Thoughts on the Portage

Two years on

2011-06-17T22:01:00.002-04:00

I never did go the three-portage route...Went straight down Smoke Lake to the 245ish metre portage, over that, down and then around to the first site in the bay...lovely site...Whole trip in took about 3.5 hours..almost 2 of that getting to the portage and over and then on my way again.

Went again to APP with Danny the next July, this time up through Canoe Lake, into the Joe Lake System, up through a couple lakes into Tom Thomson...was fun but again crappy weather cut a trip short by a day....

Next week, the July 1 weekend, going up to Canisbay with the clan, a day there then soloing down through Cache to Harness and then the next day to Louisa lake and back to Harness,then back to Canisbay..

We shall see how that goes.

It's down to single digit days before I go

2009-07-04T23:47:00.001-04:00

In fact this time next week, I'll be back and sleeping it off at Leslie and Mark's place....hopefully with a ton of stories and pictures..

2009-04-20T15:32:00.002-04:00

WEll, upon review and consultation of a trip-planning website that calculate travel time based on ability and how many carries you typically do across a portage, I've rethought the three-portage into Parkside BAy route; by the calculations, doing a double carry across 3 portages totalling 1.4 kms was at LEAST 90 minutes longer than doing the single double carry across the 250ish metre Smoke Lake/Ragged Lake portage, even with then having to paddle around the point and back into Parkside bay....

As well...

2009-04-10T22:14:00.002-04:00

You might have noticed that, instead of veering east at the bottom of Smoke Lake, I'm going the other way and doing a three-portage route into Parkside Bay. Now, in light of the fact that unless I find a way to really go gear light this trip I'm looking at double or even triple carries across these portages...and that'll epically suck....so, I know you're asking why do three portages instead of the one into Ragged Lake and then just paddle around and back up...

The thing is, though...I have no idea how long it'll take from the put-in at the top of Smoke Lake down to either the portage into Ragged Lake or the series going directly into Parkside Bay...Could be 2 hours, could be 4...and depending on when I get there, That could make it early to late afternoon and then do I REALLY want another 1-2 hours going the long way around through Ragged into Parkside???

Two factors, then:
1) possibly getting there near dinner and then having to set up quickly.
2) the sites being filled up and having to settle for something less than good...

The real factor, I think is going to be how efficiently can I pack???
If I can do double carries, then the 3-portage route makes wayyyy more sense; it's faster and far more direct...If I am doing 3 carries (or more, let's be honest, last year was not a banner year for gear efficiency...) I'm doing ONE carry and paddling the long way around....

2009-04-10T22:03:00.003-04:00

Well, this is the route I'm currently planning to be day 1 of the three day solo run from Smoke Lake Access down into Parkside bay, then down into Big Porcupine to camp, then exploring up into Bonnechere for the rest of the day....

I love this map, which was put together by a guy named Jeff McMurtrie.

Really an outstanding job of combining a topo map with an informational brochure format...truly a work of art and love and a great resource to use...his map is truly awesome. He's pretty much married to APP and does at least one 30 day trip a year. All the history and information he's able to stuff into that map, including parks that border APP is really sweet.

2009-02-28T08:02:00.001-05:00

Ok, so we're far farther along than we were:

2009-02-28T07:18:00.003-05:00

In the past couple of days, we got off our butts and booked a few camping trips (ok, 4, but better than the zero we had booked before this)

There's a KOA Kampground over-nighter for us guys and the girls (neither Leslie or Grace have camped with us before)

Sam and I are going to Frontenac in the end of May (potentially brrrrrr) over night..

Then, the one that concerns, excites and generally occupies my mind at the moment: a 3 day SOLO in APP for MOI!!!!

More in another post

Looking at where to go this year...

2009-02-17T05:52:00.002-05:00

There's the same old choices; Frontenac, Depot Lakes, Algonquin. etc etc
And it's hard, in the middle of February to be thinking, trying to put my thoughts into the summer and think "Now, where would I WANT to be on July 15th or August or whenever?"
It's hard to NOT see the snow and cold and ice everywhere and find my sunny hot "happy place"

Though I know that eventually I will be on Gould Lake and Big Salmon and even maybe Smoke, Canoe or Galeairy Lake and paddling.
This thought from here as I sit here at 6 in the morning on February 17th will still be there (here?) as I read it in 5 months and I'm here in July...

I realise I need to move on a coule sites before they are taken but as well I want to not just pick a day to just pick a day.

Trips we need to think about:

1) over-nighter with Danny and Phil
2) over-nighter with Gunnar and Joachim.
3) over-nighter with Sam and me.
4) over-nighter with Sam, Grace, Leslie and me (KOA).
5 1-27(kidding) nights with just me.

All that plus Bon Echo and the Cottage..

PLUS day trips...
PLUS beach days....

oy.....

Already looking at 2009 trips.

2009-02-11T07:50:00.002-05:00

Hopefully, I can get a few more day trips into the schedule this year.

Post Season Analysis.

2008-12-12T13:01:00.002-05:00

Ok, winter's here and the boats, etc are away...while we had fun thisd year, we never got the paddling in that we had hoped...granted, there were a few trips in.
Next season I think I'll be wanting at least ONE day of just Mike camping; Sam's just not into it as much as I'd require to make the outings anything I want to repeat on a regular basis.

Trip Log:Collins Bay Creek: April 16,2008.

2008-04-16T11:07:00.005-04:00

Ok, started off this trip a couple days ago with the typical spring decisions of where to go for the FIRST water run this year. I can't remember where I went last year for the inaugural 2007 paddling seaon starter(probably the same place I ended up going THIS year) We were going to go up the creek from the Dupont plant and see how far THAT'd go before we'd have to turn around. Sam's former soccer team mate's Grandpa (ok, it SOUNDS a bit of a tenuous connection, but it isn't really) and I spent the last few months huddled in front of the school at 3:30 each afternoon, waiting to pick up our respective kids and in doing so have exchanged a fair amount of small talk on what I guess a former OPP officer and life time resident of the area and a former Chef and transplant from Toronto would find common ground on, I guess. Fishing and the weather, as it turns out.

So, he suggested that I go up from the plant and see if I couldn't make it all the way up to Princess road and the Ambassador Hotel, then turn around, something he said he's done a few times in the past. To be honest, I've thought about this route an awful lot the last couple years, as I've passed over it either along King St, Bath Road or Princess Rd. and thought that it'd be a great sort of warmup or quick-trip fix should I have the afternoon or morning off. The only thing is that I've never seen ANYone paddling it.

And the thing this morning was that there wasn't really a defined put in anywhere really except up at the Ambassador and where to park then? probably not in their parking lot and I dunno if there's anything public that's closer than the pancake place's parking lot (maybe a thought for the next time I go by: Where to Park?)

Anyway, with all the issues of access and solitude(normally solitude is a BIG BIG plus on a day trip, though later in the season) I was persuaded to go with the old standby of Rotary Park's put in and paddling down Collins Bay.

And, so , I unloaded everything and took everything but the canoe down to the put-in (where some d-heads sunk a picnic table in a bout 5 feet of water...I swear I don't GET the mindset of some idiots...Did doing that REALLY satisfy something deep in their souls, some missing thing that trashing a donated table satisfied or filled?)

Then hoisted the boat onto my shoulders and started down to the water, flipped it down and got all the gears loaded and pushed off and settled into my spot and planted that first pitch stroke and thought "andddddd we're off on another season of paddling"

Well, I got to where the memorial benches are, just west of the central parking lot at the Conservation area and saw the sheer of the lake effect wind pushing north from where the lee of the point faded. After this point, I realised, the wind would make any forward motion a hard thing to achieve.

So, I turned around and headed back towards the put-in/take-out, thinking that this really hadn't been the most soul-satisfying of trips. And as I was getting closer to the take-out I was watching the bridge on the Loyalist Parkway that heads over what I later found out was Collins Creek... And I thought about going over there, but was looking at the wind and the waves and what would happen if the wind picked up and whatever, but...I heeled around and started across on a path just south of the bridge, thinking the wind would push me around to where my tejectory would be this big "C" of an arc...well, it worked well enough andby paddling of the oppositre side of the prevailing wind, I was able to get decent speed up ( I'm sure someone more versed in Physics could tell you why when the wind wants to push your boat in one direction and you push from the opposite side, you get greater speed.)

Anyway, after a bit of paddling here, there and everywhere, I got under the bridge and into this area where it's usually very calm and slow.....but there's foam and obviously a current that isn't as strong in the summer (at least the time I was there last summer, I couldn't notice any appreciable current) so I paddle up around the bend and....

There's whitewater!!!

Be still my heart... So, I edge up on the inner part of the river's curve past a landing spot that I sort of passed on, looking for something farther up I guess, and make my way across in a decent ferry if I DO say so myself....and edge up through a couple eddies and land the boat and get it well up out of the water while I go up to scout upstream (last thing I want is to come back and see it out in Collins Bay)

And there's all these "No Trespassing signs" around in this undeveloped scrub land..

I mean I realise that the owner probably doesn't want play-boaters treading a mud trail through his land while doing repeated runs on the river during Spring Run-off, but still it grated me to see something so...I dunno...Corporate, I guess.

So, I went up a bit and realised that

a) the river was running pretty quickly and was at least a technical Class II+.

b) I would probably really ding the green boat trying to run any of it.

c) I really wasn't skilled enough to get a good run in without trashing the boat and possibly dumping it.

d) If I dumped, I was FUBAR'd in a major way, as the water was maybe 3-4 degrees above freezing.

So, I amused myself for a couple minutes by looking at the river and plotting the run I WOULD take, were I actually going to run it, then headed back down to the boat.

As I was getting in, I slipped and put my leg in the water up to calf level...make that water temp JUST above freezing....lol.....
Still, I did a few peel-offs into the currents and got pretty good at getting into the right spot on the river quickly, so it was at least decent practice for getting in and out of eddies..

I got back to the bridge and realised the wind had shifted (when does it ever NOT shift when I'm out????) and the bridge was acting as a major wind tunnel against me and of course I was too far back in the boat to avoid the bow weather-vaning all over the place and sending me back and forth... so, that was pretty annoying after a bit, but, finally out we came on the other side and well, after that it was just a matter of 'bulling' the boat across the bay and back to shore....

[One of the things that I'd been telling myself over the winter, while sweating it out at the Y was that all that weight training would make me a stronger paddler...Well... I dunno yet if that's true, as it's a bit early in the season... I didn't FEEL much stronger, but I did notice that my arms and shoulders didn't stay as tired as long after I'd rest a second or two: They seemed to recover far more quickly, which I think is a result of the training and them being used to being stressed out far more often. They look at the paddling as just another set of reps]

So, while I was loading up again, I got a wierd question:

"So, the water cold?"

I dunno...I would GUESS it would be, like I surmised about the whitewater....but I got the feeling that the person thought I'd gone swimming or something...I dunno, just struck me as a slightly strange thing to ask in early April...

So, I celebrated my first paddle of the year with a Tim's coffee...

Can't find the other Bill Mason quote...

2008-04-07T22:58:00.000-04:00

The one in "Waterwalker" where he talks about going back for the second load and how that's the one part of the portage when you actually get to notice things and see what you're hiking through without the distraction of a 75 pound boat resting on on your shoulders or three packs perched on a tumpline and straining your head forward to keep them up there or a 60 litre food barrel with20 pounds of tent/sleeping bag/tarp bungee-corded to it.. The idea that you can just absorb the nature around you while you walk back unencumbered....that's what I wanted to bring to this blog.

Trip Log: Gould/Blue Lake, Ontario. July 25/2007.

2008-04-07T20:30:00.000-04:00

This was one of my favourite trips of last year, even though it's a route I've done several times since getting the Green Canoe back in 2006. It was the first trip I took with Sam that he actually had to portage between lakes. Granted, it was just the one portage and a pretty easy one at that, but still, for a five year old (and any canoe-bie), Sam did very well.

Here's what happened:

We had loaded the car (by we I mean Me of course, as I pack my trips myself because a) I know what I want and need and b) that way I know that I have to be responsible for everything....[lots of well-intentioned splitting of the packing goes awry when one person assumes the other person's looking after an item or list....then, suddenly 4 hours paddle away from a re-supply, you realise you have a stove and no gas or condiments but no food])

So, we get in the car and head up Sydenham Road...I'll be honest, I can't remember whether we hit the Tim Horton's on the corner of Sydenham and Princess or (more likely) stopped at the MacEwan's Gas in Elginsburg for schnacks....in either case, we get to to Sydenham and head through onto Bedford Rd. then onto Alton Road and make our way to the Conservation area...I stop, pay my money, ask for a car tag and... get this....get told "Oh, we never bother to check...."

Your donation dollars at work, folks.....

Personally, I'd rather switch off with my co-worker every hour or so and take a walk down that 1/2 km. and check out the parking lot rather than be stuck in that cramped hot wooden booth all day...but, that's just me..

So, I get the boat off the car and the tie downs in the car (I used to stow the red front "Y" one under the front of the car but I've become paranoid about losing it) get the gear out, then get the boat down to the water...As usual, there's a group being taught canoe/camping craft (Note to self: Grace and Sam are taking those classes, they look like fun)

That day's topic: toilet trowel technique...some of the girls looked like they'd rather hold it in for the entire trip than actually poo somewhere other than their own bathroom, let alone have to drop their Old Navy shorts and La Senza bikini briefs to squat over a hole in the woods, then have to deal with more than merely pulling the handle to flush it away.... ( I shouldn't talk as I haven't had to poop in a cat-hole in the woods since the night Allen Sung, Chris van der Maas and I camped out in a farmer's back 40 across from Canada's Wonderland the night before its official opening, back in May of 1981. )

Anyway..

Sam offered to help carry the paddles down to the put-in, which was great, except that he didn't seem to be able to organize them so that they were easy to carry, but insisted on carrying them anyway. Quite the trooper.

Got everything loaded up and stowed, got Sam in the bow seat (he insisted on being carried to the front of the boat, so as to not get his feet wet....(not so much troopage on this front), pushed off (I still get a rush from pushing off from the put-in, much like feeling a jet rumble beneath you and knowing you're on your way or "fairly embarked" as Thoreau put it, back in the 1840s...)

Paddle past the kids trying to make their canoes spin around a fixed point on the water and head for the lee shore of Gould Lake to avoid the winds that come up in the late morning, then up past a rock the size of a football field that comes up to a flat plateau about 4 inches under the surface which would make a great "shallow end" to splash on if it didn't drop off again to about a billion feet almost immediately after.

We get to the mouth of East Bay, paddle in and head over past The Rock to the "take-out"...

Truth be told, this is not an official take-out because the portage up to Blue Lake isn't an official portage, as far as I can tell, anyway.....You basically drag your gear up a small 4-5 foot berm, step onto the Tom Dixon Trail, head up the middle of the "V" of a small valley and hill for about 425 metres, hop onto the Famous Trail (which ironically, I'd never heard of before looking up whether there WAS an official portage between the lakes) and head another 10-15 metres down to a swampy put in.

Sam again was very good at carrying some stuff and actually was able to keep up and out of my way at the same time..(I was afraid of either getting tripped by him or whacking him upside the head accidentally with the ass-end of the canoe).

However, the put-in has the double whammy of being VERY shallow right off the shore and very mucky/froggy, so you need to wade about 5 feet out through calf deep ooze and frogs to get enough draft under the keel to get in and then push off

However, yet again, Sam wanted no part in wading out to the bow or even to the stern, so I had to carry him to the bow.

Well, after getting the back floor of the boat FILTHY from my muck-encrusted shoes, we pushed off and got to see 3 Great Blue Heron nests just around the corner....very pretty and BIG, but deserted that day...

A quick paddle down the lake(it's about a kilometre and a bit in length) brought us to the biggest beaver dam I've seen, at least 20 across and obviously very well constructed and fairly old as the sediment had enveloped it and there looked like there were no new logs there.

On the non-lake side of it, you can see were the lake USED to run down through the rocks back down into Gould Lake, before Bucky and family blocked it off..

A quick look around, then back we went to the froggy portage... the bugs were a bit more aggressive going back down as I think I was a bit sweatier now, but still, nothing like earlier in the season, when that portage was slightly buggy-hellish (I'd been a bit afraid how Sam might deal with the swarms of bugs on the walk, but he was OK with them and they seemed to never be there in the numbers I remember.)

Back we went to the beach and loaded the gear up (Sam being a bit less inclined to help, but good enough to just hang out while I got re-loaded onto the car)
Then, Sam enjoyed snacks as we headed back the way we came...

I was so happy that Sam carried through on his first portage that I made up a little certificate for him to put on his "power wall"
He wasn't as thrilled as I hoped, but it's still there, which is more than I can say for some things there, so, I suspect he's somewhat pleased.

Canoe Quote

2008-04-07T14:56:00.000-04:00

I would not know how to instill a taste for adventure in those who have not acquired it. (Anyway, who can ever prove the necessity for the gypsy life?) And yet there are people who suddenly tear themselves away from their comfortable existence and, using the energy of their bodies as an example to their brains, apply themselves to the discovery of unsuspected pleasures and places.
I would like to point out to these people a type of labour from which they are certain to profit: an expedition by canoe. What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other travel. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature

P.E Trudeau. Canadian Prime Minister, Law Professor, Canoeist.