BUCKET LIST UPDATE No. 159: Swim in one of the Great Lakes

Lake Ontario swimming area at Wilson-Tuscarora State Park.

Several years ago, I read a book called “The Great Lakes Triangle” by Jay Gourley. Published in 1977, this book detailed the numerous, unexplained disappearances of planes and boats over the Great Lakes over the past century. This book made the Great Lakes seem so fascinating that I put “Swim in one of the Great Lakes” on my “bucket list.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the Great Lakes, they are a series of five connected freshwater lakes on the border between the United States and Canada. The Great Lakes include Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario and Lake Superior. Together they are so large that you can see them from outer space. In fact, they are so large that they more strongly resemble inland seas than they do lakes due to their deep waters, strong currents, rolling waves and high winds.

Having lived most of my life in South Alabama, getting to actually swim in one of the Great Lakes seemed about as likely as getting to walk on the moon. They’re over 1,000 miles from my hometown, and I’d never ever had a good reason to be in that part of the country aside from catching a connecting flight in Chicago once.

That all changed last week when my family took a short trip to Niagara Falls, New York to see that city’s famous water falls. While there, my wife and I seized the opportunity to take our kids to one of the Great Lakes, so they could at least say that they’d been there. From our hotel room, we did a little research online and discovered that there was a public swimming area at Wilson-Tuscarora State Park, which was less than 25 miles from our hotel, on the south shore of Lake Ontario.

We arrived just a few minutes before the public swimming area opened at 11 a.m., and I was surprised to see that the park had several lifeguards on duty. We swam for almost two hours and spent more than a few minutes comparing the “beach” there to the more familiar beaches of Gulf Shores, Ala. The biggest difference to me was that the shores of Lake Ontario are covered with cobblestones of all sizes, while the Gulf Shores beaches are known for their sugary white sands.

Reading up on Lake Ontario later, I learned that “Ontario” means “Lake of Shining Waters,” and Lake Ontario is the only Great Lake that doesn’t share at least some portion of its shoreline with the state of Michigan. Lake Ontario covers an area of over 7,300-square miles and is over 800 feet deep in some places. It’s the 14th largest lake in the world and is 53 miles across at its widest point. From our vantage point on the New York side, we could not see the Canadian shore.

In the end, how many of you have ever swam in one of the Great Lakes? Where and when did you do so? What did you think about it? Let us know in the comments section below.