I discovered Lake Nipigon, Ontario, Canada, while thumbing idly through a road atlas, dreaming of destinations suitable for the unballasted dinghy cruiser I had borrowed from my brother for the summer. I wanted a boat that would be light enough to pull up on a beach for camping ashore, but could accommodate sleeping aboard at anchor if necessary. It would have to row as well as it sailed, avoiding the fuss and expense of an engine that I wouldn’t know how to repair or maintain. Most importantly, I needed a boat that could be towed from adventure to adventure by a moderately rundown two-door hatchback. My brother’s boat fit the bill perfectly—a 15-foot plywood-epoxy beach cruiser he had built in his garage, using plans from Australian boat designer Ross Lillistone.

Lake Nipigon looked like a worthy destination for an open boat cruise—60 miles long and 40 miles across, with wide stretches of open water and hundreds of thickly wooded islands. I liked the look of it, especially the lack of official charts, the absence of roads or towns and the idea that no one I knew had ever been there. A haphazard Internet search revealed only vague rumors of wolves and woodland caribou, tall cliffs and black sand beaches. It was surprisingly difficult just to find a map of the lake. When I finally tracked one down in Thunder Bay, the clerk who sold it to me wasn’t able to tell me anything about Nipigon either. No one he knew had ever gone there. 

The map itself was delightfully vague. There were no depths, no markings for latitude or longitude, no compass rose or declination and no contour lines. This map is illustrative only, a note at the bottom stated. Do not rely on this map for navigational purposes, nor as a precise indicator routes or location of features. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find “Hic sunt dracones” scrawled across the edge of the page: Here be dragons. 

After a two-day drive from Wisconsin, I pulled into the parking lot of the South Bay boat ramp to find a pit toilet, a camper and a couple of boat trailers parked in the weeds, and a battered fishing boat tied to the dock, half-filled with rainwater and listing sharply to port. A bulletin board declared, “Nonresidents camping on crown land require a permit,” available for $10 per night “from numerous fish and wildlife license issuers and from the Ministry of Natural Resources district offices in northern Ontario.” But I hadn’t seen a town since Thunder Bay 90 miles back, much less a district office. Which was just as well, because I didn’t have the money anyway.

Another sailor might have had everything planned ahead of time, reservations made and permits in hand. Not me. I launched the boat, rigged a tarp on a line between the mast and rudder head for a makeshift tent and slept aboard at the dock, hoping the place would prove to be as ill-patrolled as it seemed. 

After waiting out a morning fog so thick that I couldn’t see the water beneath it, I hoisted the sail and set out just after noon. With a southerly wind, that first day was all downwind, broad reaching and running northwest past a misty forest of dark spruce and pine and scattered birch, following the edge of a jutting peninsula spiked by granite cliffs and looming headlands. The fog burned away slowly as the day went on, and the wind grew stronger. After 20 miles I dropped the sail, double-reefed by then, and worked my way into the sheltered cove at Charlie’s Harbor under oars. The surrounding shores proved inhospitable to camping ashore with, thickly wooded slopes, fallen trees, tangled brush, and boulder piles. I finally gave up, rowed into a reed bed, and dropped anchor in ankle-deep water to sleep aboard instead. 

The boat drifted to a halt as I tied off the anchor line. The sun was barely visible above the high ridge on the west side of the bay, and long shadows flitted across the water like the wind’s dark fingers. The silence was interrupted only by a faint breeze shuffling through the trees overhead, and the quiet rippling of small waves against the hull.

In the morning I could just make out Kelvin Island 9 or 10 miles north, a rough, low bump in the horizon that glimmered and shifted like a mirage. It seemed as good a destination as any. The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, Thoreau tells us, and by this definition I am nothing if not wise. Tucking away my book—I had read a few pages of Thoreau at breakfast—I set a hand compass on the bench to steer by and swung the bow around, slipping the oars into the oarlocks and dropping into an easy rowing rhythm. 

The water lay flat and calm around me as far as I could see, as if held motionless under the weight of the cloudless and immovable sky. I kept rowing slowly northward toward Kelvin Island, settling more deeply into the surrounding stillness with each moment. I might just as easily have been rowing in place while the world spun beneath me. 

After four or five miles, a soft breeze swept down the lake like the slow steady breath of the world. I stowed the oars and hoisted the sail.

The southeastern tip of Kelvin Island was impossible to land on, a steep hillside with thick spruce forest running right to the water’s edge. The other islands nearby—Wilson Island, Endakwis Island and Blacksmith Island—didn’t look any different. The map showed a campsite on Dawson Island a few miles farther on, so I headed that way, ghosting along in a breeze almost too faint to feel. But Dawson Island was dense forest, too, with only a narrow fringe of sandy beach. I finally managed to find room for my tent in an overgrown clearing thick with tall weeds. The mosquitoes arrived at dusk and I retreated inside, leaving the boat on the beach, tied off to a birch tree.

Checking my map, I saw that Dawson Island’s harbor lay at the very center of the lake, the hub of a vast archipelago that stretched to the farthest shores in every direction. From here, I could go anywhere. I had a vague and admittedly arbitrary notion of pushing on to 50 degrees north latitude—farther north than I had ever sailed before—and into the farthest reaches of Windigo Bay; when the next morning brought southerly winds, I didn’t waste time. After a hurried breakfast of instant oatmeal, I rowed offshore, hoisted the sail, and set off on a close reach in a faint breeze, up the east side of a chain of large islands stretching northward across the lake. I sailed for six miles along the shores of Kelvin Island, another six or seven miles past Geike Island, five more miles to pass Whiteaves Island. Island after island, broad expanses of forest that had come unmoored from the mainland to drift into my path. A scattering of tiny islets off the starboard bow—the Rabbits, according to the map—helped mark my progress through the water. Eventually I left them behind, too.

It was marvelous sailing, with the breeze growing stronger through the morning. I tied the sheet off to an oarlock with a slipped hitch, draped an arm over the tiller, and let the boat sail itself. With blue skies under puffy white fair-weather clouds, sunlight glinting on small waves, the distinctive rippling sound of water rushing along the hull’s lapstrake planking, the day seemed like it would never end.

Only now, sailing along at 4 knots for hour after hour, did I begin to understand Nipigon’s immense size. My little boat was barely a speck of white in an endless maze of islands, forests, cliffs, and open waters. I hadn’t seen another boat, or another person, since leaving the boat ramp three days and 40 miles back. The sense of freedom was exhilarating, and more than a little unnerving. No one knew where I was, or where I would be tomorrow. I had no phone, and no radio—only a slightly questionable map. But the sail was a smooth curve of white overhead, pulling the boat easily through the water, rolling and swaying on the waves like a living thing. And all it would take to go here instead of there was a nudge of the tiller and a pull on the mainsheet.

At the southern tip of Vennor Island I finally had to make a choice. A turn to the west would bring me into a sheltered lagoon within a ring of islands that rose from the water like flooded hilltops—Ord, Whiteaves, Billings and Barlow. A glance at the chart showed at least half a dozen anchorages that would be perfectly protected from the southerly breeze. But that would take me through the windshadow of Whiteaves Island, where I might lose the breeze entirely. Better to keep to open water where I could keep sailing. With a tinge of regret, I steered east around Vennor Island. Another four miles would take me to a sheltered anchorage in a broad bay on the west side of Logan Island.

The breeze faded away to almost nothing as the evening went on, but I reached Logan Island’s sheltered bay well before sunset, turning into the wind to drop the sail while the boat drifted lazily across the water. I had been aboard all day, without even a brief stop ashore. There’s no such thing as boredom when you’re sailing—not for me, anyway—but I was happy to stand, stretch, and let my attention wander. A bald eagle launched itself from a treetop and soared past overhead. Other than that, I was alone.

The anchorage was surrounded by steep hillsides, with thick forest running right to the water’s edge I was beginning to wonder why I had bothered to bring a tent for camping ashore. No matter, I rigged an anchor near the mouth of the bay and settled in for the evening. After a dinner of red beans and rice and a chapter of Thoreau, I set up the boat’s sleeping platform, rigged a nylon tarp over the cockpit to keep off the dew, and enjoyed a quiet evening listening to a chorus of loons, their wavering cries a perfect backdrop to the bats that swooped and fluttered around the bay in the lingering twilight. 

Just before dropping off to sleep, I pulled out the handheld GPS that my brother had insisted I bring with me. I had never used it before, and wasn’t even sure how to turn it on. But after trying enough buttons in various combinations, the screen showed my location of 50 degrees and 7 minutes north. 

A strong northwesterly breeze was blowing by the time I pulled up the anchor and rowed out of the bay the next morning. It would be 10 miles to the head of the lake from here—10 miles dead to windward. I was tempted. The northern shores were lined with tall cliffs, and a huge mesa, flat as a tabletop, rose like a lost temple from the forest between Windigo Bay and North Bay, with broad beaches and flat marshland farther west. But with an abundance of islands to explore in every direction, the notion of a 10-mile beat into stiff headwinds seemed ludicrous. Besides, I reminded myself, I had already reached 50 degrees north. Without even a slight twinge of my conscience, I hoisted the sail and set off southward on a broad reach.

All that day the boat ran slowly south and east, following a slaloming course around and between and past one island after another: Little Burnt Island, Burnt Island, Ramsay Island and a dozen others too small for names. The early morning’s strong northwesterly soon faded away, leaving just enough wind to keep moving. After 10 miles of sailing—a long hot day in light air—I spotted a curving stretch of sandy beach on the west side of Murchison Island. With no schedule to keep, and no particular destination in mind, I headed for shore.

It was an easy landing on flat sand, but the beach was fully exposed—not a place to leave a boat overnight in a region of prevailing westerly winds. But that’s the beauty of a lightweight dinghy cruiser. I unloaded my gear, shoved a couple of plastic fenders under the keel to serve as rollers, and pulled the boat up onto dry sand at the edge of the forest. After rigging a few lines to hang some laundry for drying, I set up my tent in a muddle of moose tracks at the top of the beach, hoping I wouldn’t be trampled on during the night. 

And so it went. Light breeze and dead calms. Thunderstorms that shook the trees and stabbed the earth with sudden jolts of lightning. Bouts of spirited sailing in winds strong enough to stir up tumbling whitecaps and bright bursts of spray. The northern lights twisting slowly in vivid red and green ribbons that hung from the night sky like rippling curtains of light. A long downwind run, fully reefed, surfing waves whose breaking crests rose well above my head—the boat surging forward, then sliding off the back of one wave and onto the face of the next, again and again, until finally I rounded a tall headland and coasted into the flat water of its sheltered lee.

Nine days after I had set out from South Bay, I dragged the boat up onto a beach beside the boat ramp I had launched from and started ferrying loads of gear to my car. It was fairly windy—I finished the day with one reef tied in, and might have been better off with two—but the boat had handled far worse. Half a dozen fishing boats, though, were tied up at the docks, bouncing around and slamming against each other in the chop, a line of disappointed fishermen beside them. It was no day for them to go out. The tiny harbor, and all of South Bay, was completely exposed to the northerly breeze.

“Is that your little boat there?” one of the waiting fishermen asked me.

“My brother’s boat,” I told him. “He’s letting me borrow it.”

“Well, you don’t want to go out on a day like this,” he said, assuming I was loading gear rather than unloading it. “No one goes out on a north wind.” The way he said it, the words might have been engraved on stone tablets.

“I wasn’t planning on heading out,” I told him, not mentioning that I had already sailed 10 or 20 miles that day. He wouldn’t have understood. He would have thought I was crazy, or stupid—maybe both—for going out on such big waters alone, in a boat hardly bigger than a canoe. I felt no obligation to correct his assumptions. 

Nine days—200 miles, more or less. I had sailed through lingering blue-sky days and star-scattered nights, slipping quietly past white-whiskered otters, and owls, and red-eyed loons, through wheeling flocks of herring gulls and pelicans. I had seen eagles hanging from the sky on outstretched wings, and minnows flashing dart-like through the shallows. There had been wind and rain and storms, flashing spray and mirror-flat calms. And each moment—each delight, each small discomfort, each faint stirring of fear—had been an anchor fixing me ever more firmly to my own life, to the fleeting conjunction of here and now. That, more than anything, was what I had come looking for.