A kayak trip out to the abandoned lighthouse on Salmon Point

We were visiting family who were camping at Sandbanks provincial park in Prince Edward County recently, so I brought the kayaks in case the weather was nice, and it turned out to be calm and sunny and warm — perfect weather for a nice long paddle! So I took the 14-foot Perception Carolina out and decided to paddle out to the very end of the spit of land to the south east of the Sandbanks main beach. At the end is an abandoned lighthouse that was built in 1871. I’ve paddled out there before but that time the waves on the point were too high for me to get close to the rocks so I couldn’t get out and look around.

The point is officially called Salmon Point, but apparently schooners and freighters used to call it Wicked Point, because there’s a shoal that sticks out that led to almost a dozen shipwrecks, including one in which all the crew and passengers died. After that wreck, the province decided to build a lighthouse equipped with a lifeboat and a keeper, one of the earliest such lighthouses on the Great Lakes.

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