Sailling the North Channel, day 3. August 22, 2012

We planned ahead to stay here at Killarney for a whole day, and we enjoyed ourselves here. It was a slow morning, with coffee on the boat, then breakfast in the inn. We hung around a while, and saw this float plane come down the channel.

Finally we went on a hike on George Island. It was a 7.5K hike, and it was recommended that we allow 3 hours for the hike. I could not believe a "moderate" hike of that distance could take 3 hours... Hah! First I went into the office and paid $2 apiece for a 1/4 mile ride across the channel to the island.

A young man ferried us over in a pontoon boat called Tinkerbell. When we arrived we got right on the trail and started our adventure.

There were smooth places that were like a walk in the park, and places where we had to climb over rock piles to stay on the trail. Toby had a blast climbing the rocks and never lost his enthusiasm.

Erika showed Toby some striations in the rock and explained which marks were caused by glaciers and how to tell which direction the glacier was moving. It's always nice to have a real geologist on a hiking trip!

Toby took a photo of us resting on a rock.... he was still going strong.

After much rocky climbing we thought we would see the water, and we did, from a far distance. Then we hiked back down the rocky slopes and finally reached the beautiful shore of Georgian Bay.

There we saw the first people we had encountered on this hike, and they took our photo.

We took a more extended break there and ate our protein bars. We brought lots of water, and were glad of it. It's been much warmer here than we expected. 80 degrees today.

The trail was well marked in most places, but when we got down to the shore the painted marks were eroded, so others left signs that led us the right way, like the one above.

While hiking along the shore we came upon the old tar vat that old time fishermen used to tar their nets, and the bones of one of their old boats.

While hiking along shore we also found a couple of people who were lost--they were out there in flip flops and had no water--and the triail back into the woods was pretty hard to find. We did find our way however, and the people in flip flops followed us out. On the way out Erika smelled a bear so we made a lot of noise... we had seen signs of bear along the way so we knew they were out there. It was quite a strenuous hike, and it took us 3 hours and 10 minutes! I would never have believed it!