A hungry 250-pound black bear broke into four boats in three days anchored off Heywood Island in the North Channel of Lake Huron, climbing up swim platforms, confronting owners in the middle of the night and generally sowing fear and anxiety.
The local paper, The Manitoulin Expositor, says the first reported bear problem came from Brian Laux, from Walworth, New York, who was below in his cruiser Serenity, fixing dinner – a bass he had caught earlier. Laux heard a strange scratching noise and thought it might be a swimmer in distress. “But when I went outside there was a bear right in the water – he was trying to climb up the side of the boat,” he said.
This time, the bear swam away. Later, Laux heard the bear paddling back to his boat. He poked the bear in the nose with his boat hook. The bear swam around the boat and eventually retreated.
It turns out that the bear had already ransacked a boat named Carandy anchored nearby. The owners were away on a kayak trip. When they returned, the bear was inside, tearing up their cabin. He had climbed aboard the boat using the swim ladder that they had lowered when they got on their kayaks. The owners banged on the hull and the bear left and swam to the island. A bit later, however, the bear returned and tried to climb on the boat from the bow. They whacked it on the nose with a boat hook and it left.
Later on, Dennis Kirkwood arrived at the mooring area in his catamaran. When he was getting ready for bed around midnight, he heard a thumping noise under the boat. The bear was under the swim platform and Kirkwood said it was breathing heavily. At first Kirkwood tried to scare it off by blasting his air horn. That didn’t work, so he hit the bear with a wooden oar; the oar broke. Read more:
https://www.manitoulin.ca/hungry-black-bear-boards-four-boats-over-three-days/
