Now you've stirred my curiosity, :)
I based my low water theory on living on Lake Huron
and watching the high water levels fluctuate from year
to year. Dry winters usually mean siginificantly lower
water levels on all the Great Lakes during the next
summer. But the ups and downs always average out in
the short term.
However, my neighbors tell me that our beach wasn't
here when they moved here in 1969. Their boathouse,
which is now separated by a hundred or so feet of
beach from the shoreline, was originally right on the
water. So the high water mark has retreated that far
over 34 years.
Place that scenario in the St. Clair flats, I
reasoned, and it's possible that sandbars could become
permanently exposed, and islands could increase in
size over 30 or 40 years.
I'm also guessing that the shipping channel is the
same one used before the Seaway by Great Lakes
freighters, and dredged to accomodate ocean-going
ships when the Seaway was built. Also that the border
always follows the main shipping channel. If the
current channel had been cut through Seaway Island in
1958, and the border re-aligned to follow it, we'd
know about it, for lack of better words.
It's possible that the Walpole Island seaway project
involved cutting a new water path through Bassett
Island (the "cutoff" on the topo map). That would have
created a new island, appropriately named "Seaway."
(Thanks for those Walpole Island links, BTW. That's
always been a favorite place of mine.)
You'd really need to compare the current topo with a
pre-1958 large scale map of Lake St. Clair. None of my
old large-scale SE MI road maps cover Harsens Island
or the St. Clair flats. (The current AAA, American
Auto Club, SE MI map, 1 inch to 3.5 miles but not
exactly a definitive reference for shoreline
alignments, does, but doesn't show the sliver of
Seaway Island extending into the USA.)
Or it might be the time for a one-day border
expedition to the far southern tip of Harsen's Island,
to see what can be seen.
Either way, as with the knothole in the board fence
out by the nudist camp, I'll be looking into it, :)
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