Georgian Bay is a bay the way Lake Superior is a pond. Fifteen thousand square kilometres, thirty thousand islands, the largest freshwater archipelago on earth. On a map it belongs to Lake Huron. Nobody who has crossed it in a blow has ever thought of it that way.

Champlain came through in 1615 and called it Mer Douce. The freshwater sea. He was hunting a route to the Pacific and thought for a while he might have found it. It held that name for two centuries, until a British surveyor renamed it in 1822 for a king who never saw it. The older name was the better description.