Run up the Bruce Peninsula to Tobermory

Thursday, June 29 -- Owen Sound to Tobermory (72 miles)

Good to be back on the water again -- and a good day for it. Sunny with high clouds, mid-70s, with modest wind and waves coming from behind us. Our destination today was Tobermory, a village at the far north end of the Bruce Peninsula. This is a logical stop for boaters going to or from Georgian Bay or the North Channel, and John always stayed here on family trips back in the 1960s and again in 1993 and 2006 on trips with his dad. The harbor and surroundings are still lovely, but the village is much more touristy than he remembers, and this was confirmed talking to some Boomer natives in one of the shops. 

 

We got up early to turn in our rental car when they opened at 8:30, then called into a 9am Zoom meeting of the Wiggins Bay Dock Owners Association to get the latest on rebuilding our docks in Naples. (The good news is that things are on schedule for the docks to be finished some time next summer and it will cost a bit less than first estimated.) After the call we drove over to the marina to get diesel fuel and a pump-out. We were underway at 10:40 and tied up at the fuel dock at Little Tub at 3:25. (There are two natural harbors at Tobermory -- Big Tub and Little Tub -- with a lodge occupying the former and the village the latter. But the lodge -- where John's family always stayed when he was a kid -- no longer offers dockage to transient boaters.) After filling up again, we tied up at our assigned dock and then walked around town to buy a few items and look at potential dinner places. John kept marveling at how little he recognized, but felt better after the woman behind the counter in one of the gift shops (seconded by another customer there whose father bought a cottage in the area 50-odd years ago) said that the area has changed a lot since she moved back 15 years ago, and especially since Covid times. 

The ride up the eastern shore of the Bruce Peninsula was lovely but desolate. It reminded us of Lake Superior. We saw only one other boat until we reached Tobermory. There were lots of cottages around the cape immediately north of Owen Sound and after that hardly any. There was no development at all visible along the shore. But there was lots of interesting geology. The Peninsula is part of the Niagara Escarpment -- more of which we'll see when we are on the Erie Canal -- and some of which we saw already along the south shore of the UP. Check it out on Wikipedia. This series of pictures shows some of the cliffs and escarpments that we saw. The lighthouse is at Cabot Head and the big cliffs following is the Western Bluff.

A few miles north of Tobermory we headed out of our way a bit to cruise by Flowerpot Island, which is one of the major attractions of the Five Fathom National Marine Park. The oddly eroded rock formations are, of course, called flower pots. None of which looked like a flower pot to Janet. If you look closely there are lots of people climbing around the rocks. Tour boats bring them over from Tobermory, which wasn't the case when John was a kid, as this park was just established in 1987. The boomer local in the gift shop said that this park and the hiking and kayaking around the Bruce Peninsula have established Tobermory as one of the top ten tourist destinations in Canada. And it's just a three-and-a-half hour drive from Toronto. The marine park is also notable for its diving, with numerous wrecks in relatively shallow and crystal clear water around the islands and shoals guarding the entrance to Georgian Bay.

The dinner place that we decided on was a brewpub. It was full of locals, which we took as a good sign. The owner's nephew -- who just finished his junior year at the secondary school in Woodstock, Ontario -- was very friendly and explained some of the nuances of the NHL draft pick, which was playing on the TV and has been a big subject in the local news. A kid from Owen Sound was drafted in the first round (number 18 to the Winnipeg Jets). They had a musical duo start up at 8pm but we were gone by then. We got to listen to them anyhow -- like it or not, and we mainly didn't -- until they quit at 11pm because the music reverberated throughout the harbor. Even with the windows closed due to rain we could hear them. Ugh. 

 

We had a number of people today refer to the holiday weekend, and we finally asked what that was about. We learned that July 1st is Canada Day (formerly known as Dominion Day), which celebrates the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867. The remarkable number of people that we saw in Tobermory was probably related to the holiday weekend.