This article originally appeared in slightly edited form in my cottage newsletter the “Big Cedar News”. A small weekly for residents of Big Cedar Point on Lake Simcoe.
Inspired by the positive feedback of literally dozen of people I decided to keep this going and continue exploring. My name may not yet be counted amongst the likes of Amundsen, Scott, Franklin, or Shackleton… but at least I haven’t frozen to death. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
Anyway, as presaged in the last article, what’s at the bottom of the Holland River? Quite a lot it turns out. Even I was surprised by how far you can go. It may not be as scenic as the Danube or the Rhine, but it has the big advantage of being much closer to me than either of those rivers. That’s the only advantage, everything else is worse.
But wait! Before we enter the Holland River it’s time to catch up on one thing we left out of the last article. The Maskinonge River, or “that river that Krates Marina is on”. My daughter and I decided to go out for lunch by boat recently, and I wanted to go somewhere I’d never gone before. Looking at the map I found that the “Riveredge Restaurant” is on that river. It looked dodgy from the outside but was actually fine inside, the food was edible, and the beer was cold. If you’re looking for more than that Keswick is not where you want to be. Anyway, everyone was very friendly. To continue up the river from Krates there is a low bridge that you need to go under. A Waverunner/Sea-Doo will go under no problem, but larger boats will have an issue. The image of the restaurant itself is from their website, the other is our exploration vessel. See also my companion for this lunch, she looks ecstatic, after all what 13-year-old girl wouldn’t love seeing the Maskinonge River?
As mentioned in the last article, for such as small “river” you can go surprisingly far on it, though most of it looks like this.
The little marina you see here is called AM Watersports and will rent you a jet-ski. In doing this I’ve been surprised by how many of these little operations are on the lake. Must be hard to make money renting for only a few months a year, and realistically only a few weekends of those months.
Unfortunately, while the jet-ski is great for exploring because of its shallow draft, it has one fatal problem. If you drive through a weedy area you can block the jet intake (it will suck up loose weeds). It’s unlikely to make the machine quit running, but anything other than idle speed will become impossible as the intake simply can’t pull enough water. This happened to us here, and I had to go slowly all the way back out to the lake and to one of the parks from part one. There I had to get in the water and under the ski to pull out the weeds. Keep this fact in mind.
Back to the Holland River. Which is much closer to being an actual river.
The entrance to the river is nondescript except for some channel markers. The first thing I noticed was that there were a great many channel markers stuffed up on the banks of the river. I guess they’ve moved and no one has come to move them back?
Here around the mouth of the river there were also a fair number of people fishing. I didn’t take pictures of them because I didn’t want to seem like a weirdo (more-so). They were right next to their cars, and it turns out there is a road that makes this possible. I’d love to come back by car and check this out. But this article is about the water not the roads, let’s move on.
On this part of the river there are a lot of farms, some of them have “break walls” of a kind. You are also likely to see a lot of diesel powered pumps that are irrigating the fields.
Shortly after this the river branches in two, there is a white channel marker and a white camper to indicate this. Today we are going up the east branch. The camper may have nothing to do with navigation, but it’s probably more visible than the marker.
The Holland River Marina is right after the branch, it seems in good shape and has a gas pump. Which is a lot more than you can say for what’s coming up.
Speaking of, see Albert’s Marina. It looks like there was once a gas bar here, but it’s gone. It looks like there was also a restaurant of some kind the “SAIL ‘ER INN”. Thank God it’s closed or seems to be. I’d rather drink a swimming pool of Holland River water than eat whatever was once on offer here. I mean, not really, but you get the idea. Most of the surfaces around here are covered in goose poop.
There is a surprisingly large cutout/pool here with almost nothing in it. Except for this bizarre “house boat” type thing? Huge, with four pontoons supporting it. No engine or interior of any kind, it looks like a redneck’s idea of a floating office. There are also a lot of campers and boats stored on land. I know I keep bringing this up, but who owns this stuff and why is it just sitting here? A few of these boats are worth something (not many, but some) and I just can’t get over who lets them sit and rot.
Speaking of, right after this is Sunset Harbour Marina. Which is mostly rotting wood. It’s a marina only in the most aspirational sense, like a heroin addict talking about how they’re going to get it together soon and catch their big break.
After this there are some homes and our final marina, Riversports Recreation. Which is right next to Queensville Sideroad. At this point I thought I should probably stop. I was worried about weeds in the water. If I got the intake blocked here it would take a long time to get all the way back out to the lake. Either that or I’d have to swim in the river to get the intake cleared. I have no idea what’s in this water. But from the looks of it there would be things that get into your orifices. Things that are alive.
However! No risk no reward! A true adventurer never gives up, at least not until he freezes to death. So I kept going. The river seems to go on and on from here. There were houses, then empty river where you think it will end, then more houses, then more empty, river, then more houses, etc. At this point I was really getting scared, I thought for sure I’d fouled the intake with all the weeds in the water. The river had become more of a stream, then something closer to a creek.
But nope, I gave the throttle a few hits when I wasn’t in front of anyone’s house and all was well. I finally hit the end of the navigable portion of the river here, right next to someone’s “dock”. There were many trees and logs fallen across the river at this point. You might be able to get a canoe or kayak further, but this was it for the WaveRunner. From Google Earth it looks like the river finally peters out somewhere around Bailey Ecological Park in Newmarket, which is at least as far again as I’d already come. But as I said, probably not much more than a creek that’s mere inches deep for most of that.
Remember that white marker? There’s a West Holland River too….
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