At this point we’ve made the transition to feel like we’re on vacation instead of in some sort of semi-frozen purgatory.
After a surprisingly mouse-free night in the Ledge Rapids cabin, we woke up to another cloudless day. Faced with a quick current and the choice of big miles or small meals, we set a lofty mileage goal of 46 and an ending point of the Big Black campsite well downriver. This would put us through Basford Rips and the Big Black Rapids, two of the three spots we were mildly concerned about.
The morning started with a lovely pot of coffee in the sun on the porch and an aggressively-close helicopter flyby (more on that later). We got on the water around 10:30; later than we’d hoped, but after catching up to and passing the gentlemen we’d met the previous day within the first two hours, we calculated our cruising speed at eight miles per hour and didn’t feel too bad.
Overall the paddling was spectacular. The scenery is stunning; trees, untouched riverbanks, a handful of pristine campsites, vast expanses of marshland full of birds and gently waving grasses. Periodically we come across a stretch where the ice floe is still on the bank, six or seven feet above the water line. THAT is always a little eerie, especially knowing we’d been in the water with some of those chunks of ice a week or so earlier.
As promised, the rapids we passed weren’t anything to worry about in high water; we bounced over them easily and didn’t give anything a second thought… until we came to the turn for Big Black and realized we were too far left to follow the line recommended by our guiding friend.
Waaaaaaayyy too far left. It was only big standing waves, but we took on a bunch of water in the first one we hit. As Steve morosely yelled “OH GOD. IT’S OVER. WE’RE SINKING. IT’S HAPPENING” and I laughed hysterically, we slowly and inevitably swamped. The swim to shore was cold but short and we didn’t lose a single piece of gear, so our spirits were soggy but high as we bailed the boat out on shore.
We coasted into the Big Black campsite midafternoon (having CRUSHED our 46 mile goal in about six hours) and were met by a group of seven or eight old timers who had been running the trip every spring for years (43 of them, in fact!) and were kind enough to feed us a bunch of their leftovers (Beans! Brown bread! Bacon! Steak! Cookies!) while telling us bad jokes and stories about their canoe racing experiences. Bob and Terry were the ringleaders of the crew; Bob and Terry, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I never managed to track you down to thank you again for your hospitality. You guys rock.
The group had a campfire going (the first of our trip!) so we sat around well into the evening with them drinking chaga tea and trading stories, then got to pass out on dry ground in a dry tent smelling like wood smoke after a very satisfying day.