Months ago, during a hike on a lakeside stretch of the Voyageur Trail, Clean North chair Bill Cole stopped short because he saw a decrepit fiberglass boat half sunk in the water. His immediate thought? “Ugh. There’s probably a lot of toxic stuff in that boat that we do not want to end up at the bottom of a lake.”

Many months and lots of phone calls later, a crew of eight successfully removed said boat from McIntyre Lake off Highway 17 north of Sault Ste. Marie.

While Bill organized this endeavour, he was pleased to have critical help from volunteers with the Saulteaux Voyageur Trail Club and staff with MNR’s Sault Ste. Marie District, especially planning and logistics support from Bill McCulloch, MNR integrated resources management technician.

Heavy lifting!

As they tackled this challenging project, a key issue was the boat’s weight as it was heavily waterlogged. They started by removing the waterlogged seats and rotten floor decking; then they were able to steer the boat to the shoreline near the road out.

photo of two men pulling a waterlogged boat in the water

Next they attached lines and tried to drag the boat up a 15 metre incline to the roadbed. However, on the first good pull with a pickup truck, the boat’s decking separated from the hull.

They had to resort to cutting the boat into 1 x 1 metre chunks. Even these were so heavy it took two people to carry each to the trailer.

The crew had a generator and power saws on hand to dismantle the rotten and saturated fiberglass hull. They used a shop vac to clean up most of the dust, bits of polystyrene foam, and rotten plywood, restoring the site to near-pristine condition. A whopping 905 kg of material was taken to the city landfill for proper disposal.

The origin story

So how did this boat end up in this sorry state? Bill says it was brought into the lake in about 1998 and later abandoned. It was sitting on the lakebed in shallow water a few metres from shore.

Over the years, many hikers have observed this eyesore, which was visible from a section of Voyageur Trail that runs from Old Goulais Bay Road to Highway 17 just north of Sixth Line.

In gratitude

Back row, left to right: Nick Burkill, Robert Guzzo, Bill McCulloch, Paul Ward, Cheryl Widdifield, Steve Dominy. Front: Mark Crofts. Not pictured: Bill Cole.

Clean North thanks all those who helped with this project, including MNR’s Bill McCulloch, Cheryl Widdefield, Robert Guzzo and Nick Burkill, as well as Steve Dominy, Mark Crofts and Paul Ward under the auspices of the Saulteaux Voyageur Trail Club.

We also thank the two landowners who granted us permission to use the private gated road and trails on their land to access and remove the derelict boat.