Summer 2016 Day 25

Ahead, the river poured over a ledge and dropped down to our level and the current rushed toward us.  By sticking close to the side we inched close enough to the short fall, then got out and climbed up rocks near the edge.  Between them, we pulled our boats, gear and all, up a fast stream, jetting between the rocks, not quite deep enough to keep us from scraping our hulls.

A hundred meter paddle past the rapid, just before the Windigo Dam, a big blue sign said, “portage ici.”  We took out at the boat ramp and began carrying the boat and gear along the dirt road up the hill.  Nobody was about, and we stopped frequently for raspberry breaks.

Just after launching, under torrential rain, my line twitched and I pulled in a pike.  

It seemed as though our map had been made before Hydro Quebec built the dam.  The water flowed over islands marked on the map and into bays marked as valleys.

Without any settlements marked on our map for a long ways, we stopped to ask what lay ahead in Fergesen, a cluster of three or four houses with a dock.  A small ferry that took a handful of passengers up and down the river was disembarking, and the captain told us another village lay about ten kilometers ahead.

At the end of our day, we found it.  From the water, we only made out a few boats tied up on a small beach or to a crumbling, uneven dock.  But we heard music in the distance and saw a plume of smoke that suggested a fire.

We followed the sounds up the road.  Between two hills, six houses with enormous lawns spread out around dirt crossroads.  The only house in use welcomed us to drink beer and join their fire.   The family, on vacation, talked about their own fishing in the area and let us cook ours on their grill.  The mother asked us what we’d eat first when we returned home.

I said, “Salad.  We don’t really get to have salad on our trip.”  Erin agreed.  Our hosts made us a big salad.

S

Summer 2016 Day 24

We paddled on flat water for a long time.  We were tired and passed a house with a lawn.  Maybe we could stop there for the night.  A fishing boat sat anchored nearby.  Children swam around it.  We said hello, and the fishermen told us that Windigo, a small tourist settlement, was just around the next corner.

Around the corner we found a strong headwind and disgruntled water.  We crossed to the other side, and paddled beside a railroad track cutting the lake in two and sheltering us from the wind.  On our way back south at the end of our trip we would take the train on those tracks and remember the hard day we looked forward to ending.

And it did.  In Windigo we met a hotel owner who was happy to let us use her Wifi and showers.  No one else seemed to be using the place, and the shower was warm and cleansing.
Windigo did not have any way for us to resupply.  A generator powered the hotel.

Summer 2016 Day 23

One of the campers dropped us off at the top of the dam.  We piled our gear on a cluster of rocks and boulders beneath a ledge.  After carefully carrying the boats down to the water, we began the precarious work of loading them off of the rocks in the rain.  We packed our rain gear last, and launched.

A few houses looked out over the lake.  

At the top of the lake, we arrived at the Rapid Blanc Dam.  The nearest boat ramp left us with another long(1.5 kilometers) portage.

Scouting out the route, we passed an abandoned village of two story brick houses.  Beyond the village, we found lots of strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries beside the road.  Eventually, we arrived at the boat ramp.  Wheeling the boats along the rocky, muddy, road through the downpour didn’t seem like any fun at all, so when power plant employees passed us in a pickup truck we waved them to a stop.  

They explained that they weren’t allowed to help us move our boats and gear, but would anyway.  While the furnished and well maintained houses, abandoned in 1964 and now used by the electrical company, would not be good places for us to spend the night, a storage garage with outlets for our electronics and live in squirrels to spook us would be.  

Soon we were warm, dry, and our gear neatly ready to launch the next morning at the boat ramp.  Fresh wild strawberries are wonderful.

Summer 2016 Day 22

Wer packed our gear for the kilometer portage, from camp above the climb, to the put in past the dam.

We hung our wet towel to dry as much as possible while we portaged.  Once we packed the towel, it would dry no more.

We started with one of the boats, then returned for a pile of gear.  A kilometer is a long distance to portage.

A pickup truck towing a motor boat came up the  forest road.  The driver and his wife talked with us in  French and maybe we understood.  He wanted  to help.  We threw our gear in the back thinking that we would meet him at the launch.  But after just a few feet the truck turned onto a small side road, U-turned,  and left us.

We ran after them!  The truck stopped. We climbed into the bed, returned to the rest of our gear, and loaded up. The driver had thought to get it for us.

Before we knew it, our long grueling portage was quick and easy. The truck had dropped us off and we were ready to launch. Except, we’d forgotten the towel.  We walked back, got the towel,  returned to our boats, and started our day’s paddle.

Our map showed a town to our right, but we saw only wilderness.  

But where another river met ours, we found a summer village, complete with children swimming near big inflated water toys.

The river narrowed, but the current never got so strong that we felt, near the edge, like we were struggling.

At the end of our day, tired, we  approached the Trenche Dam.  Folks waved to us from a motorboat.  We waved back.  They called out to us and waved a wooden canoe paddle in the air.  We approached.

Their boat didn’t work.  One of the younger folk in the party leaned way out over the bow and struck at the  water pitifully with the canoe paddle, making some splash but otherwise failing to move the boat forward.

I hooked my tow rope up to Erin’s boat and Erin hooked her’s to the motor boat.  Towing a motor boat is hard work. But before long, we’d brought it to shallow water and the vacationers were able to get out and push it toward a boat ramp.

We found a dock and took out.  Beneath the dam, and signs that said “”no camping” in French, we found a makeshift campground.  RVs spread out through the forest. We pitched our tent, joined a party, got our fish wrapped in tin foil and cooked on a grill with lemon, and had a fine evening. We learned the fish we’d been catching recently were pike.

One of our hosts had heard about us on the radio, and soon everyone treated us like heroes.

Summer 2016 Day 21

We began by using the lee of an island to cross the river below the current.  The dam loomed just ahead, tumultuous water pouring out of it.

On the other side, we met a friend of our night’s host who had a house on the water.  Besides giving us and our gear a ride over the dam, he gave us fresh chicken eggs from his chicken, which we got to pet, and vegetables from his garden.

Finding the launch north of the dam proved to be easier said than done.  The first trail we went down, toward the water, turned out to be long, full of strawberries, and a dead end.

We drove over a bridge, and found a short easy trail with raspberries on the other side.

I caught another one of the funky fish, which later I learned was a northern pike.  Having steeled myself against chickening out in a moment of panic, I plopped it in my boat and removed the hook without hesitation.

As we navigated between the islands of a lake, two fawns and a doe picked their way along the shore.

The current grew strong, and we couldn’t get up it.  We crossed and tried the other side of the current.  There too, it flowed too strong.  We tried along the shore, and failed.  

Erin and I had a fierce disagreement about whether or not a particular body of land was an island or a peninsula.  On inspection, Erin won.  Rightfully, she poked fun at me for it at every opportunity.  On the other side of the island that was not a peninsula, the current still flowed too strong.

The last time we’d hauled boats up the river, we’d decided, in retrospect, that it might have been easier with shoes.  We pulled over to the wooded shore, quickly failed to find an easy portage, put on our shoes and helmets, and then began our waste deep hike up the river.  Shoes did make it a lot easier.

Back in our boats, we arrived at Beaumont Dam.  Steep hills rose from the dammed gorge.  Just to the right were some rocks we could climb, so we tied up our boats and investigated the potential portage path.  At the top, we found an electric fence.  For safety reasons, we did not wiz on it.

We climbed back down, and tried a different spot. Hands gripping vegetation, we pulled ourselves up the incline, boats tied to and resting on the rocks below. We found the same fence, but this time with a path beside it.   The path led us to a  road and we explored the area around the dam.

In search of a take-out, we followed a path along the top of the gorge, but it kept on going when we were ready to turn around.

On the upriver side, well above the dam, we discovered a boat ramp.  To get there from a take- out below the dam would be a long haul, but along a paved road and then a dirt road, not too much trouble with our cart.

Walking back toward the spot where we came out of the woods, a car passed us.  We flagged it down and asked for directions to the portage take-out.  

The driver’s directions led us back to the path through the woods.  This time we followed the path farther, until we arrived at a clearing where we eventually made camp for the Sabbath.  At the edge, a the path led down the cliff.  We climbed down.  Rocks and earth slid out from under our feet.  At the bottom, we some rocks beneath a thick growth where we could take out, with a great deal of caution.  

Jet skiers cruised by on the river, and with them we hitchhiked back to our kayaks.  We’d left them on the rocks, but the water had risen and they floated.  Lucky thing we also tied them up.  We thanked the jet skiers and paddled down to the take-out.

With a pulley, rope, lots of treacherous climbs, and stops to munch on blueberries, we got everything to the clearing.

In LaTuque we’d bought cream cheese, olives, and other yummy things for the Sabbath.  Together with our catch, we ate delicious food and rested after a long week of paddling.

Summer 2016 Day 20

While paddling around a bend in the river, framed by woods as far as the eye could see, a vicious tug yanked the fishing line.  I pulled it in, and let it out, pulled it in, and let it out.  The fish grew tired and I reeled it out of the water.  

It seemed a freak of nature snapping back and forth on the line in front of me.  It looked like the fish I’d seen in the Chambly Canal.  I was too scared to put the strange, large fish in my cockpit with me, snapping convulsively one more time, it escaped the line.  Erin made fun of me.

A tremendous current rushed out from La Tuque’s dam.  Some houses could be seen between the trees on the more gradual slope on the far side of the river.  The current parted around islands.  We didn’t see a portage, but a path wound down from some stairs on the cliff-like shore, so we parked and climbed, and found a backyard in the small town of La Tuque.  The owner of the backyard welcomed us with open arms.  He found an ancient pair of glasses that were close to my prescription, and gave us a ride to the supermarket.  We were welcome to set up our tent in his backyard.

We were not invited in to use the shower, the pool was ours to bathe in.  La Tuque, he told us, was the last edge of civilization.  North, we would only find First Nations, and not for some time.

He called a friend of his who lived on the other side of the river to help with our portage the next day.

Summer 2016 Day 19

In the morning, we were again swarmed by mosquitoes.  We launched quickly.

We had learned to search the map for especially narrow sections of the river.  There, the current was strongest, and we caught our third fish for the day.

We caught our fourth just before taking out at a beach for the evening.  A friendly family with a little boy came down to the beach as we prepared our dinner.  They pretended to believe our story, that we’d kayaked from New York, to be polite.

A road led up from the beach through the woods to a backyard.  The house, beside a large garden, resonated with the sounds of French spousal argument.  We knocked for quite a while before the elderly couple realized we were at the door.  They were happy to let us use their hose to resupply our drinking water.

We made camp in a tiny clearing beside the forest road.