There are a handful of beaches along Lake Ontario in Toronto, some in places where you can swim and others in places where you can’t.
- The city assigns some locations as designated swimming areas, but others are without lifeguard duty and supervision.
This doesn’t begin until June every year when the weather gets warm enough for swimming. There are some people who balk at swimming in Lake Ontario, but I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. Some of my friends won’t join me, although they’re happy to go swimming at their relatives houses along Lake Huron to the north. For many years I didn’t get a chance to head out to Lake Ontario again, either for swimming or even just standing along the waterbanks to get a beautiful view of the water. My job in Yorkdale has me on the north end of the Greater Toronto Area most days, so I have to schedule a dedicated trip for an entire afternoon if I want to head south for Old Toronto and places like the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre next door. It was a lot more fun to do these activities when I was younger, whereas nowadays I’d much rather explore nature in a nearby city park. But an old friend of mine asked me recently if I wanted to accompany him to Woodbine Beach and I realized I had never actually been to that particular Lake Ontario beach. It’s a fairly popular beach and it definitely lived up to its reputation that day as there were families for as far as the eye could see.