Wayne D's Blog

Now that the pictures are in I can write about the Explorer canoe trip I went on to the Temagami area of Northern Ontario during the second week of July. The trip took in parts of Obabika River and Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater provincial park. I spent an hour or so with Google maps to create a Temagami 2007 canoe trip route map. I think it's pretty cool, please take a look.

One theme that will be consistently revisited is getting up early. Day 1 saw us rising early to meet at 6:45 a.m. and get on the road to Temagami Ontario where we would pick up our interior permits. 3 canoes, 5 explorers and two leaders left almost on time and headed up Highway 400, then Highway 11. A stop in Sundridge for breakfast at the Blue Roof restaurant, a quick stop for gas, a detour from the outfitters to the Finlayson Provincial Park office for our permits and another 60 kilometres to the Mowat Landing access point and we were ready to hit the water. Another recurrent theme will be size and distance, in Temagami the lakes are large and the distances are long, 10 kilometres is a short paddle. We loaded the canoes for the short trip to Mattawapika dam and our first portage of the trip. It was then that we ran into the other constant of the trip. The mosquitoes and biting flies were quite active anytime we weren't on the water. Even though I had insect repellent I still returned with a large number of itchy red bumps after the trip. We made our down the river to an island campsite on the eastern end of Lady Evelyn Lake. Our plan was to rise at 5:00 a.m. to break camp and get on the water by 6:00 a.m. so we could paddle across the large open section of before the wind came up. We would be heading straight west and a strong western wind would make it very difficult and tiring to paddle. As we made dinner we saw three canoes paddling down the lake into the wind. They seemed to be almost stationary and showed up exactly what we didn't want to get into. After we had made camp and eaten it began to rain and we retired to our tents.

It was 6:03 a.m the next morning as we paddled away from the island, the lake was smooth and we had an uneventful paddle past the Obowanga dunes. Just before we stopped for breakfast we passed Island 10 a large fishing camp. The noise from their diesel generator could be heard before we could see the island. Though we were in the wilderness we weren't really in a wild place. There was only one day we didn't see power boats and that probably only because the rocks in the stream made it difficult for boats to pass through. While trying to fill the kettle at our breakfast stop the other leader slipped on the wet rock and fell flat on his back. This resulted on a funny shape bruise on his back from where the camera in his fanny pack broke his fall. His camera refused to open after that and I was gifted with the spare film he had brought. I had my old, cheap, point and click 35mm camera that I kept in a ziplock bag in my shorts pocket. After breakfast we paddled and paddled and paddled some more until we reached our campsite on Hobart Lake. We were surrounded by rocks and trees and trees and rocks. We made camp, ate and then watched as the clouds descended over Maple Mountain. There was a spectacular thunder and lightening storm that night.

On day 3 we waited to see if the clouds would clear from the top of Maple Mountain. Finally at about 10 a.m. we decided it was going to be clear enough that we could see something when we reached the top of the trail. We made the short paddle to Tupper Lake and the trail to the top of Maple Mountain. The bugs were voracious, the woods were wet and dripping but the view from the top was spectatular. The picture below really doesn't do it justice but it's all I have.

I learned an important lesson, guys with knees like mine shouldn't try to keep up to 14-16 year olds. By the time I made it down from Maple Mountain my knees had almost locked up and I could barely lift my left foot. If I ever do something like that again I'll go slower and use a trekking pole which a couple of people have told me can really help. I also learned that 14-16 year olds will lose anything not permanently attached to their bodies including but not limited to, water bottles, hats, socks and food. Oh, and it rained after we eaten dinner.

Due to the aforementioned 14-16 year olds we didn't make it onto the water until late the next morning on Day 4 because they couldn't find hats and sunscreen. We had two portages as we passed through Willow Island Lake and a lake that isn't named on my map into the south end of Lady Evelyn Lake. We had hoped to make a little more distance but the wind came up and we started to see whitecaps. We decided to not risk the 2 kilometres of open water and stopped on a campsite on a nice rocky point. This was the only night it didn't rain.

Day 5 saw us again getting up before the sunrise and getting on the water slightly after 6 a.m. We had a long paddle both up and across Lady Evelyn Lake, check the map to see what I mean. The trip up Lady Evelyn Lake was uneventful, marred only by the occasional power boat. The other leader had put together a sail from a tarp and some poles that had been left at our campsite in the hopes that we could use it with a following west wind to cross Lady Evelyn Lake. After our breakfast break we east on Lady Evelyn Lake with a strong southern wind. This meant the sail remained stowed. We stuck to the North shore of the lake for most of the trip except for one two kilometre stretch which required hard, consistent paddling just before we reached the river before returning to the river. When we reached the river we decided it was now or never and unfurled our sail. It was the fastest 2.5 kilometres we covered during the whole trip. As we were sailing down the river we went by the campsite of a couple who we met at the take out the next day, I saw the woman on shore watching us as we went by. I ran into her the next day at the take out point and she said she almost didn't believe her eyes as we zoomed by. Eventually we were becalmed and paddled the last kilometre or so to our campsite. The bugs were voracious and it rained, but only after we had eaten and were ready for bed.

We were up relatively early the next day for the short trip to the dam, portage and across the bay to Mowat Landing. The canoes were tied on the vans and off we went. A stop in North Bay at Swiss Chatlet was our first taste of food that didn't come from a barrel since Day one and the Blue Roof restaurant. Even though there was a satellite radio in the van I found that at I preferred to listen to my iPod on the way home. That's the nice thing about your own iPod, you like every song that's on it.

If you like canoeing in the wilderness and don't mind the occasional power boat give Temagami and Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater provincial park a try.

The only problem with being an emusic.com member is that I have to manually add the music I buy each month to my iTunes library. I store my iTunes music library on my Linux computer because then I can play it on my Linux box, my Windows machine accesses it via Samba. I have never managed to get my Linux machine to connect to my Windows XP Home machine otherwise I would have done it the other way around and maybe I could have used the Consolidate Library function on the Advanced menu in iTunes. As far as I can tell iTunes is the only music player that doesn't let you update you music library by scanning a directory. iTunes Library Updater is a Windows program that implements this missing functionality. It removes items from the library that no longer exist in the directories you specify, will let you specify multiple directories to scan and will recursively scan the directories. To bad Apple didn't build this functionality into iTunes.

I know you are probably wondering when I am going to write about my six day canoe trip in Temagami. I got back late Wednesday afternoon, Thursday night was the Argos game and I think that I have pretty much recovered. My sunburn has faded and my knees are back to normal. Well, you are going to have to wait a bit longer. I'm not going to write up the trip until I get my pictures back from Black's. I wasn't sure about taking my digital camera out in the canoe so instead I took an old point and shoot camera. I paid the extra six dollars for each film to get the high resolution digital scanning and am curious to see how they come out. After shooting one film I realized that the camera was set to 100 ASA when it was really a 400 ASA film. I don't expect the two stops of overexposure to make any difference since the camera has a fixed aperture and shutter speed anyways.

Today was website day. I spent most of the afternoon updating a couple of the websites that I administer. I found a neat javascript tabifier that I implemented on the Argonotes photo gallery page. I also updated the Meet the Band pages to reflect the changed membership in the various sections since last year. I also uploaded the pictures from Thursday's game to both the Argonote's website and the Argonote's Facebook group. The St. Paul's website also got it's monthly freshening up. Tomorrow its off to Guelph to drop my younger two sons off for a week at Camp Edgewood.

It was a busy week this week, Argos home opener and the long weekend. Sunday night we went to Richmond Green to see the fireworks, I tried taking some pictures with my digital camera and was convinced yet again that if I want to shoot in low light I really need to get a tripod. It just seems like so much work to drag the thing around. I took some pictures after the Argonauts game Thursday night including the illuminated CN Tower and the balls floating on the pool outside Roy Thompson Hall. They remind me of the old TV show The Prisoner.

Canada.com has finally decided that I live in Canada, the only problem is that Global TV has taken all of the shows I might want to watch off of their website. I originally ended up there when I wanted to check out The Jane Show after I caught a bit of one episode but it's no longer there. All they have on the site other than news shows is Deal or No Deal, The Best Years and 1 vs 100. Sigh.

I'm heading off for a six day canoe trip near Temagami in a few days. I have to buy a knapsack in preparation for the trip. The big question I have now is which sleeping bag to take. Last summer in Killarney I used a lightweight backpacker sleeping bag and it was fine. I used the same sleeping bag two weeks ago near Parry Sound and suffered from cold feet the first night when the temperature dropped below 10. The second night was fine when it was a little warmer but after sitting out at Richmond Green last night in a sweater and jacket wishing that I had brought my gloves I'm questioning whether it might not be prudent to invest in something a little heavier. The other problem with the lightweight bag is that it's not very wide and is quite tight around my shoulder when it's zipped up all the way. That's good for keeping the heat in but not so good when you want to roll over.

A few weeks ago we got a number of Blackberry's at work. I've been carrying one of them around and have become addicted to the Crackberry. While hanging around at the park last night waiting for the fireworks I browsed the web and updated my Facebook status. The kids were off playing on the bouncy castles and I would have been in the beer garden if it hadn't been so darned cold. Though I understand intellectually that global warming is bad my resolve becomes weaker when shivering on a July 1st night or shovelling a couple of feet of snow in January.

It's hard to blog on a holiday weekend, the time off makes me so mellow that I find it hard to get righteously indignant about any topic enough to make an entertaining blog posting.

Click on a picture to see my Flickr photostream.

This one is for my sister in law.

This one is my favourites.

Remember the prisoner?