Toronto's Connection to Collingwood Real Estate and Blue Mountain Real Estate, Josie Schywiola, Kevin Woolham, Century 21 Offord Realty

Georgian Bay is a large bay of Lake Huron, located in Ontario, Canada. The main body of the bay lies east of the Bruce Peninsula and south of Manitoulin Island.Georgian Bay is surrounded by Manitoulin District, Sudbury District, Parry Sound District, Muskoka District, Simcoe County, Grey County and Bruce County. The Main Channel separates the Bruce Peninsula from Manitoulin Island and connects Georgian Bay to the rest of Lake Huron. The North Channel of Lake Huron, located between Manitoulin Island and the Sudbury District, west of Killarney, was once a popular route for steamships and is now used by a variety of pleasure craft to travel to and from Georgian Bay.

The shores and waterways of the Georgian Bay were, and are, the domain of the Anishinaabeg First Nations peoples to the North and Huron-Petun (Wyandot) to the south. The bay was thus a major Algonquian-Huron trade route. Champlain, the first European to explore and map the area in 1615-16, called it "La Mer douce" (the gentle sea). It was named "Georgian Bay" (after King George IV) by Captain Henry W. Bayfield of the Royal Navy in 1822.

Georgian Bay is about 320 kilometres long by 80 kilometres wide. It covers over 15,000 square kilometres, making it almost as large as Lake Ontario. Eastern Georgian Bay is part of the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, granite bedrock exposed by the glaciers at the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago. The granite rock formations and windswept Eastern White Pine are characteristic of the islands and much of the shoreline of the bay. The rugged beauty of the area inspired landscapes by artists of the Group of Seven (an example of which is the painting by Frederick Varley shown below). The western part of the bay, from Collingwood north, and including Manitoulin Island, Drummond, Cockburn and St. Josephs Island, borders the Niagara Escarpment.There are tens of thousands of islands in Georgian Bay. Most of these islands are along the east side of the bay and are collectively known as the "Thirty Thousand Islands," including the larger Parry Island. Manitoulin Island, lying along the northern side of the bay, is the world's largest island in a freshwater lake. The Trent-Severn Waterway connects Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario, running from Port Severn in the southeastern corner of Georgian Bay through Lake Simcoe into Lake Ontario near Trenton. Further north, Lake Nipissing drains into it through the French River. In October 2004, the Georgian Bay Littoral was declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO.