Richard’s Marina, St. Josephs Island, Ont

10 August 2014

The plan was to leave Thessalon and head to Bruce Mines to set the old mine setup. In finding out that the mine was closed Sunday and Monday, Plan B became Richard’s Marina on St. Josephs Island.

Since it was nice out we decided to go to the local Sunday breakfast buffet at 11PM. It was pretty crowded, it was one of the top things to do in Thessalonian on a Sunday morning. Buffet was loaded with fried and scrambled eggs, toast, waffles, pancakes, bacon, peameal, sausages, fruit, tossed salad, baked beans, potato salad, coleslaw and pastries. For $7.50 per person!

After we waddled back to the boat, we did our start-up sequence a were soon gliding over the glassy North Channel. We can see how we are moving back to more densely populated areas. There were more cottages and lots more boats running around. Eastern St Josephs Island has a large marina, and there was lots of sailboat activity.

We were soon at the channel that runs around St Joseph’s from the east to the north. It’s a well marked channel, but there is some tricky bits. We took our time and managed with no problems. Ahead was the bridge connecting St. Joseph’s with the mainland. This was our third bridge upon entering the Georgian Bay on July 4 (Swing Bridges at Parry Sound and Little Current were the other two). It has a 38′ clearance, so we just motored right under.

10 mins later we were at our berth at Richard’s Marina. Once again the dock hands were quick and knew what they were doing. We were soon on our bikes speeding into town.

We did a pretty good tour of the two gift shops, the art gallery where they were doing stone carving with a half dozen kids. We skipped the ice cream / candy store. There was a small supermarket that was famous for their meats. We picked up sausages and beef shanks for dinners later on. There was also a cafe that we missed, we heard they had great breakfasts, we would try them in the morning.

We perused the menu at the onsite restaurant. Lot of cool things, but Susan wanted to cook the steaks we had gotten in Blind River. We also got some more used books from the book exchange, dropping off some of ours that we had read.

Dinner was steaks, with mushrooms and onions and zucchini as our vegetable. Very good.

I tried some fishing off the boat, we could see fish being caught in the channel. But my worm was not enough to entice them to come in past the breakwall and I gave up in a short time.

On Monday we would head for Sault Ste Marie Ontario (The Soo) for three nights.