No sign of our sketchy friend when we woke up. One can only hope he reclaims his rightful territory.
It turns out that all it takes to get us moving in the morning is the promise of hot breakfast sandwiches, even if we have to make a two-mile trek through the pouring rain to get them. (That and a completely deflated sleeping pad with a cracked nozzle. RIP, Big Agnes pool floatie.)
Steve got blessed by the waiter for ordering three sandwiches (“the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… eat well, my son”), we picked up some aloe for the sunburn chafing under our rain gear, and then it was back to the river. There was no sign of the rain letting up, but we’d tented under a picnic pavilion so all our gear was dry and safely stowed inside portage packs and tarp.
A few hours’ paddling later, we spied a handful of boats a quarter mile or so downstream. These were the first people we’d seen out on the river yet, and we couldn’t fathom who else would be dumb enough to be canoeing in the pouring rain when it was 50 degrees. We theorized rowers; then scouts; then we got a little closer and saw a pirate flag and a few ropes being thrown between canoes. The party was five boats lashed together to form one huge Megaboat, stuffed to the gills with people, dogs, coolers, and piles of firewood and blasting classic rock from a waterproof boombox.
They offered us beer. We said yes immediately.
Sometimes your planned thirty-mile day by yourselves turns into a six-mile day with a whole pile of new friends. We lashed Blaze of Glory onto the end of Megaboat, passed our bottle of whiskey around, and reveled in being invited to an on-water party that was damn well going to happen regardless of the pouring rain. The Megaboaters asked us to lunch, so we crash-landed the whole shebang on an island and set up our tarp so their taco bar could be established in a dry spot. Evidently they found us charming, because they offered us a spot at their campsite for the night complete with beef stew, a campfire, and all the beer we could stand.
The bulk of the day passed in a cold, wet, happy drunken blur. Eventually everyone in the party made it to shore and into dry clothes, and we sat around swapping stories (and dog photos) at our first campfire of the trip. The Megaboaters were a group of friends from Philly who had been taking the same river trip every spring for the better part of a decade, and we were honored to be included in their party. It was weird to be in the company of so many people at once after two weeks of relative solitude, but we couldn’t have landed in a better group; they were all super cool, incredibly kind, and our night with them was one of the highlights of our trip.