This is the beginning of a series of blog posts about a kayak trip to Georgian Bay, Ontario. Our plan was to circumnavigate Phillip Edward Island, which lies just off the coast. Georgian Bay geography is rugged and ragged - Phillip Edward Island has been worn away for literally billions of years and so the trip offered lots of opportunities to explore the small islands and inlets as we made our way around the island's irregular outline.
 |
| This entry covers "Launch" to "First campsite" |
Day 1 (Thurs): I feel like I spent weeks packing for this trip and was more organized than I had every been before - did some tune-ups on my kayak, made detailed packing and to-do lists, and slowly and methodically prepped for the trip. Still, Thursday morning found me running around grabbing this and that and in the end I forgot a few things and couldn't find the bourbon I had decanted into a flask (note: it was on top of the small fridge in the basement). Running a few minutes behind schedule, I hustled out the door and over to Tall Tom’s, where we loaded his kayak and gear and then pointed the car northward. There’s not much to tell about the trip Virginia to Niagara Falls except that it didn’t seem as long as I expected it to.
Tom is some sort of Double Titanium Top Secret Marriott points member and he had used the associated secret decoder ring to arrange for a room overlooking Niagara Falls. We knew that Suzanne was driving into Canada via the same route (Jen and Béla were driving up via a different route) and so Tom had offered her a spot in our mini-suite room which, with two queen-sized beds and a fold-out sofa in a separate little alcove, had plenty of room for three.
 |
| View from our hotel room |
We hadn’t coordinated any planned arrival time but by happy chance Suzanne arrived almost exactly the same time we did. We all went up to the room together and gaped at the awesome view of the falls. Then, taking advantage of Tom’s Marriott perks, we had (tiny!) free drinks at the bar, then walked over to see the falls up close. Super amazing! Then we went back to the hotel to take advantage of another of Tom’s Marriott wizard spells and grazed at the complimentary happy hour. Unfortunately the happy hour snacks weren’t substantial enough for us to graze our way through dinner and so we went in search of food. Niagara Falls is a kitschy tourist town and the nearby food options were all bleak touristy stuff. We probably could have found better if we had driven, but not a single one of us wanted to get back behind the wheel at that point. We first went to a place called Turtle Jack’s, where we sat for fifteen or twenty minutes waiting for service. Waiters would pass by - we even called to one when he was clearing the adjacent table, but no one seemed interested in paying any attention to our table. We decided to get up and walk out. Unfortunately, there was no one at the hostess desk to whom to complain. Tom spotted the hostess just as we were heading out the door. He shouted, “No one served us so we’re leaving.” Her response was, “OK!” Not exactly big on customer service. We would up having dinner next door at Outback Steakhouse - second-rate steaks for Tom and Suzanne, and a passable if over-priced piece of salmon for me, all accompanied by low-end Canadian beer.
 |
| View of the falls |
 |
| Local Niagara Falls resident |
 |
| Tourists at the falls |
 |
| Rainbows keep coming from my head |
Day 2 (Fri): This was a mostly just a travel and preparation day. Tom and I packed up and began our second driving day, this time three hours or so north into the Georgian Bay region. As I had forgotten my bourbon at home and Tom needed to stock up as well we stopped along the way to load up the car with intoxicants then continued to Parry Sound, a medium-sized town with a frontier feel, and the last real town of any size before our put-in point at Killarney Provincial Park. We stopped at the Walmart (civilization!) and a local supermarket for fresh food supplies, then met the rest of the group at the Parry Sound Travelers Hotel, a cheap motel which while run-down (but clean) may in fact have been the most swankiest hotel in Parry Sound. We saw signs that another motel was in the process of being converted to a Motel 6, but alas, that level of luxury was not yet available.
 |
| The Travelers Hotel in all its awesomeness |
 |
| Ready to head out in the morning |
 |
| Yes, we are in Canada |
While Parry Sound may not have much to crow about in terms of its hotels, it does much better in the food and beverage part of its hospitality industry. We walked to a lovely dinner at the Trestle Brewpub, complete with good live music, and the following morning had a good breakfast at Orr's Fine Meats & Deli. Hockey great Bobby Orr is from Parry Sound; I imagine the owners of the restaurant are relatives. The place had plenty of Bobby Orr paraphernalia on display, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a real connection as pretty much every establishment in town had some mementos of its favorite son on display. There were even Bobby Orr posters in the lobby of the Travelers Hotel, right next to the icon of Ganesha.
Day 3 (Sat): By our third day in the car it began to feel like this was a driving tour, not a paddling trip. Tom and I were happy to reach Chikanishing late morning but we were immediately stymied by a long line for parking passes. There was only one very nice but slow-moving woman working the registration counter and the place was surprisingly busy - people checking in to the campground, getting passes for hiking and paddling, etc. The launch turned out to be pretty busy too, so once we finally got our parking passes we had to cram together while we loaded the kayaks. We slid our kayaks to the sides of the ramp to allow trailered boats to launch. My kayak wound up sandwiched between Tom’s and Suzanne’s and so I couldn’t stand next to it to load it. Instead I had to kind of lay across the boat to reach the rear hatch to load stuff. Good pre-kayaking stretching, I suppose.. Our week-long trips usually include a resupply stop in the middle and so we only have to pack for half a week at a time, but this time we were going to be out for a full week, and we all grunted and groaned as we worked to squeeze a full week’s worth of food, clothing and supplies into our kayaks. I’m sure ultra-light backpackers would sneer at what I was cramming into my boat - compact folding cot, non- dehydrated food, and the like - but in fact we were down near backpacking levels of gear.
 |
| Packing the kayaks |
As we got underway I felt uneasy because I couldn’t get my GPS to turn on correctly, a recurrence of a problem I had when I first put the Canadian map card into the unit. I had fixed the issue with a hard reset of the GPS unit, but while at the Travelers Hotel I had gone in and restored some of my custom display configurations, which apparently is what is causing the conflict. At one point I’ll have to step by step diagnose the problem, but as an immediate concern I just wanted to be able to see where I was on the map - unfortunately, I didn't have time to monkey with it before we launched. I also discovered that my ancient VHF radio no longer transmitted. I could hear other people when they talked, but when I keyed the mic all they heard was a click. I'm usually someone who makes electronics work, so I was frustrated to immediately run into problems with several electronic devices - ones that were important for navigation and safety.
We had been told that it was wavy out on the bay and indeed it was. The water was rockin’ and rollin’ with waves up to about 3 feet (Oops - 1 meter - we were in Canada, after all). Our heavily laden boats were stable in the waves, but their weight made it that much harder to keep them moving at all, let alone in the right direction. Three feet is where the paddlers beside you begin to completely disappear as waves roll between you, and indeed we would pop in and out of view of each other as waves rolled through the group. The waves had a fairly long period compared with the short, steep waves of the Chesapeake Bay and so despite their size I rarely felt like I might get knocked over - the exception being when a wave would break just as it reached me.
 |
| Martin's Island view |
As I said, my GPS wasn’t working and so I was blindly following Béla and Tom, who had functioning GPS receivers. After a while we decided to pull in behind one of the small islands to get out of the wind and make a group decision whether to seek a campsite nearby or continue on out to The Foxes, a group of small islands which was our intended target, but being somewhat offshore, was said to be tricky to get to in windy, wavy conditions like we were experiencing. It was then that I realized that Tom and Béla didn’t know exactly where we were either. We rafted up and collectively stared at the GPS and the charts and determined that we had in fact already made it to The Foxes and that Martin’s Island, which was marked on the map as having several campsites, was right nearby. The debate about whether to continue through the chop to The Foxes having been rendered moot, we paddled across to Martin’s where we checked out a couple of landing sites/camp sites before choosing one.
Well, four of us chose a site. Tom decided to explore some more of the island by kayak while the rest of us chilled out ashore. We had read in a blog that this island had a “thunder box” (an outhouse without the house part), which would allow us to not have to do Leave No Trace (more on this later). Unfortunately, we never found it - it may no longer have been there.
We had launched right around lunchtime and so had skipped lunch. I was hungry and wolfed down a Clif Bar as we relaxed on the rocks waiting for Tom’s return. We probably shouldn’t have loafed around so long, though we didn’t realize it, since just after we finally started setting up camp a rainstorm rolled in. I was afraid it was the beginning of a steady rain. I threw a tarp over my stuff and hurriedly continued setting up my tent. Also, in the hurry because of the rain the spot I chose to pitch my tent turned out to be sub-optimal. It was soft moss and I discovered that tent stakes didn’t really grab in it. I tried to pick the whole tent up and drag it elsewhere but there was no immediately obvious alternative spot, so I dragged it back to where it had started out. I think I was not thinking completely clearly, being already tired from traveling plus paddling plus having skipped lunch. While the rain soon moved out, my tent wound up wet (which is awful) and crooked. I wound up in a somewhat sour frame of mind. The rain blew through quickly, but it took somewhat longer to clear the storminess out of my brain.
We chose the Martin’s Island site part out of necessity (we were pretty much done fighting the waves for the day). Despite it being quite a pretty spot it really was not a great campsite. There weren’t may flattish sites for tents and so we wound up squeezed together. The sites were neither the flat, smooth rock one expects in this area nor were they forest. The rocks and moss were also slippery; just about everyone took at least one small tumble, and there was a steep and slippery hill to climb from where the kayaks were up to the campsite. Not ideal. But still pretty.
 |
| Martin's Island sunset |
 |
| Sunset on birches |
I roused myself out of my funk since I had to make dinner. We each manage our breakfasts and lunches individually but we take turns making dinner for the group. Since it was the first night I decided to do something with fresh ingredients before necessity forced us into into dehydrated and packaged food. I decided to make Mexican food: chicken burritos with pre-packaged chicken, whole wheat tortillas, lettuce, avocado, sautéed red pepper and refried beans from a pouch. That turned out to be a lot to carry in the kayak (the head of lettuce was between my legs the whole trip out, since I was out of hatch space), but was well worth it, I think. Four of us ate well. Unfortunately, Suzanne was feeling under the weather and retired to her tent before dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment