Lakefield Lock, and the perfect anchorage we’d been waiting for

July 6-7, 2019 – We got up early, and walked around the lock grounds, to take a few pictures when there wasn’t any action. This is one of the older locks, that we would begin to see more of, that had hand cranked butterfly valves in the lock gates themselves, rather than remotely controlled deep in the lock wall structures as in most of the other more modern locks.

We then headed back across the bridge, for a walk through town with the plan to stop at the grocery store on the way back. Quite a nice little village, with a long waterfront trail leading down to a park at the other end that was having a Jazz music and arts & crafts festival. Unfortunately, even though we were not going to stay to watch any of the musical acts, the admission to even walk through the vendors was $8 apiece, so we kept on walking back through town, past a pretty old church.

We picked up a few provisions, including a container of Kawartha Dairy ice cream, the best there is, according to some. Hard to argue, and nice to have at the end of a hot day.

When we got back to the boat, the lock wall was now pretty full – it turns out that a handful of the regulars from the marina in Peterborough (!) had cruised together to Lakefield for the weekend. We got a couple suggestions for anchorages we might consider, and then left them to cast lots to inherit our prized spot on the wall.

The other locks and waterway of the day are somewhat now a blur, but we found a great anchorage at the junction between Clear and Stony Lakes – not the one suggested by our Peterborough dock-mates, but one we picked out between three rocky islands.

There were a few cottages along the shoreline, and we watched an old wooden canoe go by, as well as some waterskiers and fisherman. The water was deep and clear, and it felt great to jump in the water. We inflated the stand-up paddleboard that we’d purchased at the Annapolis boat show last fall, and had fun getting used to standing up and paddling around. We certainly look forward to getting a lot of use out of this in some anchorages along the way.

For the first time, we were at a place where we stayed a second day just because we loved it, not because we had to, or it was part of the grand plan. Ahhhhh!

We invited our friends on Justified to come raft up with us, and we took the dinks exploring around some of the other nearby islands. One of them was apparently a popular spot to climb and jump off a small cliff – well, that just had to be tried.