July 2010

©Ian Coristine/1000IslandsPhotoArt.com

The Canadian span of the Thousand Island bridge.
Our Island is just to the right of the island on the far right.

Mandy visits.

Daughter Mandy just spent three weeks with us. It is quite a milestone when a kid fly's half way around the world on her own nickel, lands on your doorstep and says “What can I do to help”? And help she did.


She crawled under the house to bring me cement to finish a project, painted our deck, cooked and helped with mom’s chores. Still, we managed a little fun in there too. She and I attended a concert together and watched the July 4th fireworks over Bolt Castle sitting while sitting in a boat in the middle of the river.

We picked raspberries and cherries and she made jam with Janice. We also went out to see the racing boats in our yearly local ‘Polker run’. We swam to our hearts delight. The point of the trip though was to be with her mom on her Chemo days, spending the days with her at the hospital. Unless you do this , it is hard to get your head around the fact that when there everyone you see has Cancer and is really sick. Janice underwent Chemo # 4 today and so is 2/3 done...
Chemo, that is. Treatments go on until next May.

Monique and Joe Schrettner dropping by for an overnight visit

No sooner had we sent Mandy packing that we had a drive by visit from family in California. The last time they dropped in was four years ago and they had very different recollections of the state of the place, with Janice still cooking on the deck as we had no kitchen. It is always great to see them .

This month at the Bee

One of the reasons I have spent so little time working on the plane to date was my reluctance to leave Janice with no practical way to get off the island in the event of a need to do so. I have a cell phone with me so I am always reachable when I am gone but still… She was not able to ‘pull start’ our old used outboard motor so she was stuck having to row our aluminum boat. We fixed that this month. We bought a new electric start , gasoline powered 15 HP outboard (push a button to start and go!) It is now easier to ‘drive’ than a car (no brakes). I added floorboards for dry feet and stability and installed a bilge pump so it never needs to be bailed out after a rainstorm. A couple of upholstered seats completed the upgrade.



Honey Bee is located in the International Rift between two large islands, one Canadian and another American. This area separates the two countries in the middle of this part of the river. The width of this ‘rift’ is as little as 25 feet (8 meters) and as wide as several hundred feet (100 meters). The rivers width right in front of our dock is about 200 feet (70 meters) This is the area we use to swim as our dock is there, the water depth is only 7-10 feet and the current is very gentle.

Incredibly, there are also several warm water vents that provide warmer streams of water and we often jockey for position right over them when swimming. The rift though, is a shortcut from the Canadian and US sides of the main shipping channels so on the weekends we can get a fair amount of slow going small vessel traffic.

Divers (swimmers) below!

This has concerned me for some time as these boats pass near where we swim. They may be going slow and they are watchful but…. I would hate for one of us to get run over. I had been contemplating how I could rope off a swimming area with buoys or markers of some kind, realizing that this is a boating channel and is not for our exclusive use. The solution came to me recently when I got a flag that is internationally recognized by boaters warning them of ‘divers below’. Now when we swim, I simply toss the float with the removable flag into the water and dive down to attach its line to a sunken cement block so that it remains stationary. Boats now give us a wide berth and everyone is happy.

National Geographic says
we are the bomb!

The Rideau Canal (a great boat ride from us) is the second best destination in the world, according to the most recent sustainable tourism survey by the National Geographic Society. The Society gave the region a long-sought stamp of approval last winter.

It’s Center for 'sustainable destinations' says that geotourism is tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place: its environment, culture, esthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents. In 2008, it rated the Rideau Canal National Historic Site, which is part of the biosphere reserve, second best among worldwide historic destinations in its global stewardship survey.

The Frontenac Arch biosphere, a nearly 3,000-square km region that includes the Thousand Islands, the Rideau Canal and much of the Land 'O Lakes area is only the ninth region worldwide -- and the first in Ontario -- to get the charter from National Geographic. And now you know the rest of the story.

One more time...

We never tire of trying to share the breathtaking images of our little piece of paradise and below is a video compilation of some of the images in our friend Ian Coristines latest book. If you want to take a peek, just click on the arrow in the center of the image below.