Adventures of Boreas: Day 371 – Alexandria Bay, NY to mooring on Camelot Island, Ontario

We had a leisurely departure this morning and then headed first on a sightseeing tour instead of directly for our final destination. Our sightseeing tour took us ten miles further down the St. Lawrence River to Jorstadt Island, site of the Singer Castle. Singer Castle was built by Frederick Bourne in 1896. Bourne started off as a clerk for the Singer Sewing Machine Company and worked his way up to president. The castle was a hunting lodge as well as a place to vacation and entertain guests. The castle is open for tours and it still has most of its original furnishings. Perhaps next time we’re in the St. Lawrence we’ll stop for a tour.

After taking lots of pictures of the Singer Castle, we headed back up the St. Lawrence River toward Rockport, Ontario where we planned to clear Canadian customs. After tying up to the face dock at one of the marinas in Rockport Fred made the call to customs. A few questions later (and a few Canadian dollars to pay the duty on some extra alcohol we had on board) we were given our customs number and sent on our way.

Then it was on toward Camelot Island where we hoped to stay for the night. Parks Canada maintains a number of islands in the St. Lawrence Islands National Park that have docking, camping and mooring facilities. Camelot Island is one of these islands. It is in good spot for how far we’d like to travel today and it has docks and mooring balls available. The trip to Camelot Island was beautiful; we just can’t stop commenting on how amazing the Thousand Islands are for cruising.

When we arrived at Camelot Island, we found a couple of the dock areas already full of boats, but that was OK as we had planned to look for a mooring ball. We found the mooring area and began slowly taking Boreas into the cove. We were a bit unsure about depths we were seeing, so instead of getting into trouble, we went back out into the main channel and dropped the dinghy so that Fred could explore the cove that way. I maneuvered Boreas around in the channel while Fred used a lead line to check out the water depth going into the cove and around each of the mooring balls. After choosing the mooring ball he thought would be best, Fred came back to Boreas and grabbed a mooring line to attach to the mooring ball (we figured that would make it easier when we went in – instead of having to grab the ring on the mooring ball and feed a line through it, all I would have to do is grab the line). Everything worked great – no issues with water depth and an easy grab of the line and we were secure.

We took the dinghy to shore and paid for our mooring for the night and then relaxed on the boat. Later in the afternoon Fred put on his wetsuit, mask, snorkel and fins, jumped in the water to check out the bottom of the boat. The water here is a bit warmer than we’ve seen recently and very clear so he figured he’d get a good view. There was a bit of green stuff growing on the bottom, but all the zincs look good. Fred used a long handled brush and got some of the green stuff off. The other thing Fred found was that there were some barnacles (or more accurately the shells of barnacles, since the barnacles themselves can’t live in fresh water) on the trim tabs, the rudders, inside the exhaust ports and on the prop shafts. We don’t have the equipment needed to do anything with the barnacles, so we’ll deal with them when we pull the boat out in the fall.

Miles: 25.8 Bridges: 1 Locks: 0