The salad dressing up here must be unbelievable

Georgian Bay is known as one of the best cruising grounds in the world.  Thirty-thousand islands dot the area.  Wait what?  That’s 30 TIMES as cool as Thousand Islands!

One of the islands is Fryingpan Island—or Frying Pan Island depending on your source of information—which was our destination for today.  That’s because this is the only island—out of 30,000—with Henry’s Fish House Restaurant.

Henry’s they say is a place one must go when in Georgian Bay.

Kind of like we think about the Tin Fish on the Imperial Beach Pier.  Commercial seaplanes fly folks in just for lunch.  We wouldn’t elevate it to Tin Fish status, but the pickerel was delicious even though the overnight mooring was a tad pricey.  The nice vacationers appropriately admired Misty Pearl and Second Wave.  A couple of guys screwed up the courage to ask for a tour, which we graciously hosted.

One of us historically has been the clear target of a government conspiracy involving unmarked police cars with radar guns and Redflex cameras that dispense what should be unconstitutional speeding tickets, so we’re sensitive to trickery.  The beat-up fishing boat used by the Canadian game wardens is the ultimate.  By the time these guys sidle up with their sidearms, there’s no time to escape the effects of whatever illegal you might doing on your boat.  They tied up at Henry’s, however, just like everyone else.

The tough part of the day was before we got to Henry’s.  Things started out blissfully enough.  Light wind, flat water.  Excellent day to see some new stuff.

It’s been a while since we had open water, and a day without locks promised to be worry-free.  Then the winds whipped up three-foot beam waves, changing our outlook significantly.  Add in some big fast boats waking us and some big slow sailboats blocking us, and getting to Henry’s grew in importance exponentially.  We won’t be posting pictures of the scary stuff, obviously, because we were too scared to be taking pictures.  Trust us though, some of this is scary.

There were moments in the small craft channel, fortunately, when we could admire the scenery.  We’ll probably post a bunch more pictures that look a lot like these but also fail to do justice to what we see.

Tomorrow we head to Parry Sound for a couple of days.  We need provisions and almost certainly there will be a handy LCBO.  After that, there’s a real possibility that we’ll not have cell service for chunks of the next week or two, basically until we get to Michigan.  So if we don’t post for a few days, we probably haven’t died.