Sunday, September 24, 2017

Thousand Islands Part 3: Grenadier to Sugar

Monday, 9/11

Monday was going to be one of our long days - a paddle to Boldt Castle. This meant paddling the length of Grenadier Island and then island hopping to the castle on Heart Island, for a total of about fifteen miles round trip. Jen had really wanted to go to Boldt Castle, and I did too. There is family lore about a family vacation visit to Boldt Castle when I was young. As a child I had my share of irrational phobias. As the tale is told, I spent our entire time at Boldt Castle fretting about missing the boat back to the mainland and pleading to go "back to the boat dock" as soon as possible. As it happens, I recently had some old home movies digitized including, as it happens, footage from our trip to the Thousand Islands. In the film I appear to be having a perfectly fine time at the castle. I don't doubt that my fears of getting marooned there were real, but I suspect my insistence on waiting at the dock for the tour boat has been magnified over years of retelling. In any case, I was ready for a confident return to the castle (via my own boat, which was not going to leave without me).

Our trip there was against the current and into the wind, so it was a bit of a slow slog. We detoured a little bit to look at an old lighthouse and we made another stop to check out the campsites at the middle of Grenadier Island. This area of the island is more of a campground - many more sites and more facilities (picnic shelters, bathrooms, etc.). Being a weekday after Labor Day, it was empty. Also, I saw a mink in the wild!

Towards the end of the trip there I started to feel twinges of pain in my chest. Based on the trauma caused by my recent surgery I get a great many weird aches in my chest. The doctors have reassured me that such pain is nothing to worry about - however, pain in my chest could also signal the onset of a heart attack, which is an urgent medical concern. As a result, I freak out whenever chest pain appears and have to convince myself that it's not a heart attack. So, when I started to feel funny I slowed down and after a bit the rest of the group did too. Fortunately, my self-diagnosis of not having a heart attack once again turned out to be correct.
Boldt Castle

 Jen had called ahead to see if there was a place we could land kayaks and had been assured that there was. However, when we got there what we found was a steep ramp which would have been a tough landing even if it hadn't been blocked by a work boat, and a rather high dock. By working together to stabilize the kayaks we were all able to climb up out of the boats onto the dock and then haul up the kayaks. You come ashore into a no-man's land - on the island, but outside the castle perimeter. We paused there to have some lunch.

Landing at Boldt Castle (Rob's pic)

Next, we ran into the biggest challenge of paddling in this area - the fact that an international border runs through it. The rule is that you can cross the border as much as you want on water, but as soon as you set foot on land after crossing the border you have to check in with the appropriate border patrol agency. Heart Island is in the U.S. and there is a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol booth there to log in visitors coming from Canada in accordance with this rule. After finishing lunch we headed for the entry and dutifully logged in with CBP. The CBP officer gave us each a slip of paper with our U.S. entry number and a number to call upon our return to Canada. Suzanne and I, who are the ones to worry about such things, were concerned about what the re-entry check-in into Canada would entail (for example, would they expect us to physically visit an office outside of kayaking range?) so we decided to call the Canadian re-entry phone # right away. The Canadian officer on the other end of the line assured us that we could check in by phone upon our return.

Boldt Castle piano

We had a nice time visiting the castle and grounds. George Boldt made his fortune by pretty much inventing the luxury hotel business just in time for the robber baron era of the 19th century. He was, for example, the proprietor if the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. In a sense, he was like the Donald Trump of his era, creating properties that catered to the super-wealthy. However, unlike Trump he was a self-made man and no foe of immigrants, having worked his way up from kitchen staff when he was a new immigrant himself to millionaire hotelier. Also unlike The Donald, he didn't trade in his wives every few years. Rather, his wife Louise was his true love and it was for her that he was building the 120 room castle (he even renamed the island from "Hart" to "Heart" and incorporated a heart motif throughout the design as a show of his love for Louise). Tragically, Louise died before the house was completed, at which point George abandoned the whole project. So the castle today is not so much restored (as it was never finished or occupied) as it is an imagining of what it would have been like had it been completed.

At the end of the visit I indulged in a rare treat of ice cream (chest pain be damned - I was hungry and it was hot), then we got underway. For the trip back we had both current and wind helping us, and so, while we spent 3 1/2 hours outbound (including stops), it took us only two hours to get back.

The whole way back we were a little concerned about the customs issue (lots of jokes about how, like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, we were going to be stuck between two countries) and so upon our return to camp our first order of business was to call the Canadian Customs number. Jen called, and the person who answered took her name, asked the typical nonsensical questions ("How long is your kayak?") then - without taking anyone else's names - told her we were all checked in. This didn't sit well with us. We envisioned getting to the U.S. border at the end of our trip, showing up in their system as already having entered days earlier, and being sent to Guantanamo Bay. So, we called again. The person who answered was a little annoyed (since we had just called a minute earlier) and told us that the previous officer had been trying to do us a favor, but since we insisted on doing things by the book what we really needed to do was visit the Canadian Customs office at middle Grenadier. By this time it was around 6 PM. The office was open until 8, but there was no way were were going to get there and back by foot or by kayak, before dark. So, we thanked the latest Customs officer and decided we would take care of it the next morning upon our return to the Canadian mainland. Needless to say, we spent the rest of the evening joking about Canadian Customs SWAT teams swooping down onto the island in black helicopters to take us into custody. In retrospect, September 11th might not have been the best choice of days for cross-border shenanigans.

The bureaucratic headaches did not diminish our appetites. It was Suzanne's turn to make dinner (or maybe it was Jim's - Jim is not much of a cook and Suzanne had volunteered to take over his cooking night on top of doing her own) and we feasted on her tuna with olives pasta dish. It was an early night, as we had an early start planned for the morning. There was a marked warming trend in the weather and after having spent the preceding nights bundled up in my sleeping bag, Monday night I was borderline schvitzing in my tent.

Tuesday, 9/12

Usually on these trips we spread re-positioning over two days. Break camp and paddle back to the cars one day, spend a night ashore getting cleaned up, reprovisioning and repacking, then head out again the next morning. This time, because the distance between our two launch sites was fairly short, we decided to cram it all into one day. We knew it was going to be tight - even without the still to be determined process of checking back in with Customs. We had ascertained from the web that Misty Isles, our second launch point, was on the list of official Canadian check-in points (this turned out to be meaningless, as all they do is call the same phone number we already had) and so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and do our check-in there. To make a long story short, it took us over an hour and another seven or so phone calls to get officially checked in. The Customs agents wouldn't even allow us to pass the phone along from person to person; each of us had to call separately. Each of us got a different set of oddball questions ("Are you transporting any building materials?") and most of us received some degree of attitude from the Customs officers at the other end of the line (it turns out there are surly Canadians!). But eventually we all got "legal". And we provided much amusement for Gail, the (super-nice!) proprietress of Misty Isles.

Once we were done the group split up to take care of whatever else each of us needed to do. It was a mad dash, since we had only a few hours until our agreed-upon launch time for the paddle to our next campsite on Sugar Island. The people who hadn't cooked yet ran to the market to get food. We all refreshed our food and swapped out our dirty clothes for clean ones. I, for one, went in search of a shower. Most of the group had been either bathing in the river or using the solar shower; however, I am too genteel to consider a dip in cold, diesel-slick river water to be a bath and too delicate to subject myself to the tepid water of the solar shower, so my personal bathing on Grenadier had been limited to wipes. The first campground I visited turned me down (boo to the Ivy Lea KOA) but the second let me in, even declining my offer of payment (yay to the Ivy Lea Campground!). I took a luxurious hot shower, shaved, and also took the opportunity to wash out the cooler (we were concerned that the raw chicken had leaked). I bought fresh ice at the campground both because I needed ice and because I wanted to give them some business.

Our ashore time had been so busy that I hadn't had time to eat lunch. While time was getting tight, rather than just eat another of my camping lunches (tuna fish or peanut butter) I zipped back towards Gananoque with the intention of grabbing a quick lunch at the first restaurant I saw, which turned out to be McDonald's, so instead I grabbed a quick lunch at the second restaurant I saw - a chipotle chicken wrap at Tim Horton's. I was the last to arrive back at Misty Isles, but I still had almost an hour before our scheduled launch time and I had no problem packing the boat and being ready on time.

Ready to lunch at Misty Isles

The paddle out to Sugar Island was short and the water was calm and before we knew it our GPS receivers were beeping as we hit the waypoint I had set for the landing beach at Sugar Island. Sugar is a 35 acre private island owned by the American Canoe Association. Camping on the island is one of the perks of ACA memership. The island has minor improvements, including outhouses and really neat camping platforms perched right on the edges of the island. We had reserved two platforms but, since once again we had the place to ourselves (except for a caretaker who was there for the first few days) we wound up taking over five platforms: Jen and Suzanne each grabbed one to camp on, we took the nicest one as our central hangout and kitchen (it even had a kitchen area!), one for the solar shower and another one on which Tom and I hung our laundry. Another group of CPA paddlers had visited Sugar just weeks earlier. These folks for whatever reason like to maximize the amount of "roughing it" they do and so camped over on the rocky, buggy side of the island. Not us! We went for the sweet cushiness of the platforms.

Another luxury on Sugar is potable water. There's a hand pumped well and so we would take our water holders over in the (provided!) wheelbarrow and fill them up with water. Soooo much easier than filtering.

Camping platform on Sugar Island
View on Sugar Island

Our gourmet kitchen

It was Tom's turn to cook dinner - rough duty given all the work we had already put in over the course of the day; however, he was undeterred and prepared a marvelous meal: steaks and foil packets of mixed vegetables (corn, green beans, onions and potatoes) and turkey kielbasa. I've been neglecting to include mention of dessert in my descriptions of the meals, since mostly it was simple stuff like cookies. Tom, though, brought some sort of exotic Serbian dessert. 've already forgotten the name, but it was something he grew up eating - apparently some part of his family has Serbian roots. It was sort of a nut roll, sort of a babka. It was quite delicious! We spent the evening sitting on our "living room" platform staring at the water and the stars and marveling at our incredible good fortune at being in such a lovely place.

Sunset at Sugar Island

Wednesday, 9/13

After two busy days we agreed to a slow start on Wednesday. We started with a leisurely breakfast on the platform, watching an otter swim by and listening to the loons. We spent time on "camp craft". No, not lanyards. I had recently purchased a camping hammock and spent some time figuring out how to hang it up as well as relaxing in it. Rob and Tom set up the solar shower. Suzanne rigged a changing room out of tarps. Rob, Tom and I had all brought solar chargers for our electronics and so we deployed our solar farm (Rob travels with an amazing array of carabiners, bungie cords, spring clamps, and the like for such purposes). We each explored bits and pieces of the island on foot. In the afternoon we got on the water and did a six mile exploration of the Lake Fleet Islands - the local archipelago of which Sugar is a part. Lots of neat houses and scenery.

It was once again Suzanne's turn for dinner and this time she went pre-fab (this one must have been Jim's dinner!): Tastybite Indian Curry pouches with chicken. The curry had dairy in it and so Suzanne was good enough to set aside some for me before mixing in the chicken. I added some nuts and raisins, and had a nice meal of Indian sauce over rice. At this point, it should come as no surprise to readers that we spent the evening staring at the stars and the water. By this point in the trip it was pretty warm - we hadn't felt the need for a campfire (except for cooking) since arriving on Sugar.

Wednesday also marked the six month anniversary of my surgery. I had brought along a bottle of champagne from the U.S. (dutifully declared at the border) and we celebrated my survival and recovery with a champagne toast. It was very meaningful to me.

Toasting my heatlh!

Jen invited herself to stay over at my place, which was rather forward of her. Not to worry! She just wanted to try sleeping in my hammock. I slept in my tent; she spent the night in my "guest room".


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