Some anchorages you find by planning. Others you simply spot on the chart and follow your instincts, and they turn out to be exactly what you needed.
We found just such a place off Yellow Girl Point near Nepetugain Island — a completely sheltered cove that our Navionics GPS had been kind enough to reveal. A truly protected anchorage is one of the quiet joys of cruising life. It doesn’t matter what the wind does or where the weather comes from — inside, everything stays calm. We settled in for the evening in the easy company of a family of Mergansers and the occasional fishing boat cruising through, and let the stillness do its work. It was, as it turned out, exactly the right way to spend the night before our anniversary.
The next morning we had a plan, and it began with a detour. Before pointing ourselves toward civilization and whatever anniversary celebration Sioux Narrows might offer, we slipped through Whitefish Narrows into Whitefish Bay to look for something we’d been told about — pictographs, painted on the rock faces along the water’s edge, left there hundreds of years ago by the indigenous people of this region. The pigments, we learned, were made from Sturgeon — fish that still swim these very waters — pressed into images that have outlasted everything around them.
We found them, and we floated quietly next to them for a while.
There was something unexpectedly moving about floating before these ancient marks on the rock, this far north, on a lake carved by glaciers. What struck us most was how familiar some of the imagery felt — echoes of the petroglyphs and pictographs we know from our own southwest region back home in Colorado. Across thousands of miles and hundreds of years, people had looked at the world around them and felt the same impulse: to leave a mark, to say we were here, and this is what we saw. We lingered for a bit longer.
Eventually the living called us back, and we meandered through Barney Narrows and into the little bay at Sioux Narrows, where we tied off at the town’s government docks for the princely sum of five dollars. Five. We have paid more for a cup of coffee.
Sioux Narrows turned out to be exactly the kind of town you hope to stumble into. The visitors center was cheerfully devoted to the twin religions of the north country — Fishing and Hunting — and outside it I discovered a little library cabinet where I could swap out a book, which felt like a small miracle after weeks on the water. We walked across the wooden bridge we’d just passed under on our way into town, looked back at Bearcruzer sitting contentedly at the dock, and kept exploring.
And then I found the dress.
Boutique Soleil is not the kind of shop you expect to find in a town this size, but there it was — a blue floral dress that seemed to have been waiting specifically for this occasion. I tried it on. It fit perfectly. Mike approved. For an anniversary dinner in a town of a few hundred people on a lake in northern Ontario, it was exactly right, and I felt like myself in the best possible way.
We did a little reprovisioning at Gill’s Trading Post, and then — dressed for the occasion — we made our way to Big John’s Bar & Grill for our anniversary dinner. It was warm and lively and exactly what we needed after weeks of wilderness cooking aboard Bearcruzer. We ate well, we laughed, and we walked back through that quiet little town afterward in the long northern evening light, hand in hand, my captain and I.
It may not be everyone’s idea of a romantic anniversary. No candlelit restaurant with a sommelier, no hotel with a view, no grand gesture. Just a blue dress found by happy accident, a good meal at Big John’s, a five-dollar dock fee, and a stroll back to our boat on a summer evening in Canada.
For us, it was just perfect.
Happy Anniversary to us. Here’s to seventeen years, and to wherever the next seventeen take us — preferably somewhere with good holding and the occasional boutique.
Living the Dream 
Happy anniversary !! Sounds like good times. Bill and NatSent from my iPhoneOn Jul 22, 2026,