By John Francis,
Bruce Peninsula Press
No sunset cruises except on Saturdays. Some restaurants closing by early evening. No line-ups except on Saturdays. Parking spaces available almost everywhere. As I watch our communities put another tourist season to bed a bit at a time, it reminds me of tourist seasons past.
It’s easy to forget, while parsing the minor differences between one post-COVID season and the next, that tourism on the peninsula has changed dramatically. Over and over again. Within living memory.
Admittedly, very few current residents remember the inauguration of the Tobermory-to-South-Baymouth ferry service in 1932. The MS Normac could carry 18 cars and 66 passengers. And no one at all remembers the arrival of the first automobile in Lindsay Township in 1911 or in Tobermory in 1916. These were monumental events.
But a lot of people remember when the road to Tobermory still ran through Stokes Bay. In those days, Stokes Bay was a big deal — a tourist Mecca in its own right as well as being the gateway to the north. There were cottages, cabins, hotels, restaurants, fishing charters, speakeasies.
Most of them are gone now, of course.
Across the peninsula, Lion’s Head was a scenic backwater, well off the beaten path. No more. Fast-forward to 2020, when Northern Bruce Peninsula had to ban parking on Moore Street because there were so many tourist vehicles parked there that ambulances and firetrucks couldn’t get through.
When the highway switched to its current path around 1960, that instantly pulled traffic away from Stokes Bay and channelled it much more efficiently to Tobermory. Which, in turn, created dramatically increased demand for ferry passage to Manitoulin.
It got to the point that two ferries — the Norisle and the Norgoma — couldn’t keep up with the traffic and people were stranded in Tobermory for days.
That was when Tobermory’s tourist industry consisted mainly of motels and restaurants, all catering to ferry traffic. The season was short and frantic, beginning in earnest the second week of July and slowing down the day the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) opened in mid-August.
Motel units were often booked by people who had expected to get on the ferry but couldn’t. They’d get a motel room, then sign up for standby. When standbys got on the boat, some motel owners got quite adept at giving the room a quick once-over and renting it again. With a season that short, you never passed up an opportunity to rent the same room twice.
As recently as 45 years ago, Tobermory was deserted by mid-afternoon on Labour Day. The end-of-season booze cruise aboard the Mamie left the dock around 6:00.
After Labour Day, there were no visitors except on weekends.
Back in 1973, the Chi-Cheemaun was commissioned to replace the two older ferries. She entered service in 1975, carrying 100 cars. When traffic kept increasing, she was fitted with ramps that created a second level and increased her capacity to 150 cars.
But the traffic kept building, to the point that by the mid 1980s, people were stranded again, waiting for the ferry. The Nindawayma was brought in to handle the overflow, but circumstances got in the way. After a couple of years of problem-plagued service, the Nindawayma blew an engine late in the 1990 season and never sailed again. By then, though, the four-laning of Highways 400 and 69 provided a faster alternative for many travellers and the demand for ferry service was dwindling. But it hardly mattered. Tourism on the Bruce Peninsula had evolved well beyond a role as a way-station on the route to the north.
Around the same time that Highway 6 got its current route, SCUBA diving went from a technological wonder to a popular hobby. Suddenly, shipwrecks were a tourist magnet, offering the first inkling that Tobermory could become a destination rather than just a way-station on a circle tour. Divers would stay for whole weekends, sometimes even for whole weeks.
Gradually, other people — Bruce Trail hikers, botanists, outdoor enthusiasts in general — came to see the upper peninsula as a destination.
I was shocked to read the results of a Chamber of Commerce survey about 25 years ago — the average stay in Tobermory was a week, not the night or two that I’d expected. Things had changed that much since the way-station days ten or fifteen years earlier.
Then social media changed things again, resulting in hundreds of carloads of hopefuls lined up at National Park entrance gates, as well as the aforementioned overcrowding on Moore Street (not to mention Little Cove Road, Grant Watson Drive, Dorcas Bay Road and Black Creek park).
Add COVID and stir. Those were some crazy summers, with everything in the cities closed and Instagram and Tiktok pushing everybody up here.
So: a little quieter this summer?
Works for me.
