Storing Your Boat on Henderson Bay, Henderson Harbor NY [Lake Ontario] (October 3, 2014)

The Place

Henderson Bay is in the southeast corner of Lake Ontario.  The towns of Henderson Harbor and Sacketts Harbor are located on the bay.  The shores of the bay are lined with vacation homes perched on shale shelves or behind concrete breakwater walls.

The Adventure

I had always imagined that the shores of the Great Lakes were lined with vacation homes.  Probably my childhood spent in the Adirondacks or my adulthood spent on the Rappahannock River and it's creeks have fueled this mental image.  Henderson Bay is the first Great Lake place that we have visited over the trip this summer and the current trip to live up to this vision.  All along the shores are vacation homes.  When we went kayaking last night, and again today I felt like I was finally seeing my imagined view come to reality.

Interestingly, none of these houses have permanent docks or piers.  None of them have sand beaches.  Most of them have stone or concrete walls protecting their property from erosion, probably because for part of the year the waters along the shoreline are frozen.  So how do they get their boats in and out of the water during the warm weather?

Once we asked that question, we noticed all kinds of clever solutions.  Some houses have a concrete ramp or driveway that goes through the wall down to the water.  Many of those have some kind of apparatus for moving the dockage and/or the boat along the ramp to the water.  A few houses have a water level garage that you can drive the boat into and then hoist the boat up inside the house.  One house just had planks for sliding their catamaran into the water.

Of course we just rolled our boats out of the water on their little dollies!