Thousand Islands Part 2: Gananoque to Grenadier

Friday 9/8

One of the nice things about a trip like this is the planning and coordination up front. We're all experienced at this sort of trip and we all have a lot of gear, so there's a lot of good back and forth in the months and weeks leading up to the trip as we choose routes and campsites, decide who is going to bring what, and so forth. This year the planning phase was extra-special for me as much of it took place while I was recovering from surgery. Visualizing the trip and watching the details crystallize helped motivate me as I worked to get my strength back. Suzanne wisely suggested that I take on the job of figuring out places to paddle and so during my convalescence I scoured the available literature, pored over Google Earth, planned out plenty of paddling options, created a color-coded Google map with all our options, and created a file people could load into their GPS receivers with locations (waypoints) for all of our destinations. By the time I headed out from Newark I had lived this trip in my head for months and was excited about it finally becoming real.

A mere million hours after leaving New Jersey (or so it felt) I crossed the border into Canada and made my way to the small resort town of Gananoque. The first thing I did was to try to fiddle with the settings so that my car would display speed in km/hr. Normally it just shows MPH but, being a soft screen, it should be programmable. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to figure it out while driving. Fortunately, I know from running that 5 km is approximately equal to 3 miles, which was enough to allow me to convert between km/hr speed limits and MPH (it helps that speed limits are almost always multiples of five). I remembered as well that the Fibonacci sequence is a pretty good approximation of the relationship between miles and kilometers, which I used to double-check my math.

It's easy to spot your friends' cars when they're all loaded with kayaks. I noticed Jim's car in the lot of a liquor store, then pulled in next to Rob and Suzanne's cars in the lot of our motel. By the time I finished checking in Jim was at the hotel too. His phone didn't work in Canada so he had no way to communicate with the rest of the group. One of the few good things about T-Mobile is free international data and texting, so I had been able to ascertain that Rob, Tom and Suzanne had walked over into town for lunch. We caught up with them as they were leaving another liquor store - we do take our alcohol provisioning seriously. Carried along on a wave of group liquor purchasing, despite already having wine in my car I bought a bottle of bourbon - probably a year's supply at my normal rate of drinking. Jim accompanied me to the liquor store and bought more beer to augment what he had purchased earlier. Beer is generally not a good choice for kayaking - the cans are big and it gets shaken up. But, as I will explain, we were going to be "glamping" and so could be a little looser than usual with our packing standards.

Coordinating gear in Gananoque

"Glamping" is a portmanteau of "glamour" and "camping" and refers to luxury camping. Usually it refers to high luxury - for example, high thread count sheets on a Tempurpedic mattress in a yurt. In our case, we decided that since our two planned camping locations were on islands only a few miles off shore, weather permitting we* would tow Jen's ultra-light canoe filled with extra gear. This would allow us luxuries including a cooler, cushier sleep mats, and full size chairs. Still, we all had to be ready to do without the glamping gear in case conditions were such that we couldn't tow it. So we all arrived with chairs big and small, camping mats thin and thick, multiple stoves and so on. Later in the trip we joked about how we felt like we were having the poshest trip ever, despite the fact that by many standards we were pretty darn far from lux (after all, we were still using outhouses, sleeping on the ground, cooking our own food, bathing in the river, etc.).

Once Jen arrived, we went out to dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant in town, where I had a delicious serving of tuna. The remainder of the evening was spent with various preparations - coordinating and paring down the group gear from among multiple options, test-packing the glamping canoe, shopping for food at the local supermarket, packing the cooler, and so on.

Jen and Jim load the glamping gear

*"we" = Tom

Saturday 9/9

After taking advantage of the free breakfast at our hotel (including pocketing a few yogurts and things for later), we headed for the put-in at Mallorytown landing. I was so excited that I actually forgot to check out of the hotel. Fortunately, they billed me just for the one night; they aren't still charging me for the room. There we went through the usual ritual of packing the boats. I had taken the largest of my kayaks and still used a deck back to add more storage. In part that was because, knowing that we had only a short paddle and could load up the boats, I had brought along bulky canned goods for the dinner I was preparing. We had divvied up responsibilities in advance - each of us was responsible for one night's dinner, plus the last night we'd throw all our leftovers together for a potluck. I had drawn the first night.

Getting ready to launch at Mallorytown Landing

Towing the canoe to Grenadier

The trip out from Mallorytown to Grenadier was pretty easy. There was a little chop, but nothing that prevented us from taking the canoe. We quickly discovered that the canoe tended to hunt back and forth rather than going straight. We corrected this by having a kayaker follow behind, with the canoe tethered to the follower's bow by a slack rope. Even though the rope wasn't taut, it was enough to keep the canoe in line. Our destination was a campsite on Grenadier East. My Grenadier campsite waypoint was spot on, putting us right into the cove by our campsite. Based on write-ups we'd read we had been afraid that we would have to land far from the campsite and haul our gear a long distance, but the campsite area had a small dock and some flat rocks to land on, so we were fine.

The dock at Grenadier East (Rob's photo)

The site itself was quite beautiful. There were three campsites all together, and in addition a day use area with a pavilion and a fire ring. Plus a composting toilet (less stinky than a basic pit toilet, and well maintained - toilet paper and all! - by the Canadian park service). The place was empty (the joy of traveling after Labor Day) and so we spread out over all three campsites (we had reserved two, and paid on-site for the third, which was available only first-come, first-served) plus the day use area. The whole setting was quite lovely and, as far as we could tell, we had the east end of Grenadier Island all to ourselves. The only real reminder of civilization was the fact that we were not far from the main shipping channel. The St. Lawrence is a major shipping route and every once in a while a large cargo ship (these are ships ranging from 400 to 800 feet long - not large by supertanker standards, but pretty darn big from a kayaker's perpective!) would lumber by. By the way, if you are a boat nerd you can watch the St. Lawrence boat traffic on AIS at http://ais.boatnerd.com/.

Freighter on the river

The good thing about making dinner the first night is that there's nothing else to compare yours to. The bad thing is that, having just come from ashore, people haven't yet developed that "I'll eat anything, even if it's been dropped in the dirt" camping hunger. Fortunately, my whole wheat gnocchi with white beans and spinach was a success - it was appealing even to the non-ravenous.

Having had a long day, after dinner we built a fire and relaxed. It was a clear and chilly night. This gave us a beautiful view of the night sky, and we hung around the fire until it just got too darn cold at which point we all crawled into our tents for the night. The temperature went down into the 40's overnight, but I was sufficiently bundled up, stayed toasty warm and slept well.

Sunday 9/10

A number of the people in the group had crossed paths in the past with an Ottawa-based kayaker named Alf. We had let Alf know that we were going to be in his general area and he said he'd come out and paddle with us on Sunday. In order to get to us Alf had to drive the 2 hours from Ottawa to Mallorytown Landing then paddle from Mallorytown to Grenadier Island, and so we knew we were going to have time for a leisurely start to the day while we awaited his arrival. It was late morning when we got on the water.

Our goal for the day was not overly ambitious. The region is home to a number of palatial houses built by nineteenth century industrialists. We started our trip by paddling to Singer Castle, located on an island just a few miles from our campsite. Singer was built by Frederick Bourne, who was the president of the Singer sewing machine company in the late 1800's. We circumnavigated the island but did not go ashore. While the castle is open to visitors, there was no landing place suitable for kayaks. Also, the island is on the American side of the river. We had launched from Canada and knew that setting foot on American soil would trigger immigration reporting requirements, a fact which would come back to bite us at our later visit to Boldt Castle.

Lunch break at Brown's Bay

After gawking at the castle we paddled back to the Canadian side and landed at a park at Brown's Bay. This provided a pleasant place for lunch. From there we followed the coast back down to Mallorytown landing, where Jen had to make a stop to pick up some papers. There is some sort of reciprocity between her museum and Boldt Castle which was going to provide us all with free admission to the castle when we visited. After the quick stop at Mallorytown we headed back for the campsite.

It was Rob's turn to make dinner. Rob is known for complex - and delicious - dinners, and this one was no exception. Rosemary chicken grilled in the fire ring, plus brussels sprouts, potatoes and other vegetables cooked on the stove. Alf stayed for dinner, and we all hung out and had a nice meal. He departed when he had just enough light left to get back. It was nice meeting him after hearing his name over the years. I look forward to seeing the pictures he took - he was traveling with a high end camera (well, Micro 4/3) with a honking big lens.

Rob's chicken  on the grill

Tom helps with the vegetables

Hanging with Alf

Oh, and lest I forget, he brought us bottle of a delicious chocolate bourbon liquor, which we drank to the last drop - as I already described, we were short on alcohol ;).

Then, it was a repeat of the previous night - sit by the fire watching the stars until it got cold enough that we all retreated to our tents. But there was a difference - there was a thief afoot. As we sat by the fire I kept thinking I heard something over in the pavilion. I would turn my head but never saw anything. Finally, with my headlamp on I looked over towards the dock and saw the reflection of four little eyes. We went over to the dock and caught a glimpse of two small raccoons rummaging around our boats. And then Jen realized that her food bag, which she had left on the table, was missing. It was gone - never to be seen again. We figure that the two raccoons we saw by the dock were juveniles and that momma raccoon had sneaked over to the picnic table and made off with Jen's food. Fortunately, that wasn't all of Jen's food and we had plenty of extra food, so she didn't starve (no one is even in danger of starving on these trips!). And somewhere on Grenadier Island there are raccoons who are now spoiled from eating homemade granola and lots of other goodies.