‘Key West’ of Canada Awaits Spring Thaw : Island Virtually Cut Off From World in Winter

They sometimes call it Canada’s Key West. But until the spring thaw comes, the 195 year-round residents of Pelee Island on ice-crusted Lake Erie are virtually cut off from the outside world.

From mid-December, when the last tourist boats head home, until the ice pack breaks up in late March, commuter flights to Windsor, Ontario and Sandusky, Ohio, are the only direct links with the mainland.

Pelee Island, 16 miles south of the Canadian mainland and 22 miles north of Sandusky, is the southernmost inhabited point in Canada.

“The only problem with Pelee Island is you either love it or hate it,” said Donna Olsen, who runs a bait and tackle shop with her husband, Svend. The Olsens are among the year-round residents of the island, 11,000 acres of farmland, scrub and beaches.

300 Permanent Residents

About 300 people consider it their primary residence, and up to 1,500 people crowd its 17 square miles during the summer, when the ferries MV Pelee Islander and MV Upper Canada ply their regular routes between the island, Kingsville, Leamington, Ontario and Sandusky.

Visitors are few in the winter months, mostly small groups of hunters who want to make use of one of the few spots within hundreds of miles for shooting pheasant.

“I don’t have an attitude that it’s an isolated place,” said Helen McCormick, owner of the Pelee Passage Restaurant, which offers the island’s only year-round food service.

The island’s hotel, motel, bar and other two restaurants close for the winter.

The Pelee Passage Restaurant is the site of a Tuesday night card game, and the Canadian Legion Hall hosts a Friday night gathering.

Seated at the restaurant one recent afternoon were four pheasant hunters who had flown over that morning on the six-passenger Piper Navajo that makes twice-daily flights to the island.

“We’re friends and we go up north every fall, moose hunting and bear hunting,” said Dudley Sparks of Merlin, Canada.

“If you want to hunt pheasant, you have to go to Pelee,” said one of his companions, Gary Ryckman.

Farming Dominates

Farming has dominated the economy of Pelee Island since the first European settlers arrived in the 1820s. While fields of soy beans, wheat and corn still cover about 7,000 acres, the population has dropped sharply as mechanization has increased the acreage one farmer can plant and harvest.

“There were close to 1,000 people here when I was growing up,” said Don Gow, a retired postmaster born on the island in 1902. “If you had 50 acres and a team of horses, you were pretty busy all summer. If you work it with a tractor, that’s a day’s work.”

More typical today is the 540-acre spread farmed by Bill Krestel, the “reeve” or supervisor of the Township of Pelee Island. Krestel was born on the island to a farm family that emigrated from Romania before World War II.

As is common among farmers, he holds several jobs to supplement his income, working as a telephone repairman for Bell Canada, a deputy game warden and an occasional hunting guide.

His post as the island’s top elected official brings him about $1,200 a year.

Krestel said that lack of employment opportunities drove most of his classmates off the island. He wants that to end.

“When I went to school, there were 13 kids in my class and about 130 in the school,” he said. Now there are 25 in kindergarten through eighth grade at the two-room Pelee Island Public School.

Five young people from the island attend high school in Kingsville on the Canadian mainland, boarding with local families and flying home on weekends.

“What you’ve got to have is a job that a kid who has gone to school can be proud to do,” Krestel said. “You can look at a million things and it always comes back to tourism.”

He and other island officials and merchants are at work on a number of projects to boost Pelee’s tourist trade.

Key to the expansion is the introduction of a larger 400-passenger ferry, with space for 45 cars, to replace the MV Upper Canada, which can carry a maximum of 100 people and 10 vehicles.

The MV Pelee Islander, with capacity for 267 people and 15 cars, will continue to run.

“We’ll almost double our capacity,” he said.

Heritage Center to Open

Getting tourists to the island is only half the battle. Krestel and others are trying to drum up more things to keep visitors busy while they’re here.

A Pelee Heritage Center, featuring exhibits on the island’s history and economy, is to open on May 1. The town council will experiment with a third pheasant hunt, importing adult birds to supplement the 20,000 raised each year on the island’s pheasant farm.

The 1,600 permits for the two hunts sell out within days.

Recently, Krestel and Peter Pfeifer, vineyard manager for the Pelee Island Winery, sat at Pfeifer’s kitchen table and discussed plans for a tasting center that would allow visitors to sample products of the island’s grapes and tour the nearby pheasant farm.

Pfeifer took the job in February, 1986, after answering an advertisement in a West German wine magazine, bringing his wife, Inge, and their two daughters from Heppenheim, a city of 36,000, to the island community.

The moderating effect of Lake Erie gives Pelee Island an average of 19 more frost-free days than the mainland, and its rich, dark soil yields hearty, sweet grapes that are shipped to the winery in Kingsville for processing.

The remoteness has been harder on Pfeifer’s wife, who had stayed on in Windsor after a family trip to the mainland earlier in the week.

“It’s a little more difficult for the women out here,” Pfeifer said. “There is no shopping. It can be isolating out here.”

Occasionally, if the lake freezes hard and deep enough, snowmobilers will trek from Pelee south to Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island, a part of Ohio.

Lisa Nageleisen came to Pelee Island to teach in 1981, met and married a ferry worker. She teaches 11 children in grades four through eight. In the next room, Debbie Janzen teaches 14 children from kindergarten through third grade.

“It’s a juggling act,” Nageleisen said as she and Janzen watched from a classroom window as the children frolicked outside. “The kids learn to work a little more independently. The older ones will sometimes help the younger ones.