It snowed last night, so we stayed in the tent until about noon waiting for things to thaw out. Fortunately we brought some truly terrible mystery novels and a deck of cards and are very easily entertained.
The sun eventually came out and it warmed up considerably. The river still has an ice block on it but we had a lovely lunch in the sun (I got burned- no surprise there) and spent some time flailing around in the half-rotten corn snow along the slash throwing snowballs across the border.
Our big adventure for the day was getting water. Since we still can’t tell where the land ends and the river begins, I put on my life jacket and punched a hole in the ice with my rocks paddle so I could pump five gallons of water into our reservoir jug while Steve anchored me with a safety line from a patch of verified land. It was tedious but anticlimactic, although I did shove a massive ice sheet away from the bank with my paddle that coasted lazily downstream in a way only a 400lb death slab can do. We technically pumped water in Canada, which we didn’t feel great about given the previous day’s warning from Canadian border patrol, but it was a matter of “do we walk out on the ice and potentially fall through and drown in Maine” or “take the obviously safer choice in a gray area of international boundary” and I’d prefer not to die before we even begin paddling.
Things are much slushier, and we’re hoping maybe Sunday will be our departure day. We just don’t want to be on the water the same day the ice is actively going out, since that seems like a great way to get squashed.
