Summer 2016 Day 11

A large bald eagle took off from a tree just above to fly across the river.  Another followed it.  They settled high up on the tallest tree.  Strangely, the second eagle wasn’t bald.

At the bottom of the Richelieu, we paddled through Sorrel.  A sign at the bottom of a boat ramp advertised Sorrel Marina.  The road from the ramp led to a drydock area in the distance; boats in their cradles spread across a field.

Sorell is an industrial port town on the Saint Lawrence. We passed a number of freight yards, ships, and shipping docks during the final stretch and as we turned onto the Saint Lawrence, with celebratory mutual congratulations for the new phase of our journey.

The wind and the river’s current moved us along.  Our map said Ile Di’Grace, four miles ahead, had camping, but we didn’t know if we’d find drinking water, so we stopped at a marina.

We couldn’t stay there; they had no room for our kayaks on the dock. In fact, we’d have to be on our way immediately because they had reserved the spot where we parked our boats for someone else.  The man in charge begrudgingly said we could fill our water bottles in the bathroom, but then we’d really have to go.

We did and we went.

The spot marked on our map as camping seemed to be a summer cottage’s front lawn.  We pulled up to the dock and knocked on the door.  Nobody answered.

We made camp, swatted black flies, and sheltered from them in our tent as quickly as possible.

A drunk French Canadian pulled up to our dock on his motorboat.  He offered us beer, French conversation, and a bed for the night in his house across the channel.

His shower was warm and his house smelled like cigaret smoke.  He left a bucket in our room in case we had to pee.  We opened the sliding door to our room to let some air in, and mosquitoes shared our soft bed for the night.

Summer 2016 Day 10

We spent Friday procuring equipment and supplies for the remainder of our expedition.  Northbound from Montreal meant little in the way of civilization ahead.  We found an outdoor recreation store and replaced our busted dry bags, torn map case, and squirrel stolen knife.

We bought oatmeal, nuts, and raisins to prepare five weeks worth of granola.  We calculated how much we’d eat in a day and bought cornmeal for breakfasts and rice, lentils, and cheese for dinner.  

Everything fit in the boats, barely.

We also put chickpeas on the stove for lunch and walked Montreal’s old French quarter for the jazz festival.  After a 45 minute rainy walk along a canal, we arrived in old Montreal and remembered we hadn’t turned the chickpeas off.  Our hosts were out of the house.  As we rushed back, we hoped we hadn’t ruined the chickpea pot or burned the house down.

We hadn’t.  The lightly salted chickpeas melted on our tongues.

Day 10

Back on the water we enjoyed a cooler cloudy day progressing down the calm waters of the Richelieu.  We met a fellow paddling a very fine kayak designed by Johan Wirsen, for whom I sell kayaks.

It was pleasant to chat with a serious sea kayaker headed in the same direction, if only for an hour.

We ended our day at the Saint Denise marina where we found an empty clubhouse with showers,couches, and a pool table.  We looked for people to get permission to use the facility, found no one, and a had a very comfortable if slightly nervous night’s sleep.

Summer 2016 Day 9

We continued to fish, and our line constantly caught on river weeds.  We tried to paddle where there were fewest weeds.  Each time the line caught, we had to stop and untangle it.  Many of the weeds floated free, perhaps shredded from their stalks by propeller blades.  When I felt the drag, I slowed to clean the hooks.

After 12 miles of river, we had a choice.  Rapids lay ahead.  We could pay 28 dollars to go around the rapids down the locks.  Without any idea how bad the rapids were, we erred on the side of safety and spent the twenty eight dollars at a small cabin in the side of the Chambly Canal.

Parts of the canal ran right beside the river, other parts veered off and away before coming back.  Bridges passed overhead, and a young canal worker drove from one drawbridge to the next to open and close them with our passing.

The locks worked manually.  The doors opened and closed with the turning of a crank, as did the pipes to let the water in and out.

Erin caught a fish!  A bit smaller than the previous one, but surely super tasty.  Freakishly long skinny fish swam in the green water beneath us.  I wondered what they tasted like, or if they were even safe to eat.  The fish that we caught just barely fit into a Nalgene for safe keeping.  When we waited as the locks waters descended we changed the water.

The one-room houses beside the locks that were now maintained as part of the park system had at one time been home to the lock masters.  

At the very end of the canal, we descended three locks, one right after the other, to rejoin the Richalue in the town of Chambly.

We missed the big marina to the right and found a small one to the left instead.  There, a watersports and fishing outfitter happily volunteered to store our boats and lock our gear in his shack.  He told us we had a bass in our Nalgene.

A woman who worked at the outfitter spoke just enough English to offer us a ride to a bus station.  Friends of my brother lived in Montreal where we intended to stay the Sabbath.  They invited us to stay with them a few weeks earlier, but without a working cell phone I had not managed to contact them since then and no definite date had been set.

After navigating the train and bus system we managed to find their house.  Though surprised to see us, it only took a moment to make up a bed.  We offered our fish, which had died on the train, as a gift.

Summer 2016 Day 8

After a heavy stack of pancakes, Erin and I set out for Canada.  Erin knows the Canadian national anthem, and I insisted that she teach it to me.  But I was too dense to learn it before we arrived.

At the north end of Lake Champlain we crossed the line to the Richelieu River, passed under a bridge and beside a fort to find ourselves in French Canada.  A sign on a buoy in the middle of the river directed us to pull over at customs on the jetty ahead.

The customs officer asked us all sorts of questions: what would be our address during our stay in Canada?  How long would we be staying?  How did we intend to return to the U.S. when we were done?  Was I bringing in any weapons besides the knife on my life vest?

I’d like to think our answers entertained her.  When we were done and our passports were stamped, she let us take a picture of her and the jetty from my boat.

Welcome to Canada.

My  cell phone lost reception even though I had paid Cricket extra to make sure that it would work.

Besides no reception for American phones, just north of the border we discovered horse flies, aka zebra flies and black flies.  They’re slow, but if you’re not paying attention they’ll bite a chunk out of you and leave a trail of blood and pain.

We pulled up to a marina to make camp, and were welcomed by it’s talkative owner to pitch our tent on a grassy field.  The marina nextdoor had showers and wifi, but not his.  Also, he thought our route would take us the wrong way.  He knew a kayaker a while back who did a trip similar to ours, and went a different way.

The marina nextdoor kindly let us use their showers and wifi.  I spent some time on Skype with Cricket trying to get my phone to work, to no avail.

Summer 2016 Day 7

We paddled up Lake Champlain with a sunny tail wind and moderate swell.

Other sea kayakers were out on the water, so we went to say hello.

“How’s your expedition going so far?” the fellow asked us right off the bat.  With all of our gear stowed in the hatches, nothing about our boats obviously suggested expedition.

“Great!  How did you know we were on an expedition?” I asked.

“I was looking for you,” he told us.  He had come out that day to meet a southbound expedition, from Canada to Key  West.  We chatted amicably for a while.  

He made his own Greenland paddles with an interesting innovation, one face flat and the other curved. I tried them out, and rolled easily enough with both faces.  We continued on our way.

We didn’t catch any fish, but that was okay.  My uncle lives on Lake Champlain and we finished our day at his house.  He’s a retired chef, so we ate well and slept in a warm bed.

Summer 2016 Day 6

Over the Sabbath, squirrels got into our peanut butter, chewed through a dry bag, and stole an avocado and the knife we set aside to cut it with.  Maybe the knife wasn’t the squirrel’s doing, but that didn’t make it less gone and we did catch the squirrels peanut butter handed.

Day 6

The Adirondacks overlook Lake Champlain from the west, and a fellow at the campground told us that Split Rock Mountain, just beside the water, would take our breath away.  It didn’t, but the woods, hills, rocks, and lake dotted with sailboats and laced with sunshine were enough without some mind blowing escarpment.

We planned to camp on an island for the night, so we needed to fill our water bags.  We stopped at a beach beneath an inn, and I caught a fish!  I noticed the fish when my line fought back while I pulled it in for the landing.

With a hoot for joy, I dropped the jumping fellow in my cockpit, then pumped lake water into the boat so that he’d stay fresh for dinner.

The folk at the inn were happy to give us water and we were back on our way.

We headed toward Juniper Island just off of Burlington to camp.  Landing on the near side was possible but would be difficult, so we paddled around to the far side.

We found a dock, and a July 4th weekend party.  We told some of the party goers our story and they found the island’s owner, who said we were welcome to rest, but not stay the night.  They owned Juniper island and they drew the line at letting people camp there, no matter how far we had kayaked.

My cockpit full of water for an occasionally antsy fish, we turned back and headed for a beach we could see inland, about three miles out of our way.  Tired and disappointed, we arrived on a pebble beach with a view of the setting sun across the lake and a sign that said “Private Beach”.

Through an earthy summer-sweet wood, we found a house under construction above the beach.  Nobody was about; we made note of the porta potty.  We walked through forest in the other direction and got to a video-camera gate at the end of a driveway.  The actual house hid almost out of sight.  Nobody answered when we rang the bell, so we returned to the beach and made camp.

Our fish stew simmered when a family climbed down the hill to the beach for Fourth of July fireworks.  They assured us that, despite the sign, we wouldn’t have any trouble sleeping there for the night.  Their cousin worked on the house above and they came to this beach all the time.

After the fireworks, we slept soundly under the open sky.  

Summer 2016 Day 5

At our launch, a group of about twenty kids and a couple of adults set out in rec kayaks to weed the lake of invasive species for the day.  Our host’s grandson from the night before was among them.

We packed our own boats at a much slower pace than the group did their’s, and when we finished we remembered that we had wanted to fish for the day.  To get out the fishing gear, we had to unpack and repack.

An overcast sky brought a solid tail wind and a following swell.  We cruised up southern Lake, Champlain past Fort Ticonderoga.  Spits into the water declined to submerged sandbars that scraped our hulls.  We arduously paddled through thick plant growth, or circumnavigated it annoyingly.  But with the wind at our back, we made great time and arrived at our destination well before the Sabbath.

We arrived at the Crown Point campground to learn two things.  “Storm’s coming,” the rangers warned everybody, and they didn’t have any campsites for us.

We told the man at the front gate our story, and he checked with his supervisor.  We could stay in the day-use area for six dollars a night.  Had one of the campsites been available we would have paid 18 dollars a night.  We found a spacey wooded area with picnic tables and a shower house to be exactly what we hoped for.

The storm was anticlimactic, our tent kept us dry and comfortable through the mild rain.  I left my Dr. Broner’s soap in the shower, and the ranger gave us his.

We rested for the Sabbath at the end of our first week.  We were tired and everything hurt, but our spirits had never been higher.