My Watermark is Lake Superior, Ontario.

When I was in tenth grade, my parents signed me up for a Tall Ship Adventure course. There’s a charity in the harbour, Bytown Brigantine charity, and I’ve always loved ships – my family didn’t have any money and they subsidized the course. I signed up for a two-week sailing trip on the Great Lakes, it was my first time on a sailing ship and my first time really out on the lakes. I had ridden a ferry once or twice but we drove to Sault Ste. Marie, and we got on the play fair and we spend two weeks sailing on the Great Lakes.

I wanted to see Lake Superior and they asked me why I wanted to see Lake Superior and I said it was because its the one that was the farthest away. And to me, Lake Superior always seemed the most exotic, most cold, most remote, and most dangerous. I don’t know why my tenth grade me thought Superior was – but to me living in Toronto on Lake Ontario, which seemed pretty safe, I wanted to go somewhere dangerous and since the North Sea you’re in the Arctic Archipelago, it was an amazing experience to be honest.

The worst part of that was no shower. Because there are no showers on this ship. So when you shower it involves you jumping in the lake, getting out, putting on some kind of all natural soap that doesn’t harm the water and jumping back in again. It was absolutely freezing in August and it is probably the most horrible thing you will ever have to do but it was two weeks of sailing, I had an amazing time and made so many memories. The thing that I took away from the experience the most was the music, which surprised me. Because we got to sing a lot of sailing songs that the officers would teach us, some from hundreds of years ago, some from Napoleonic era about sailing to south Australia that made no sense to us but some were actually about the Great Lakes, some incorporated the Great Lakes and I still remember those, those are very fond memories.