Our summer cruising continues in new territory for us – the freshwater cruising of a Great Lake and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Along the way, we are surrounded by a vintage vibe in the towns and a timeless feel on the water as we hug the NY coast of the Lake and make our way into the American Thousand Islands. And there’s castles!!!
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Once we exited the last lock of the Oswego and passed the Lighthouse, we were out in Lake Ontario – and a very flat lake, at that. It was near perfect conditions, and we forwent our usual typical big water higher cruising speed in order to relish the open space and big blue skies after the confines of the narrow canals and locks under blue skies.
The US-Canadian border runs right through the middle of Lake Ontario and the first part of the St. Lawrence River. The Thousand Islands is an area at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and is actually 1864 islands between the two countries. If that number seems rather high, recognize the criteria for ‘island’ is anything that stays above water year-round and can support the growth of at least one tree. And yes, Thousand Island Dressing was invented here.
Sacketts Harbor, NY
Jul 2-4, 2024
First order of business after arriving at Navy Point Marina (so named because of the Navy Shipbuilding operation located here from 200 years ago) was we HAD to give the boat a good wash. After the slime and grime of all the canals it was driving us crazy. Plus we had started noticing the spider webs in nooks and crannies that’s common with fresh water river cruising, and which leaves a sticky mess as well as spider poop freckles on the deck. Once that was done, we set out to explore.
Walking through downtown Sacketts, my first thought was that I was on a Hallmark movie set. Main Street was well-kept old homes, vintage storefronts and stone buildings, boutiques and antiques, brick patios of restaurants with bright umbrellas shading the tables, a waterfront bandstand, and ample park space with manicured lawns. And the gardens! Towering hollyhocks, mounds of daisies, arching blooms of orange daylily borders, and overflowing container gardens at the curb.
What better place to celebrate the 4th of July than a town with a historic battle and military base from the War of 1812? Bunting draped along porch rails, flags flew, and stars and stripes pinwheels spun in the white picket fences of the historic military base. The State Park Battlefield was actually open on the 4th, and we did a tour and then scootered the six mile path running around the battlefield and outskirts of the town, through open farmland, explored the military cemetery, and around to the other end of town where the old Army base original buildings were being developed as a residential community. After dark, we watched a fireworks display against the backdrop of the town while sitting on our own boat.
Cape Vincent
Jul 5
Just a quick overnight stop with a free dock, the Cape Vincent downtown was a short two blocks and a little worn. But it had a hoppin’ brewery and a very eclectic coffee-shop-bakery-women’s-boutique in an old store with the original cabinets and bins that we can verify serves a good breakfast. There was also an ice cream place with a line too long for us to wait. We scootered three miles to the Tibbets Point Lighthouse along the shoreline road with beautiful old homes on large properties that seemed at odds with what we had seen in the town itself. Most of these were probably summer homes and had a lot of character.
Clayton
Jul 6-8
Clayton was a great place to spend a few days. It’s vibrant downtown caters to boaters, with lots of day docks and waterfront parks lined with colorful Adirondack chairs to encourage sunset-watching and boat spectating. There are many vintage power boats in this area, both at the phenomenal Antique Boat Museum (with its huge collection of immaculately maintained wooden boats in their varnished and polished chrome glory) as well as spotted ‘in the wild’ cruising through. We spent the better part of an afternoon at the museum, and Dave was in absolute heaven looking at the shiny classic Chris Crafts and other boats. They also have the restored La Duchesse, a gilded-age 100+ foot houseboat that was originally part of the Boldt family estate (more on the Boldts later when we get to Alexandria Bay).
A total bonus for us was getting to hang out with Rick and Sue of our sister Maine Cat Oysterland. In fact, we ended up docked next to each other at the marina – what are the odds that of only nine boats made we would be sharing a dock? I mentioned in the previous blog that we met them finally in Brewerton after having corresponded by email. But hanging out with them for three days and comparing notes on our boats, travels, and shared military experiences over three days was really special. We were actually sorry to say good-bye, as they will be continuing their Loop on the Trent Severn and we will be heading east to the Thousand.
Alexandria Bay & Boldt Castle
Jul 9-12
The trip to Alexandria Bay was fraught with wakes from the many passing boats, which were out in force even on a weekday. The weirdest sight was large freighters on their way to or from the Atlantic sharing the waterway with much smaller boats. But the St. Lawrence Seaway is a major international shipping channel after all, even if it is lined with quaint summer cabins with their red Adirondack chairs and giant blow up flamingo floaties.
One of the reasons we had decided to come up north for the summer was so we wouldn’t have to be constantly planning around potential hurricanes along the east coast. So what happens? The remnants of Hurricane Beryl head right into Thousand Islands. Go figure. It was just heavy rain without winds by the time it made it this far, but still meant we had to forgo a planned anchorage and hunker down at the small dock at JP Marine in Alexandria Bay for two days.
Then on the third day – we visited a castle! George Boldt, famous for revolutionizing the American hospitality industry as the manager of the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC, bought the island in the1890s and commissioned the castle as a gift for his wife. When she died in 1904 he ordered work halted and never returned to the island. He died in 1916 and the family sold it to Mr. Life Savers (Edward Noble). His plans to make it a tourist attraction in its unfinished state were thwarted by the Great Depression, and it sat abandoned and falling apart for 70 years.
While the story of the George Boldt and the castle is compelling, I think equally amazing is that in 1977, when it had been deteriorating and crumbling for over 70 years, Mr. Lifesavers’ family gifted it to the local authority and they have finishing it ever since, working from the original plans found in the castle and funded solely be revenues from tours. They found much of the original planned woodwork, trims, and indoor fixtures still in unopened shipping crates packed into what was supposed to be the kitchen. But it still has taken lots of research to fill in the gaps of the 100-year-old based on what was trendy during the Boldt’s time.
The result is amazing. There are many tour boats to the island, but we took our dinghy right to the castle dock. The tour is self-guided with a downloadable app, and you wander through both furnished rooms in period style and unfinished areas of raw stone and rough cut wood throughout the four floors. They even left decades of old graffiti exposed for viewing from the time of the castle’s abandonment. I loved that we could do this at our own pace, as there was so much to absorb. My favorite room was the library, of course, with whimsical carvings from children’s books in the mahogany wainscoting and Hansel and Gretel carved into each side of the fireplace mantle. The grounds were also beautifully landscaped with restored outbuildings. I did have to keep reminding myself that no one had actually ever lived within these walls or walked the garden paths other than tourists, but they had done such a great job putting everything in its historical context that it was easy to imagine that the Boldt family had summered here.
We also toured the Yacht House, a separate structure on nearby Wellesley Island housing many of the Boldt family’s (now antique) wooden boats. The gilded-age houseboat La Duchesse, which we toured in Clayton at the Antique Boat Museum, was originally stored in this Yacht House. But it sank at the dock in the 1920s, and Mr. Lifesavers sold it to Mr. World Atlas heir (Phillip McNally) for a mere $100 if he would just get it out of his yacht house. He did just that, repaired it, and his family used it for decades as their summer retreat.toured
Alexandria Bay proper became a thriving recreation and vacation hub shortly after the Civil War when George Pullman (of railroad car fame) invited Gen. Grant to vacation there, and continues to cater to tourists with an abundance of restaurants, t-shirt and souvenir shops, and tour boat companies. We took an evening dinghy ride to gawk at the fancy homes along the Millionaire Mile, and had pizza with a Looper couple from Minnesota we had met. The morning we left, we had time to walk the city dock and gawk at a dozen antique wooden boats there for a show that Saturday, stopping at a place where they had made-to-order fresh donuts (couldn’t possibly pass that up).
Cedar Island State Park
Jul 13
Continuing down the St. Lawrence (east), as we moved further from Alexandria Bay it became much less busy with other boats. There were no more town stops on the American side, and we began seeing more and more small rocky islands with cabins/cottages on them, some literally just a big rock barely big enough for a single small house and a couple trees. Of course, they all had docks or boathouses and were purely seasonal.
Our first foray into the smaller islands was Cedar Island State Park. There is a park dock there with a few slips, but they weren’t too big so we anchored out and took the dinghy in. One small boat stayed overnight on the dock, but otherwise we were surprised that for a beautiful Saturday there were no other boaters or campers at this park with such nice facilities. After our evening Roxy run, we dinghied around the island, checking out the dozen or so houses on the private side of the island.
Singer Castle
Jul 14
A big reason we had chosen this anchorage was because of its proximity to Dark Island, home of Singer Castle. We weighed anchor (which involved pulling a heck of a lot of grass off it as it came up) at 9:45 and were docking at the Castle dock a little after they opened at 10. The first tour boat doesn’t arrive until 11, so we benefited from a personal tour. Built at same time Boldt was building his castle (finished in 1905), it is the same Singer of sewing machine fame. It was built by Frederick Bourne , who was the president of Singer Sewing Machine Company at the time (not sure why it’s not called Bourne castle), and designed after a castle in the book Woodstock by Sir Walter Scott. It’s best known for all its secret passages, which Bourne had incorporated so servants could move about unseen. He even had hidden observation points in the common areas for a servant to be stationed to watch and see when something was needed. Personally, I thought it was a little creepy. Overall, it’s more medieval looking and not as grand as Boldt, but it was actually occupied and used by the family until 1960. It then went through a couple owners until purchased by a German businessman who buys castles and makes them tourist attractions – talk about a niche market. It’s actually currently for sale, if anyone is interested.
Lest anyone think this is the land of castles, Boldt and Singer are the only two. There were two more, but they are now gone. Why are there any castles up here? The Thousand Islands was a burgeoning summer playground of the NYC rich during the gilded age, when industrialization was like steroids for the US economy in the early 1900s. But what’s interesting is it was almost all self-made wealth buying up islands, including Boldt and Bourne — people who started as immigrants or laborers in a company rather than high-society names that started with family wealth and got wealthier. And I guess castles were big in popular culture back then.
After our morning at Singer Castle, it was time to cross the border to Canada and the next phase of our summer adventure. Our previous experience with Canada has us excited to be going back. With this anticipation, we pointed the boat a few miles further down the St. Lawrence to Brockville on the other side of the river.
Final Thoughts
We are quickly falling in love with the Thousand Islands. The scenery is stunning, there is a vintage charm about everything, and the towns are small and intimate. Boating on the river is the central theme; all the summer homes we see are relatively understated and the focus is on water activities (okay, many of them being accessible only by boat plays a big part here). There is a strong appreciation for nature, wildlife, and conservation as well.
Fresh water cruising has many advantages: less growth on the boat hulls, clear water, no salty sticky coating on everything, less wear and tear on the boat from salt erosion, etc. About the only negative? The bugs. It seems like every stop had a Most Favored Bug. It started with spiders in Sacketts harbor, with webs spun every night in nooks and crannies. In Cape Vincent we woke in the morning to one whole side of the boat covered in bugs attracted by the single dim pedestal light on the dock. Clayton had gnats forming gnat-nados as they furiously circled the puck lights on the dock; every morning you saw boaters hosing down their deck, as stepping on them ground them in and left brown stains. And in Alexandria Bay it was these slim moth-like things that stuck to the screen door and flew away in a cloud if you opened it. We turn off all the lights, but even a distant reflection on our white hull attracts them. We’ve just accepted it as the trade-off of enjoying the natural beauty here, consoled by the knowledge that they do serve a purpose beyond making us constantly clean the boat.
Our pace has been very relaxed, traveling just a few miles a day at a slow cruising speed to enjoy the sights. Previously we had itineraries laid out well in advance, with contingencies for weather. But now we find we’re cruising a little more by the seat of our pants, with more of a ‘where should we stop tomorrow?’ attitude. With so many good anchorages available, we don’t worry as much about marinas being unable to accommodate us. Such is the case with our next destination of Brockville, which was a last minute addition based on a recommendation from another boater. Not sure what to expect, but so far everything starting in Oswego on the shore of Lake Ontario has exceeded our expectations.
Pops’ Stats Corner*
- No of Days: 13
- Travel Days: 5
- Miles Traveled: 104.8 (91.1 nm)
- Castles Visited: 2
*Pops is the family’s affectionate name for Dave’s dad. He had a mind for sports statistics, earning him the nickname Numbers from the coaches of several Stillwater teams with whom he worked. This regular section of the blog is in his honor, because it’s the kind of thing he would love.
Visually stunning! Loved all the photos.
And some text just writes itself:
and Mr. Lifesavers sold it to Mr. World Atlas heir (Phillip McNally) for a mere $100 if he would just get it out of his yacht house.