Steve,
Excellent trip report, but it makes some of my recent trips seem a little mundane ... (-:
It must be strange to become the focus of so much public attention when you're travelling to different rivers... especially if it can result in bizarre incidents such as the one involving the injured woman. It makes me rather glad that the locals barely raise an eyebrow as I roll up to a put-in with a canoe on the roof of my old Ranger.
Well, I've managed to stick to my plan of doing quite a bit of paddling during spare moments this summer. Nothing too exciting by Philippine standards. Instead, most of my trips could be classified as quiet and meditative.
A couple of weeks ago, I paddled on Clayton Lake in the Lanark area which lies northwest of Ottawa. It's not a particularly big lake, but has several small bays along the shoreline and a few small islands here and there. When I was there, about two-thirds of the lake was covered in wild rice, so that will give you some impression of the depth..very shallow with only a small channel running through the center where fisherman can navigate in their motorboats. Once you leave the main channel, you move into the wild rice and find yourself floating inches above the roots and broken trunks of cedar trees which fell into the lake a number of years ago. Their appearance resembles that of immense sun-bleached bones strewn across almost every square foot of the lake bottom. On several occasions, my canoe ran up onto roots which scraped the water's surface. A loon could be heard laughing and calling across the lake. When I finally encountered him, he was moderately comfortable about my approach and continued to swim erratically from side to side across the channel as he carried on his non-stop cacophony of laughter. The only disappointment of the trip was that the wild rice had matured at least one or two weeks previously. Upon my return to the shore, I had nothing but a handful of wild rice. If I had have been up on the lake a couple of weeks before, I imagine that I might have "accidentally harvested" a much greater amount. As a matter of historic interest, there is a large mill turbine with an accompanying plaque at the put-in spot in the village of Clayton. It is a turbine from the old Bellamy Mill that stood on the site of the dam at the put-in. The mill began operation in 1795 and was in use until 1961.
Apart from that trip, I've been paddling mainly on local streams and enjoying the midsummer plant life... lots of pickerel weed with its arrow-shaped leaves and lavender plumes, and an unusual amount of Cardinal Flower with its characteristic scarlet flowers which attract many hummingbirds. It always seems a little "tropical" when compared to the more subdued colours of native flora in this region.
My next planned exploration will be on a section of the Clyde River up above Lanark. No whitewater up there, but from the various bridges that cross it, it looks like there might be some interesting plant and bird life along its banks.
Later,
Croc |
