Article by J. Patrick Boyer

All boats work. But not all work the same way. A vessel delivering fuel in one century may offer vacation tours in another. The canoe may be the backbone of the fur trade, basis for a camping trip or summer regatta competitor. A runabout can reach a cottage, pull a water-skier, transport a tradesman and carry supplies.

 In a district legendary for pleasure boating of all kinds, it is understandable that wooden boats, top-dollar speedboats and the latest in runabouts, sailboats and personal watercraft get rave publicity. However, Muskoka also relies on an armada of workboats, an equally diverse fleet of barges, tugs, supply boats, public transit vessels, utility company service boats, police cruisers and honey barges – all doing the heavy-lifting that makes lakeside vacationing possible. 

 The elegant S.S. Bigwin on Lake of Bays, long known as “the hardest worker at Bigwin Inn,” shows an initial problem here: how to distinguish between workboats and pleasure craft? After all, Muskoka has a tradition of boats doing double-duty, even multitasking. The Bigwin ferried passengers and luggage to and from the elegant island resort for decades but today she is still hard at work in these same waters, refitted and touring folks from Lake of Bays Marine Museum. Work or pleasure?

During Muskoka’s triumphant steam era from the 1860s to 1960s, the big steamships were also working vessels – offering public transit, serving on-board meals to passengers, carrying freight and moving mail. Linked to steam train schedules and effecting mid-lake transfers, they provided seamless transport from the urban south to Muskoka’s northland accommodations.

Although the age of steam evaporated, the working tradition of the big ships endures as Wenonah II and Segwun provide moving platforms for scenic tours, weddings, sporting events, onboard meals and maintaining Gravenhurst as a “Gateway to the Muskoka Lakes.”

Muskoka’s outrageously bad roads, dangerous and impassable for horse-drawn wagons and impossible for motorized deliveries, gave rise to vessels whose name was synonymous with work: the supply boats. By the 1890s, for instance, grocers and farmers were making supply boat calls around the lakes to cottagers and lodges.

Farmer John Beaumont at Alport on Lake Muskoka owned the small steamer Nymoca from which his sons, Frank and George, sold fresh vegetables, apples and eggs from their farm as well as flour, hams, bacon, tea, sugar, soap, bananas, watermelons and canned fruit to customers at Beaumaris, Gibralter, Port Keywaydin, St. Elmo, Mortimer’s Point, Torrance, and Bala. Another supply boat, the steamer Edith May, captained by George Stevens, ran similar supplies around lakes Rosseau and Joseph to regular customers, tying up at their wharves on islands and along shorelines.

In the early 1900s, the British-American Oil Company (BA) purchased wooden steamer Ina, renamed her Peerless and hired Port Carling’s Bert Brown to operate the former private-use yacht as a fuel supply boat around the Muskoka Lakes. After World War II, BA built the larger all-steel Peerless II to meet rising demand from resorts and other lakeside customers for essential fuel from her 8,000 gallon tank. This work lasted a half-century until better roads enabled fuel delivery by tank trucks to mainland lakeside properties and on heavy-duty barges to islands. After a hiatus for Peerless II, Captain Randy Potts would convert her into a popular touring boat with narrated excursions operating out of Port Carling; a different “work boat” role in Muskoka’s vacation economy. 

Meanwhile, by 1920, Billy Langmaid in Baysville expanded Langmaid’s Groceries by offering fresh meat, vegetables and fruit and launching a summer supply boat, the  Joe Bell, to call around Lake of Bays bringing these foodstuffs from his store to cottagers.

“A special treat was arrival of Mr. Langmaid and his supply boat every Tuesday,” recalled Dean Matthews, a Port Cunnington summer resident. For Captain Langmaid to put in, “you just tied a white towel in a branch near the dock. He always had bananas and fresh fruit, quite a luxury to us in those days.”

Also in 1920, Bigwin Inn opened on Lake of Bays. In addition to ever-busy Bigwin, the new resort ran supply boats daily to Bigwin farm at Huntsville fetching fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, cream and butter, and also exchanging with a town cleaner the soiled linens for the prior day’s cleaned and folded ones. 

In Port Carling William and Sarah Hanna operated a busy grocery store and in 1891 put the Mink, a locally built 57-foot steamer, into service as a floating grocery store with iceboxes on board to keep food fresh during calls around the shorelines.

“A specialty is catering to camps,” Hanna advertised, “at prices much lower than the tourist can bring in provisions himself.”

In 1908, the Mink was replaced by Newminko as demand for fresh food delivered straight to one’s dock increased. Up and down Muskoka’s Georgian Bay coast, supply boats were essential, their services provided everything from groceries and produce to gasoline for marinas. 

With so many moving parts to the district’s waterway economy, niches kept opening for boats to take on special tasks. The Mildred, owned and operated by Captain Wesley Archer of Browning Island, linked the Lake Muskoka vicinity with short-run passenger and light freight service. The Mildred’s service was a small business thriving on opportunities the big steamship fleet operating out of Gravenhurst was too large and tightly scheduled to handle.

Later, when Earle Dunn fashioned his Big Band magnet in Bala “where all Muskoka dances,” Mildred ran evening public cruises from Bracebridge to Bala, returning from Dunn’s Pavilion around 2 a.m. When this varied working life had run its course, the elegant Mildred was scuttled – a watercraft’s most honourable end.

However, passing time changes everything. Refloated by enterprising Randy Potts, she is being restored to operation. Captain Potts and his wife Debbie expect to have Mildred back at work, on the public transit tourist side of things, for upcoming seasons of pleasure cruising.

Water taxies work daily crossing district lakes, providing the public with rides for hire. Most every marina in Muskoka provides this service, from Harbour Water Taxi at Honey Harbour at the district’s southwest to Mountain Trout Marina at Dorset on Lake of Bays in the northeast. Travelling anywhere day or night in all kinds of weather on different waters means the size and nature of water taxies varies considerably, from runabouts and pontoon boats to larger vessels.

 Many Muskoka contractors own and operate workboats on the larger waterway systems connecting lakes of north Muskoka, those of central Muskoka and the Georgian Bay coast. Whether for new construction or renovations, they arrive onsite by boat – teams of tradespeople with a full battery of tools – where building supplies, generators, even a rented portable toilet await, having been delivered by barge.

Building contractors with only intermittent lake work need not own a vessel because they can more economically book one for the time needed, a morning or a month, just as on land they rent trucks and special equipment from Muskoka’s burgeoning rental companies. The same goes for district retailers or their customers who, throughout navigation season, efficiently schedule water-borne deliveries where trucks rendezvous with barges or capacious workboats at public wharfs and privately-owned marinas.

With Muskoka’s rocky shorelines, the advantage of highly buoyant freight barges and pontoon-supported watercraft is the ability to reach most shores over shallow and rock infested waters. Like swing-bridges that enable water and road routes to function in sync on Muskoka’s patchwork watershed, these waterborne platforms keep district life and commerce functioning so smoothly one hardly notices – as long as everything keeps working.

Tugboats gained a pivotal role amidst the district’s working watercraft from the 1860s – pulling boomed logs down the central lakes to Sawdust City’s lumberyards rimming Muskoka Bay, delivering barge loads of tan bark to the vast leather tanneries in Bracebridge and Huntsville and taking log booms from the Georgian Bay coast across Lake Huron to Michigan mills. A variant was the steam-powered warping-tug, affectionately known as an Alligator, a vehicle-vessel combo custom-designed for the Canadian Shield logging environment, adeptly moving logs reptilian-like over land and across water.

The small but mighty tugs never yielded their role. Generations of lake-freighting families and dozens more Muskoka transport operators throughout the district, rely on tugs to move fully loaded barges from mainland wharves where trucks deliver building materials and other supplies cross-water to a contractor’s worksite. There the barge is secured for the coming days to serve as a floating platform or off-loaded by crews using front-end loaders or lifts to move gravel, soil, stone, timbers or skids of lumber and shingles ashore, either way enabling the doughty tug to depart and work another loaded barge.

On an expanse of lake wide enough to visibly include the curvature of Earth’s surface, especially at sunrise, it is possible to see a dream-like image as rays of light spotlight a heavy cement truck or fuel truck being driven over the water. At 7 a.m. when loading begins, a ready-mix vehicle with rotating drum or a tanker may drive directly onto a barge and lowered by its heavyweight cargo, off they go. Someone a half-kilometre away, seeing only the truck moving, the barge and tug below their sight line, glimpses how surrealistic Muskoka’s magic can be. In this special quiet moment, a vessel actually doing the work appears to be, one way or another, out of registered sight.

A different category of work vessel are boats operated by the Ontario Provincial Police, Ontario Hydro and Lakeland Power, telephone, tree service, plumbing and other utility companies. Whether owned or leased, in play daily or ready on stand-by, located at their own yards or in rented marina slips at strategic locations throughout Muskoka, these watercrafts are operated by the organization’s own staff.

A century ago, when the first police boats began operating on Muskoka waters, policing was a provincial responsibility that had been delegated to municipalities. District towns and villages each had local constables, few in number, to walk a nightly beat along main street and down to the train station and back. Once two competing railways began disgorging thousands of spirited vacationers daily to Bala’s three stations, the village’s lone officer was unequal to his constabulary tasks. In March 1921, anticipating the summer ahead, the Ontario Provincial Police opened its first detachment in Ontario.

Of necessity, Bala’s inauguration of provincial police handling local duties required use of watercraft. Today a fleet upwards of 20 OPP water cruisers based at the provincial solicitor general’s Gravenhurst property, the former Ontario Fire College shoreline lands, provide district-wide waterway police services ranging from routine patrols and talks to cottager association annual meetings to spot checks, investigations, and emergency responses.

Muskoka foresters and arborists are early responders at islands and water-access cottages to clear windstorm damage but more frequently carry out scheduled maintenance work. Tree-care companies get plenty of work around the lakes and generally operate their own workboats suited to their equipment, pattern of operation and the wide range tasks ashore.

The workboats carrying Ontario Hydro or Lakeland Power crews to destinations are strong metal craft with high power reliable engines. These craft, like those operating them, must be reliable through turbulent waves in the dark of night while rain pours.

Repair crews for telephone companies have slightly more choice about braving tempests because restoring phone service generally ranks below getting electricity flowing again to remote and isolated places. In the past decade, islanders have increasingly addressed problems of power outages and downed phone lines by installing emergency generators and using wireless communications. Of course, those back-up power systems had to be transported by workboats and then installed by utility company crews crossing water, meaning that any way you slice it, Muskoka can only be what it is thanks to the district’s workboats and freight vessels.

A number of Muskoka’s larger boathouses have slips where, alongside a polished classic wooden Ditchburn or Dippy, a battered but treasured fibreglass or tin slugger waits her turn to carry loads of groceries, rental equipment and building materials. When islanders use their runabouts as supply boats, it becomes clear almost any watercraft can at some time in some way be classified as a workboat – sharing the load of a genuine Muskoka experience.