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In 2019 a friend and I booked a canoeing holiday in Woodland Caribou Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada for the following summer. For me, the trip was my 60th birthday present to myself. Coronavirus stopped that. In 2021 my friend had a medical event which meant travel to such isolated places was not wise. I never forgot about this so as my 65 present to myself, this year the trip finally happened. Me and my son spent 13 days paddling and portaging about 130 miles in the southern part of the...

After thinking for the third time, "Surely this is the end of the rapids and lac Octavie will appear around the next bend," the water disappeared, leaving only that straight line that all voyageurs know, means a chute, a falls. I was so tired, so discouraged, and the span so narrow I actually entertained the idea of paddling over the falls. "Maybe it's just a ledge. Maybe it isn’t very steep. Maybe there’s a tongue," whispered some exhausted part of my brain. With all my willpower, I...

Introduction I am basically a river paddler, I can count on one hand the flatwater trips I have done over the past 40 years. Sure, some of those river trips have included long sections of flatwater. For example, my 2018 George River trip started with a 100+km crossing of the Smallwood Reservoir and then later in the trip the 110km of Indian House Lake but that trip included well over 125 sets of rapids some of which were up to 10km in length. This year I was looking for an “easy” trip with...