Monday 20 November 2023--I find coffee and pastry at a café on Main Street this morning, and take a stroll up and down to have another look in daylight. Then I return to the hotel and get in the car for a drive around the southeastern part of the county. First stop is the Lake on the Mountain, a geological peculiarity, a shallow bowl a short distance (across the street, in fact) from the bluff overlooking the ferry crossing from Adolphustown.

Then out some road ends...Cressy is out along a peninsula running parallel to the mainland, pointing toward Kingston. Cressy Bayside Road and Cressy Lakeside Road would make a nice loop out around it, if they joined up at the tip; but they don't. There's a point on each where a sign states that only residents and their guests may proceed farther. I have a feeling that if I ignore this, an angry Norwegian woman will appear and heap abuse on me. I see more upscale houses Bayside, and more modest housing stock Lakeside.

Down the coast I go, about twenty miles, rounding South Bay and driving another ten out to Point Traverse. Or Long Point, or South Bay Point, or Prince Edward Point--I've seen all four names. I'm not sure if the name of the point has changed several times over the years, or if there's some subtle geographical distinction being made. Whatever the case, the last mile and three-quarters of the peninsula comprises the Prince Edward Point National Wildlife Area, established in 1978. At the end of the road is a small narrow harbor, where I see a crew working on fishing gear on a lone boat, perhaps readying it for winter.* I walk along the track around the harbor and out to the Prince Edward Point Lighthouse. The light operated from 1881 to 1959, when a steel tower light was placed next to it, and the original lantern room removed. I walk out onto the beach, if you can call it that--it's bare slabs of limestone--looking for photographic angles, and note the piles of fingernail-sized shells, which I assume to be the infamous invasive zebra mussels, which came to the Great Lakes in ships' ballast water. (There are also quagga mussels, a related species from the same part of western Asia--the quagga itself is an extinct subspecies of zebra.) These mussels have had all sorts of effects on the ecology of the Lakes, still not entirely understood. Disruption of the food chain is a large part of it.

From the point, there is a view out to False Duck Island, which, along with nearby Swetman Island, was one of the False Ducks, apparently sometimes confused with islands farther east known as the Real Ducks. (One wonders whether these islands have Twitter accounts.) The article about the False Ducks Lighthouse at Lighthouse Friends has a couple of interesting anecdotes about shipwreck and lightning strike.

I head back toward Picton. A couple miles outside of town, I attempt to visit Slake Brewing, one of a dozen craft breweries scattered about the county, but it's closed for the season. Pass back through town and stop in at Lake on the Mountain Brewing. It's very quiet, and I have a nice blether with the brewer, who tells me he studied political science at university elsewhere in Ontario, and decided to return home to Prince Edward County to make beer. I learn a bit about the area, how it's become a popular holiday spot for people from Toronto and elsewhere, and how real estate pressures affect the local residents and farmers, as it inevitably does in all such places. I ask him if there's a decent pub in town, aside from 555 Brewing, which wasn't really very publike. He recommends the Acoustic Grill, and it's there I have dinner and a couple of pints. It's tucked in back of Main Street--I'd never have noticed it on my own. It's what I'm looking for, serving local craft beers and decent pub food.

*Back home, doing research, I chanced upon several articles about Tim McCormack, owner of the fishing boat Leanic, and the troubles he and other local fishers have had with Environment Canada, the agency that administers the Prince Edward Point National Wildlife Area, and which apparently wants to phase out commercial fishing at Long Point Harbour. Stories from 2013 tell how McCormack's lease, purchased from a retiring fisher, was canceled, and equipment sheds belonging to him and several other fishers were to be razed. The next stories I find are from 2023; somehow McCormack is still fishing out of Point Traverse, but now EC is planning to dismantle cottages used seasonally by the remaining fishers. Fishing has been done out of this harbor since Loyalist days. Environment Canada is of course fine with the maintenance of the lighthouse as a historic site, but evidently has no sympathy for a living historic and cultural tradition.