With the weather finally in our favour we left Boblo Island and headed off towards Pelee Island.
We left Boblo Island around 7am. We had quite an interesting start to the trip. The water level had gone down and the keel was scraping through the mud trying to get out of our slip. Thankfully Britt’s dad was there and helped us to push off. Trying to leave Boblo was interesting because of how foggy the morning was. We couldn’t see anything going through the Livingston channel but made it safely out. We got our sails up and by mid morning the fog was behind us.
We ended up following the wind which took us to the west side of the island and when we threw in a tack the wind shifted and carried us around the entire north side of the island. We stayed at 3.4nm following an arc around the island for 3 hours before we were finally able to tack and get in. We met some wonderful people as soon as we got off the dock who told us about some places we should visit. We ordered bikes for the next day and ended up going for drinks at another sailor’s boat for a couple of hours before heading to bed.
The next morning our bikes were delivered and we were excited to explore the island. As we headed over to the bikes we met a woman named Leslie who had sailed over with her friend Sandra on her sailboat. We spent an hour or so chatting with them and Sandra took our photo in front of our boat. They were headed for home that day but the marina wasn’t open and they needed gas. We had been carrying extra so passed it along so they could get home safely. After saying our goodbye to them we headed off on our bike adventure!
We started off along the north end of the island and headed east. Our first stop was the George Fox cabin!
On the north-east corner of the island there is a light house. While walking the beach to the lighthouse we met a really nice couple, Pat and Ellen, who had flown in on their plane from Ohio. They talked about an old coal ship that had sunk off shore and coal continues to wash up on the beach to this day. We explored a bit and then headed back to the bikes.
Next up we continued our bike ride down the east side of the island. We saw a couple more snakes on route, then headed towards Fish Point on the south side of the island. When we made it there we met a guy who had a powered paraglider in the back of his truck. He said he was thinking of taking it out later in the evening so we suggested flying over the marina since we wanted to see him. From there we started our walk along the beach out to the point. We knew that Pelee is stopover for a lot of migrating birds but were surprised to find pelicans there. We walked all the way out along the point and then turned back to go through the woods where we again ran into Pat and Ellen. We chatted with them for a bit and then made our way back to the bikes.
After we got back from Fish point we continued our clockwise bike of the island and ended up on the west side. We visited the Pelee Island Heritage Museum to get a better history of the island we had been exploring.
We closed out the museum and then headed three doors down to the Stone House restaurant. It was built in 1891 and we had a wonderful dinner. While we were there fully loaded ferry departed but we realized it was heading in the wrong direction. Turns out they were responding to a mayday call for a boat that had sunk and had nine people floating in the water.
After dinner we finished off the trip by rounding the rest of the island back to Scudders and watched the sunset before heading to bed to get ready for our next leg of the journey.
