Canoe Diary

2002 Canoe Diary

April 14,2002

It's a Sunday morning in April and you’re standing outside on the front deck just as the sun is breaking above the tree horizon across the river. You feel the first bright rays warming your cheeks in the windless calm of morning. As you angle your face to the sun, you squint your eyes shut and see the diffuse redness of blood running through your eyelids. Then the mind starts to wander and to wonder what this beautiful day will bring.

This morning it didn’t take long for me transform that wondering into a project for the day. Each spring about this time, I’ve wanted to take my canoe into the backwoods country north of here and discover an untravelled river/creek that swells up considerably from the melting snow and gully runoffs. This year I was determined to make it happen so I broke away from my sun bathing and called a likely paddling partner for safety reasons.

I found somebody willing to share the day and we were soon off to find a suitable put-in for the Portneuf river. We found it near a dirt road that skirted the river’s edge and fought our way through Alder branches to make it onto the water. We were off...our 2002 season was underway on this little creek which is little more than a wet rock bed in the dry summer.

The first hour was a pleasant meandering downstream but the current started picking up as more swollen streams fed water into the main flow. Then we started hearing a distant rumble...big rapids on this river I asked? None of our canoe club members had ever tried this creek to provide me with helpful info so I guessed from the initial sound that they might be Class 2 rapids. But coming around the proverbial “next bend” the sound grew louder and the river narrowed into a long descending gully of huge boulders and rocks.

Suddenly I remembered all the practical advice about spring Creeking. Get out and scout, watch for sweepers, fallen trees, etc. Alain and I climbed the cliffs and scouted a mile downstream through snow banks and we couldn’t believe this hidden treasure of fantastic non-stop rapids. However, because of the narrowing of the river and the gushing flow there seemed to be precious few places to make any eddy turns behind the boulders. Because of the technical difficulty of threading through the rock and boulders, we gave it a Class 4 for this innocent little summer stream! With portaging seeming like an impossible task through all the alder bushes and dense trees, we put on our helmets and decided to go for it.

Alain went first with his nifty turning kayak and he bounced his way downstream. Before losing site of him too far ahead I decided to follow suit in my barge-like 16 footer that I enjoy as a solo boat as well. It was a wild run with split-second decision-making that side-bounced me off rocks and heaved me atop huge waves. This was definitely worth the trip. Halfway down I looked back to make a mental recording of my line for future runs. Big mistake...that fraction of a second of lost concentration sent me over an angled "swell rock" which angled me straight into the water.

Well cool water makes for cool heads, so I made sure to get the canoe ahead of me and then just let it go. Of course there were some submerged gulps as I bobbled down through the foaming rapids trying to keep my legs up and free from any rock-jam situations until I found a tiny eddy behind a rock and managed to stay there with water up to my chest. (Yes I had a wet suit that allowed me to stay there in relative comfort in the ice-cold water while waiting for Alain to come back up through the branches to toss me a rope and pull me to shore).

My canoe? Ah yes...it continued its overturned journey down another half-mile and fortunately lodged itself against a fallen tree. Then the ride continued through another two miles of steady rapids but down to class 3 and eventually class 2. The last six miles was a calm run through another meandering gully system with great sightings of beaver, mallard ducks, hawks and the lowly groundhog. When I *thought* we had another 20 minutes to go as the crow flies, I called Marlene with the cell phone(yes yes, I know…wilderness etiquette an all that ) to pick us up. But the “S” contours of the river meant extra time making it to our take-out destination and we showed up over an hour late. She was not a happy camper but she has forgiven me since this was the first outing of the year and she understood that my calculations were a little off.

Well that morning sun has set now ...and that’s what the day brought me. Safety reminders learned today; don’t travel solo on unknown spring rush rivers and be suitably attired to face an unforeseen swim. I’m glad I had both of those covered. It could have been a very different story had I not. One other reminder, no time for scenery gazing when you’re in the middle of a highly technical set of rapids.

May 5, 2002

After a long stretch of spring field work, crop-seeding and barn-building, I decided my batteries needed some recharging with a day off canoeing…but ended up coming home with batteries that required a booster charge to stay alive :-)

With a group of fellow paddlers, we headed north on a relatively calm sun-veiled morning for a spring-rush run down the St.Anne River. Just getting to our put-in required maneuvering through a minefield of deep logging road puddles and washouts, so we were quite relieved to finally slip our canoes into the water for our 35k run.

We worked our way through a few warm-up swifts and swells but soon noticed the river wasn’t providing the water volume we had hoped for to assist us in our descent. This made for long stretches of flatwater paddling. Normally I enjoy these calm sections between sets of rapids as part of the contemplative recharging process….but not this time.

A sudden change in weather patterns brought us face to face with very strong headwinds…the gusts were inescapable, even along the normally sheltered shorelines. To make matters worse, the winds were coming at changing angles, which made it difficult to keep the nose of the canoe slicing the wind straight on. After a few exhausting hours we were glad to see some approaching whitewater rapids to provide us with something a little more enjoyable than fighting the wind and continuously trying to correct our lines….and paddling solo in my 16ft tandem didn’t make things easier :-)

We stopped for lunch at the head of the class IV rapids, which gave us plenty of time to scout and choose a safe line of attack to make it to the bottom. It was a very puzzling and challenging set of rapids with three keeper holes to avoid and two required back-ferries to redirect to offset v-lines.

Many in the group wisely decided it was best to portage the rapids. I, of course, foolishly decided it was worth trying. I was nevertheless not foolish enough to risk my life and asked that others place themselves strategically along the rapids with throw-ropes at the ready(one of the great advantages of occasional canoe club outings btw).

So with the old ticker picking up a beat or two, off I went. I skirted the first hole on the dark flow, paddled like crazy to get the propulsion to punch through the second hole. I took on a fair amount of water, which made it difficult to make my back-ferry movement. In a split second, a gust of that damn wind swung my canoe around upstream. With no time to bring it back, I simply went with the flow and tried my best to keep my line by going down the rest of the rapids backwards! It’s quite new experience to go down rapids looking at where you came from instead of where you are heading. By some miracle, I made it down the remaining haystacks without swimming but my canoe almost full of water. A throw-rope was handy for pulling my one-ton barge ashore.

At least that set of rapids made my day because the rest of the trip was more of that grueling struggle against the strong wind. It got so bad that any pause in paddling would send us drifting back upstream. We arrived totally exhausted five hours later….and this was supposed to be a relaxing day off.

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