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OWECC Thanks YCCC
for Sponsoring their Annual Canoe Trip for Ottawa Youth
We had a mixed group of youth with many talents and character traits between them: one was an all-Ontario winner in 10km run, (who, though he was not allowed to use his cleats inside our canoes, used them to great advantage on the portage trails); another who would have won all-Ontario in the high-pitched squeal upon first sighting of a fisher (aka ‘dock)’ spider; another who would have won all-Ontario in gentlemanly behaviour; a marathon late-night yapper; a silent but strong (very! – I’d have him in my bow anytime!) type with a ready smile; another very smiley guy; 2 sweet-natured, easy-going gals - one of whom showed all the others how to do a canoe-over-canoe rescue (she learned it on last year’s trip) during play time in our boats and also outshone even the strongest guys on the portage trail by carrying a big barrel AND a canoe at the same time!
Monday, June 29, 2009
We had Trailhead shuttle us (Trailhead also rented us the balance of the equipment we needed at a substantial discount) into remote (that road was an adventure in itself!) Lac Bagnole, from where we were able to paddle under grey skies via small safe waterways into beautiful emerald Lac Vert. Even though it was Monday, competition was stiff for campsites, with all of the most popular being previously occupied, but our exploration of most of the lake netted us another very pretty one (Our SPOT sent this location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=46.0068,-75.8041&ll=46.0068,-75.8041&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1 for it) under the shade of tall red pines where we ate a big late lunch, set up our three tents, a Club tarp and gathered firewood.
The afternoon blessed us with warm sunny weather so we swam & had a little playtime (aka self-directed learning time) in the canoes. Tipping, sinking, self-rescue, assisted rescue, canoe-over-canoe, re-entry – they tried it all and had a great old time figuring out new ways to get in & out of the canoes. The kids loved the clean, sheltered, weed-free, emerald waters of Lac Vert & I’ll be sending them lots of pictures of themselves for their photo albums. All enjoyed a friendly campfire (happily stoked by the ‘camp pyro’), a hearty dinner (HUGE THANKS to Andrew & his wife Betsy for their time and effort in putting together such a healthy, hearty and delicious menu for the entire trip) & retired surprisingly early (when the rain finally came in across the lake) for a good nights sleep.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
With no travel plans for the day, we enjoyed a late breakfast and some canoe lessons for the morning. After everyone had a try at draws & prys (=pivots & sideslips), canoe steering (goon accepted, J recommended), and changing places, we set out with the 3 Instructors in the 18’ Swift Winisk and the students in charge of their own canoes for an exploration of Lac Vert. Only one high-spirited rescue was needed after our tallest, gangliest student swung his head a little too far over the gunwales for the Souris River el Tigre to handle so we used the opportunity to fine-tune our canoe-over-canoe and re-entry techniques. Lesson learned in a safe & fun environment!
We worked hard at our mission for the day: lightening the load in the food barrels before our big portage the next day! The camp chores were shared out amongst the students and everybody had their turn cooking, dishwashing, tidying and packing, but nobody had to be assigned firewood gathering, because the guys who liked feeding the fire just kept arriving back in camp with armloads of it! A hare gently hopped into our campsite and sat quietly watching us as we moved about – until a couple of the kids decided he was offering himself to be eaten for dessert, gave chase, he disagreed and scampered off much more quickly than even our cleat-wearing sprinter could match. Kevin regaled us with his Little Carrot Saga while we chowed down on “S’mores” (yummier than hare) around the campfire, waiting eagerly for the punch line. We headed off to bed fairly early again because we had a big travel & portage day ahead of us, with rise & shine time set for 7am.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 Canada Day!
Everybody was up and at it on time, dressing for portaging (proper footwear), and getting their tents all packed up before doing their fair share of lightening the food barrel even more for breakfast. We were ready to load canoes 20minutes before my (optimistic) projected time of 9am, but we delayed departure time with a quick lesson on portaging before re-arranging canoe partners & loading canoes (another lesson) and we were actually paddling by 9:20, amazing time for a group of newbies! We got to the 1st portage, and knowing it was short & had poison ivy at the far end, we warned them but let them at it & watched admiringly as a couple of them actually double-loaded themselves (one guy had a heavy pack on both front & back & one gal took both a big barrel & a canoe!) to jog through. That portage was over so quickly (without a single pack being dumped in the poison ivy!) I barely had time to sweep for forgotten items and we were on the water paddling through a string of 3 ponds connected by swampy creeks headed for the big portage.
At the head of this portage, we knew there was potential for getting lost, so we organized one pack each, leaving the canoes and a few packs for the second trip, and travelled together as far as the road, where the faster ones stopped and waited for the slower ones. Lynette marked the trail with her favourite colour of trail tape – fluorescent pink – and then went ahead to find the trail leading off the road to Lac Poisson Blanc to mark it as well. This first leg of the trail was good & muddy, but also had some nice boardwalk over the worst of the swamp, so only one person lost a shoe in the muck, but only because she hadn’t tied her laces well enough. Black sludge poured out of the shoe – yum! - when it was retrieved by being hooked with a paddle t-grip. A couple of us slipped in the mud & got our butts mucky as well, but the positive attitude of the group only found this part of the adventure humorous. We were just glad it wasn’t raining & buggy! The shorter leg of the portage was along the road and then downhill to the big lake. We arrived to a nice beach due to lower water levels (2 feet?) than last year.
On the way back for our second load, one of the students had the terrific idea (Smart Kid!) to drag deadfall out of the bush to lay “corduroy” across the muddiest parts of the trail so that we’d have something to step on on our trip back over with the canoes and the last of the packs. So a few of us worked at making the trail easier to walk back over while the rest surged ahead. By the time the last of us reached the top, there was only one canoe left to share, but another group from Camp Air-Eau-Bois had arrived at the same portage and were snacking to boost their energy to carry their load (including some very heavy looking canoes) through it. Our group were very appreciative of how easy the YCCC canoes were to lift, carry and paddle and will know the difference between a good canoe and a klunker, thanks to the YCCC!
We were all finished the portage by noon, so we snacked on the beach before heading off to hunt for a campsite. Lac (Reservoire) Poisson Blanc is a huge lake which requires caution when paddling across the larger expanses and we were lucky to have calm weather, so we headed around the north end of Ile Mysterieuse towards last year’s campsite beside the huge cliffs on the other side of the lake, but got sidetracked by the lure of a beautiful white sand beach, clearly visible now that the sun was shining and the water level was low. We altered our course to investigate and paddled up to a small island with a pretty beach with “Halte” signs and pictures of a tent in a circle with a line drawn through it… I guess the multi-lingual sign for “no camping”. This lake has recently been turned into a money-making proposition by the new “Parc Regional du Poisson Blanc” http://www.parcdupoissonblanc.com/en and a lot of the campsites have been numbered for an online reservation system and small, over-used sites like this one have been designated as day-use only sites. We stopped to take a look around anyway, found new tree-plantings in an interior campsite, snacked a bit more and one of the gals pumped/filtered enough water to fill everyone’s bottles and the 10 litre container. Close examination of my maps, which I had previously marked up with campsite information from a few fellow YCCC’ers, revealed that there were quite a few more options a bit further on, so we paddled on & found 2 more empty spots (the cliff campsite appeared to be occupied from a distance) and chose the one (Our SPOT sent this location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=45.9809,-75.7257&ll=45.9809,-75.7257&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1 for it) with huge spectacular rocks and tall red pine again, over the bushy one just 100m south of it. The cliff-like rock faces gave us the feeling of being in a huge room and the thunderbox had it’s own “room with a view”. This site was numbered (33?) and we hoped we weren’t trespassing on someone’s booking as we set up camp between the rock faces. We had plenty of time to check out the depth for jumping & diving off the rocks and everyone had a great time doing synchronized antics off the rocks and monkeying back up them to jump again.
Clouds and sprinkles moved in as we prepared dinner (using the two small emergency stoves that the Leaders had brought, as the Club two-burner Coleman had become progressively too leaky to be deemed safe enough to use anymore) under the Club tarp in our granite kitchen, but held off until after we’d eaten, only really opening up full blast to soak the two dishwashers who had chosen a big rock in the open as their work surface. We all retreated under the red tarp(standing room only!) until it blew over, then tried to re-light the soaked fire, succeeding 3 separate times before finally letting the rain win the battle of wills.
Thunder Storm
As we were thinking of hitting the sleeping bags early again, we watched as the wind suddenly whipped up the lake into a frenzy of waves as a wall of rain approached across the lake, sending us into a flurry of activity to batten down the hatches and retreat under the tarp behind the granite wall again, only to have the storm whip between the rocks to grab the two big tents, rip their pegs out of the ground and threaten to do a Dorothy & Toto to the girls inside, so we ran for it, got under the fly, and anchored ourselves to the upwind corner poles and held them down as the short but violent storm howled past us. The guys caught their tent just as its pegs gave out and dragged it up against the lee side of the kitchen rock wall and held it down. When the storm passed and the wind dropped, we emerged with wide eyes and I went to check that all the canoes, which we had stacked neatly with their backs to the wind and in between the rocks, had survived – they hadn’t budged – whew! The smaller Northface tent had also been between large rocks and very securely pegged, so even with no gear (or bodies) inside it, it remained steadfast.
We re-located and re-pegged the tents with the deformed pegs, and added cord loops and rocks to anchor them again as best we could, then gathered under the tarp again to share our war stories, play cards and watch the beautiful sunset on one side of the island as a huge rising thunderhead grew and towered over us from the ‘storm’ side, reflecting the pink of the sunset, awing is with it’s beauty and it’s threatening power to potentially blow us away to Oz again. Thunder and lightening passed around us in little cell storms, but did not hit us again that night. But… if the storms weren’t going to keep us up all night, then the wound up girls decided to make lots of noise from their tent instead and kept the camp rowdy until almost midnight. Oh well – it was our last night out, so we let them party.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
We had to get up and get going again this morning, as we had 10km of paddling to get to the boat launch 2pm rendezvous with our Trailhead shuttle, and calmer conditions generally prevail in the earlier hours of the day, an important factor on this huge lake. The girls were a bit tired (go figure!) but managed to pack up all their stuff before our blueberry pancake breakfast anyway. We packed up slowly and were on the water before 10, in cloudy but mirror-calm conditions and paddled quickly south. Everyone had become quite proficient paddlers by now and we made good time, so we stopped for a snack break, snooze, crayfish fishing and a swim on a small island about 7km later after only an hour and a half of paddling.
Wildlife was abundant in the area – we saw loons, geese, ducks, seagulls, a pair of mink, frogs, crayfish, fish, garter & water snakes, a hare and a few beaver… and spiders, of course! We heard many different types of songbirds, loons and even wolves in the distance. Amazingly enough, the only wildlife that was NOT abundant were bears, blackflies and mosquitoes – Reverend Rob would say Somebody was looking after us and ensuring we had a great experience!
With so much time, we decided to paddle the last few kilometres the long way around a few islands just to see what was behind them, then headed for the boat launch an hour early (the shuttle driver had been early last year, so we figured he might be early again this year). We rounded the corner at the same time as the Trailhead van and trailer pulled up into the parking lot and it started to sprinkle again. We quickly loaded up, tied everything down and headed for Ottawa through heavy rain back to the YCCC canoe shed. We called ahead to try notify parents that we were going to be an hour early. At the shed, the rain held off while we unloaded and distributed all our stuff back to it’s rightful owners, finding we were short only one paddle (YCCC #8), so OWECC will buy us another 2 new ones as a small thank you to the Club for their generosity in loaning OWECC their canoes and equipment free of charge.
The kids had a terrific time, learned a lot and found canoe tripping a very positive experience in which they all flourished in different ways. The leaders found this to be a positive and rewarding experience also – which is why we volunteer our time for this kind of thing. As a contributing Club member, I very much appreciate the YCCC Executive’s positive and encouraging response to my appeal for their support for this endeavour, as these youth would never be able to afford this type of experience without this kind of community support. My personal opinion is that this is a more appropriate way of our club giving back to the community rather than (or in addition to) our annual cash donation to send one child to camp. This contribution, which involved no cash, enabled eight youths to have a wonderful canoe tripping experience. Many Thanks to the YCCC!
Lynette Chubb & OWECC
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