Main Duck Memories

Remote, Still Mysterious but Changing

Main Duck Island- One of the numerous snappers that reside in and around the little harbor where we docked.

We just returned from a Lake Ontario cruise with our 23 foot Compac sloop. Prince Edward Bay and Main Duck Island will be featured in photos and words for the next couple of Chronicle articles.

Back in 2009 I wrote a book that featured the adventures of three cats on Main Duck Island called “Twinkle Toes and the Riddle of the Lake”. Here’s an excerpt.

“Main Duck Island lies alone in the lake. Waves batter its stony shore and the Witch of November sends strong winds sweeping across its low lying barrens and grass lands to tear at its scanty groves of oak, hickory, and cedar. No humans live here now, but the island is haunted with memories. There have been shipwrecks here. Mad men have died here along with hapl3ss smugglers and lost crews from ships, too. Here rich and powerful men twisted the life paths of millions of ordinary people to serve their own ambitions…”

shore of island as we approach The Harbor

Today the island is still as mysterious and filled with beauty as it was when Twinkle Toes, her mother, and her cousin Miss Piggy visited it in the summer of 1994 the year it inspired the semi fictional plot of my book. It has been a sort of magical Brigadoon to me and later, to my husband. I have traveled to and explored its ledges and life filled waters since 1980 aboard four different boats. On this visit as luck would have it, I met a man who knew it for far longer than I. The son of one of the last lighthouse keepers, David Main grew up on the island in the 1950s and 60s spending every summer from age 2 to age 15 on it with his family.

In those days Bob Hart owned the island. He had been the caretaker during John Foster Dulles’s ownership and bought the island from Dulles’s estate. There were then two lighthouse keepers who shared the duty, residing in the pair of cottages a few yards from the light. David had siblings and three kids from the keeper’s cottage next door to roam the island with. He recalled it as being a paradise for kids. His friends back on the mainland fought for the privilege of visiting him at the island. The boys searched for “treasure” on the beaches after storms, hunted snakes, and assisted in various chores like mowing, tending the garden, and collecting worms and grasshoppers to supply visiting American sport fishermen with bait.

They also helped Bob Hart by painting “no fires” signs, and keeping track of the visiting boats. The kids would report on unruly behavior. At that time there were commercial fishermen living in seasonal camps and cottages around The Harbor. One of them was a sturdy fellow who could be counted on to assist the lighthouse keepers with the occasional eviction of a badly behaved visitor. If called upon, the lighthouse keeper sometimes arrived at the dock with a large prominently holstered pistol. Generally though life was peaceful and David recalled Bob Hart generally did not restrict access to either the island or its harbor.

Each year the light tower was cleaned top to bottom of spiders and their copious webs.In the glass enclosed light chamber at the top of the tower this was a hot job on a sunny day. The various diesel engines and machinery associated with power production had to be maintained as did the compressor that drove the fog horn. Another annual task was trimming trees on the point that would otherwise grow up to block the light from some angles. And the keepers replenished and annually filtered the mercury on which the light house mechanism floated.

Light after being automated. It has since gotten a nice new paint job!

The island’s fishermen seined for carp and netted whitefish, pickerel and perch. Later in the 1960s, an export market for eels led to a lucrative trot lining fishery. Eels were held in pens until enough were accumulated for a run to the fish broker. Some were exported to Europe live. My own memories of the last fishermen to use the island are of hardworking but cheerful folk who tolerated the tourists and more than once went to the aid of a yachtsman in trouble.

Dave recalled an fisherman’s attempted prank at the expense of some yachties years ago. A big sailboat made her way into The Harbor with a well turned out family dressed in yachting apparel. One little boy, no doubt curious to see the fish, was challenged by the fisherman to hold an eel straight for one minute. ‘I’ll give you 50 bucks if you can do it’, he told the boy. Now I once dealt with eels in fishery surveys, and I can tell you they are very very slippery. Our field crew called them ‘snot snakes’. The boy was game though. He hung on to a writhing eel, and as it squirmed around, it wiped most of its mucus off on the boy’s white shirt making a proper mess of his yachting outfit. But the kid persisted, and much to the fisherman’s chagrin the kid was eventually able to hold his eel straight. He got his fifty bucks.

Dave Main’s dad did a lot of work around the lighthouse, laying the sidewalk that still remains, improving a small basin where the family could keep their sixteen foot Boston Whaler next to the tower, and also doing finish work inside the recently built keeper’s cottage, a cute little bungalow that they lived in from April 1 to the December end of shipping. They used the small outboard boat for runs over to Point Traverse for supplies and also had access for a while to a 32 foot double ended steel boat with an inboard diesel, the “Tug”. This boat was employed when it was too rough for the outboard.

Most of the time life was good with picnics and barbecues with the fishermen, sailing the little pram that father had repaired after it washed up on the beach, and, when Dave got older, off roading around the island in the “dune buggy”. Each year Bob Hart also culled the island’s deer herd, and the kids participated in driving the deer towards the hunters. It was felt that 40 deer was about the limit for the island’s browse supply. However, sometime before Hart sold the island to Canada, disease hit the herd. Dave speculated perhaps they had gotten inbred. Periodically deer and other large animals sometimes make it out to the island, but at the time of our visit I saw no sign of deer being present.

windward shore of island with a southwest wind. We waited this one out before returning to the New York shore.

Sometimes a boater seeking refuge from rough water would need help getting into the harbor. I asked if Dave recalled any disasters or scary moments and he did remember a bad accident when his little brother was hurt seriously. A helicopter brought a doctor and a nurse out to stabilize the boy and then evacuate him. There was no suitable landing pad so the medics had to be lowered down. After that, the lighthouse keepers built a suitable concrete area for use so that a chopper could set down in an emergency. Another memorable incident was the trip when the small outboard Boston Whaler ran out of gas. The crew rigged up a sail of sorts from a bedsheet and boathook and crawled slowly down wind towards the light until they were spotted by the keeper on duty who rescued them with the other small outboard.

In later years, Dave returned to the island to wreck hunt and reminisce. I’ll share more memories of the Island in our next post. For more on Main Duck’s history and colorful characters check out my book Twinkletoes and the Riddle of the Lake on sale at my Etsy shop. Link at My Etsy Shop