Category: St John River

Putting in below Beechwood was sketchy at best. The bottom of the portage trail had been washed out in the flood, so we were left with a steep, glass-riddled beach of loose boulders. We timed our launch to avoid a dam release, but even so the water level changed six inches just during the time we were loading the boat.

Fortunately, the quick below-dam current made for stellar river speeds and we hit Florenceville doing eight or nine miles per hour and early enough that we stopped for coffee at Tim Horton’s.

The farther we got from the dam the more the current slowed, but at least we had a tailwind (although Steve occasionally argues that that’s worse than a headwind… probably because in a headwind, I’M the one who ends up doing most of the work instead of him). Just the same we hit Woodstock with very little trouble and went into town to hit the library for internet and a map to the nearest source of cold beers. (Adventuring is hard work, okay?)

The librarians were delighted by our expedition, and volunteered a local retiree named Doug to give us a lift downtown for a pack of Moosehead Ale. He was a truly lovely fellow and we were glad to have met him.

Steve had a small panic attack when he took the wrong trail back down to the river and didn’t immediately see the boat, but it hadn’t budged. We made our way to a narrow horseshoe-shaped island and pulled into the shelter of it’s cove to find a nice campsite with a picnic table and fire ring. The only downside was nearly stepping on a nesting goose and the immediate uproar that ensued. Eventually everyone’s ruffled feathers soothed and we had a lovely evening next to a birch grove overlooking the river.

Very little current, but another gorgeous day in terms of weather. (Not a single one of these is going by unappreciated after the rainy, snowy debacle of the Northwest Branch.)

We set ourselves the goal of ending in Nackawic, a 24-ish mile day that covered the bulk of Meguntic Lake. We stopped mid-morning in the tiny town of Meguntic to grab gas station coffee and inquire about camping options, and were surprised to find ourselves in the town that makes Sabian (formerly Zildjian) cymbals. The owner let us use the landline to call ahead to an RV park that is JUST ACROSS THE LAKE FROM THE WORLD’S LARGEST AXE, which I was very excited about because I LOVE weird roadside attractions and also IT’S A GIANT FUCKING AXE.

The paddling was a little bit of a slog, but the lake itself was gorgeous. We had a bit of a time trying to figure out how far we’d gone (no real landmarks, and the ones we looked for may still have been underwater) but there was a fun selection of architecture along the way and we spent a solid portion of the day debating the pros and cons of RV vs. tiny house vs. houseboat and the various styles of deck.

We hit the WORLD’S LARGEST AXE! Late afternoon, and while I was sad it was hollow it was basically everything I could have hoped for: nicely located, very weird, and you could touch it.

From there it was a quick scoot across the lake to Mariner’s Point RV park, where we pulled up on the beach and were immediately welcomed in with open arms. George, the owner, had us set up just above the beach by a birch grove with a picnic table. There were hot showers (OMG) and LAUNDRY (OH. MY GOD.) and then we watched the sun set over beans, brown bread, and scotch while marveling in how nice we smelled.

After that we made it one hand into gin rummy before Jen and Paul Devereaux, our campsite neighbors and resident hosts, invited us over to their campfire to sit in lounge chairs and shoot the shit while working our way through some cold beers (and Paul and Steve worked their way through a bottle of Jameson). NICEST. PEOPLE. EVER. I have a newfound respect for RV’ers; they’re just as into the “adventuring” as we are, they’re just a little smarter about how comfortable they want to be while doing it.

I woke up at 6:30, had a nice poop in a real bathroom… and foolishly went back to sleep. Around 9:30 hungover Steve managed to pull himself upright. We’d lost the chance to paddle the rest of the lake in calm, glassy conditions BUT we did get treated to bacon, eggs, and pancakes at the park’s opening weekend buffet breakfast. There was also a puppy present, which was icing on the cake for me. Seriously, NICEST. PEOPLE. EVER. They even waved us off from shore and made us feel super cool and hardcore.

Not that feeling hardcore made any difference, because the rest of the day was a bit of a slog. We set out aiming to end at Mactaquac Dam so we wouldn’t have to portage it midday.

We spent most of the day crawling down the lake in a headwind JUST stiff enough that if we stopped paddling, we immediately started moving backwards… at a rate about the same as our forward pace. It was also another fun-filled day of “where the hell are we, damn these flood conditions and damn this weird Canadian map”, although we did pass a quaint little place called King’s Landing that spawned a few hours’ worth of nerd jokes.

Once we saw the dam, we still had to find the pullout… and do a full lake crossing in gnarly tail winds and good-sized waves. And impending rain, because why not. We ended up pulling over so Steve could jog up and scout it out, and good thing- we would have missed it completely. We set up for the night at a dodgy pullout RIGHT at the dam in the company of some pissed-off beavers, and just barely got set up before it started dumping rain.

Despite a forecast of rain throughout the night and into the next day, we were relieved to wake up to cloudy-but-dry skies. We’d planned on getting up ASAP if that happened, but we were so exhausted from the  previous day we decided to press our luck with the weather by an hour.

It played out well. I scouted the portage while Steve packed (long walk through switchbacks on a gravel access road to a not-unreasonable put-in RIGHT below the dam… as in “you can hit it with a rock from here” close) and we managed to get everything packed, moved, loaded, and spray decked before the rain picked up again.

Even with a steady drizzle we weren’t complaining. We were snug and dry under the cockpits of the spray deck and were both outfitted with solid rain jackets and The World’s Best and Most Ridiculous-Looking Rain Hat. The current picked up, as it does below most dams, and the rain never got heavier than a light drizzle. The only unsettling thing was the multitude of deer and small, unidentifiable mammal carcasses hanging in the trees ten feet over our heads; at one point we even passed a fully-assembled tent tangled in a tree. We opted to avoid it completely, afraid of what the contents might be.

The rain lessened as we coasted into Fredericton and it looked like a nice little town, so we pulled over for the morning pilgrimage to Tim Hortons.

The sun came out as we walked into town and the updated weather forecast showed a decreasing chance of rain as the day went on, so we stopped by the Graystone Brewery on the way back to the boat for a quick pint and some people watching. (Overall review: decent beer, but painfully hipster environment. Mom jeans, Cosby sweaters, bad dreds on white kids, overwhelming “lumbersexual” feel, and Blundstones on every other person. We stood out pretty hard.)

With the sun now out in force and a nice breeze at our backs, we shed a few layers and hopped back in the boat bound for Jen and Paul’s suggestion of Oromocto Island. The wind picked up as we paddled the last mile, so our beach landing came in pretty hot.

Oromocto was STUNNING. Cows are grazed there in the summer but hadn’t yet arrived for the season, so it was a mix of wide, flat, grassy expanses and sandbars studded with huge trees. Absolutely pristine, and aside from a flock of unperturbed geese we had it entirely to ourselves. There was a fantastic sunset that we watched from the beach while drinking scotch and fiddling with the camera’s color settings (not that we needed to, with the fabulous show) and then we retired to the tent to pass out on level ground.

…Which we then discovered was DIRECTLY under the flight path to the airport across the river, which apparently has an incoming plane every twenty minutes. Ah well, nothing is perfect.

Whatever. It was really nice to have a quiet(ish) beautiful evening to reflect on how godawful so much of the first third of the trip was. This feels like an entirely different experience; it’s like we’re on an actual vacation and not just punishing ourselves.

After waking up to the soothing sound of incoming aircraft at the Fredericton International Airport, we dragged the boat to the downriver side of Oromocto Island and shoved off with the intention of paddling the mile across/down the river and landing in town for coffee and breakfast sandwiches. (Don’t judge; we’re on vacation at this point, and hot Tim Hortons is way more appealing than pack-flattened Clif Bars.)

Despite the early hour, the wind had already picked up significantly, and by the time we were halfway across the river we were seeing small whitecaps scuttling across the water’s surface and battling a tailwind with lovely broadside gusts. As this is less than ideal in a boat with only six or eight inches of freeboard, we added “check the weather and wind reports” to our breakfast itinerary.

We beached at a public boat launch behind a ballfield and took turns hiking the two blocks up to sustenance and bathrooms. The morning entertainment consisted of a softball tournament and watching local boaters struggle in and out of the launch; the wind was stiff enough that two separate parties nearly lost their craft in the process of unloading from their trailers.

The forecast wasn’t great, and called for high winds for the duration of the day. We eyeballed the whitecaps for a while, and after watching a group of kayakers spend 20 minutes struggling to clear the last hundred yards to shore we took another look at the wind speed forecast to see what our options might be. As luck would have it, the projection was that things would die down… at dusk. This meant that if we planned to make our allotted mileage for the day, we had to decide whether to fight strong winds and potentially-boat-swamping waves during daylight hours, or to paddle on flat water in the dark.

We mulled it over just long enough for another power boat to drift off its trailer. As its owner sprinted into the river after it, we made the call to wait until nightfall.

We hopped back in the boat and paddled up an inlet next to a lovely public park, where we set ourselves up under a picnic awning to gorge ourselves on burritos and play cards for the day. We took turns dozing off in the sun and watching visitors climb on some form of playground equipment that was clearly designed as either a torture device or some sort of crucible of natural selection; the thing was a spinning seat with no handles stuck on top of a tilted pole, which meant you could work up some good speed BUT you didn’t maintain an even speed during rotation. Several little kids (and more than one adult) were forcibly ejected. Good stuff.

The only downside to our relaxing day in the park was the screaming drone of aircraft buzzing us every fifteen minutes. Later in the afternoon a small plane started doing figure eights over the town… and continued for THREE HOURS. It almost made us miss the maddening background noise of rapids, and by the time we were ready to shove off Steve was talking me down from throwing rocks.

We packed up the boat, layered up, turned on our navigation lights, and shoved off from Oromocto just as the sun was setting. The wind died down almost immediately, and by full dark the river was glassy calm.

Paddling in the dark is an especially eerie experience. We’re well-equipped for it; we have the required navigational lights and emergency visual signals, we have the maps, and by the river gods we certainly have enough caffeine intake. At this point in the river the shoreline is relatively well-lit by towns and roadways, and there are no rapids or obstacles to be concerned about save the odd buoy or bridge.

That said, no amount of preparation can truly brace you for the weirdness that is a nighttime canoe trip. The flatness of the river means everything is reflected- streetlights, taillights, stars, your own navigation lights. Aside from the ripple coming off your paddles, you begin to feel as if you’re floating in the center of a vast orb; the stars below the bow are just as bright as the ones overhead. After dark the center of a river becomes eerily silent, and if a fish jumps nearby it’s enough to startle you out of your skin. Time ceases to pass normally. The only truths left are the feeling of your paddle in the water and the presence of someone else in the other end of the canoe. Everything else is conjecture.

Coming into Coytown we passed under a substantial highway overpass that spanned a thousand feet of river. From a distance it looked like a small string of Christmas lights, and as we grew closer the arches of the bridge appeared to open like a huge maw as the actual bridge pulled away from its reflection. We had the weirdest feeling that we were paddling toward a portal ripped open in the side of an empty black sphere, broken only by the quick whoosh of cars passing by hundreds of feet overhead.

The buoys marking the shipping lanes of the St John at that point weren’t lit, so periodically we’d hear the gurgle of a stationary object in the river and snap on a headlamp to find ourselves within a stone’s throw of a massive metal can. We stayed as close to river center as we could reckon to avoid any flood debris caught on the shore, and for the most part this meant for incredibly uneventful paddling. The one exception was when we passed through a series of small islands and lost track of shore because the river was bordered by swamplands; we thought we heard a buoy, turned on our headlamps, and found ourselves floating in a foot of water over a flooded grassy field. Oops. We spotted the next buoy and made our way back into open water for several more hours of uneventful paddling.

After spending nine hours of unbroken paddling in a canoe in full dark, watching the sun come up over remote sections of New Brunswick was a stunning display that was mostly lost on us. We were a little addled by that point; despite the natural resplendence as soon as it was light enough to see we started looking for a place to pull over. Unfortunately, at this point in the river we were surrounded by empty swamplands full of birds (mostly angry geese) and soggy, silty banks barely a foot above the water.

Somewhere south of Queenstown we spotted one of the historic ferry piers that line the St John River. It appeared to be at the end of a dirt road with one or two houses nearby but no discernable town, and as it was the first dry landing site we’d seen we decided it was “good efuckingnough”. We dragged the boat ashore and locked it to a tree, threw down our sleeping pads, and were asleep in the sun within minutes.

If the locals had any objections to a pair of soggy vagrants taking a nap on their pier, they kept them to themselves.

Lacking any functional location for a campsite, we gave ourselves a REM cycle to recharge and then dragged ourselves back into the boat with a goal of the Oak Point Provincial Park another ten miles or so downriver. This proved to be a delightfully scenic but physically painful slog as the wind picked up, and we also had to contend with a new evil called a “cable ferry”. A cable ferry is exactly what it sounds like; there’s a ferry, and instead of having a motor it’s attached to a cable that drags it back and forth across the river. This means that when the ferry is moving, there’s a huge metal rope the size of your arm strung across the river at neck height. If you’re passing by in a canoe, this translates to waiting until the ferry has landed and is loading cars and then PADDLE LIKE FUCKING MAD to get past before the cable snaps up again.

Oak Point Provincial Park is located on a spit of land that juts out well into the river, which was nice in that we could see it from well upriver… but also terrible, because we had to stare at our destination for three hours while we battled the wind to get to it. It was bad enough that at one point we seriously considered just pulling the boat out of the water, attaching the portage wheels, and hauling it the remaining miles down the road.

Finally, arms aching and nerves frayed beyond the capacity for rational thought, we dragged ourselves ashore on the beach at Oak Point… to find an apocalyptic wasteland instead of the RV park of friendly Canadians we’d been expecting. Turns out the flooding had completely submerged the bulk of the park and it was currently closed to RVs. We managed to track down some staff members who were pulling debris out of the rec buildings; I’ll never know if it was my cheerful demeanor that persuaded them to let us camp there despite the closure, or if it was the sight of Steve lying face-down on the grass near the boat refusing to move any further.

One of the park’s caretakers gifted us a bottle of homemade strawberry wine after we set up camp yesterday; it was delicious, and we drank the entire thing and were passed out cold by 6pm. When we woke up, he also gave us a weather report: thunderstorms and high winds were expected all afternoon. Rather than spend the day racing the rain, we decided to zero and wait it out.

This was more painful than it should have been. Between the flooding and the warm temperatures, the mosquitoes and black flies were out in force. We attempted to take a stroll through the wreckage of the park and were nearly eaten alive, so we spent the bulk of the day in the tent in our underwear playing cards and listening to the bugs try to break through the walls. The population was large and aggressive enough that it sounded like it was pouring rain, and if you touched the tent walls they would bite you THROUGH it. This was especially delightful given that the temperature was about 80 degrees and that special kind of hellish humidity you get right before a nightmarish thunderstorm.

And nightmarish the thunderstorm was! For a moment we didn’t realize the sound of the mosquitoes ramming themselves into our rain fly had actually become rain, but within moments the wind was howling and the skies had gone dark. We spent the rest of the afternoon huddled in the tent as it attempted to rip free from its moorings and the rain and thunder made normal conversation impossible.

The tides had been negligible (probably due to the flooding) but we decided to take advantage of what little help they could give us. The downside of this was that we had to leave Oak Point at 2am. The upside was that there was no wind at 2am, but still… 2am.

We got up in the dark and loaded the boat for one last push to St John. My dad was scheduled to meet us at the St John Marina near Ketepec; this was well above the city of St John, but we’d given up on the Bay and word on the street was that the flooding had been so severe that Reversing Falls hadn’t actually been reversing for about a month, so we figured it was an acceptable call to play it safe.

There’s a huge difference between seeing the sun rise in a canoe after paddling through the night and seeing the sun rise in a canoe after waking up super fucking early. The latter is downright delightful; you can appreciate the colors and the way the entire river springs to life, and as the sun breaks the horizon the warmth just seeps into your soul and makes you feel alive in the most incredible way. (If you’ve been up all night, it makes you feel slightly lukewarm and mostly you wish you were dead because then it’d be dark and it wouldn’t hurt your face as much.)

We scuttled across the path of another cable ferry and began the last push into St John. As you approach the city, the St John river widens and converges with the Kennebecasis River. The channel is over a mile across, wind is inevitable, and good-sized boats abound. We marveled at the fact that even though we were close to a major city, most of the riverside property was undeveloped and the scenery was stunning.

At last we spied the marina, and the end of our St John expedition was (literally) in sight. Surprisingly, the docks were completely empty and there wasn’t a single boat in any of the slips; we paddled right up to the main wharf to the delight of a construction crew making fence repairs.

The workers helped us pull the boat out of the water and told us how the entire building had been underwater just a week earlier. They were completely revamping the interior of the restaurant on the second story of the marina building, and several of their streetlights by the dock had been damaged because the water had been so high that boats had run into the bulbs. The marina owners were wonderful people and let us use their wifi to let my dad know we’d arrived, clean up a bit in the marina’s bathrooms, and then hang out on the dock playing gin rummy until I recognized my dad’s Subaru pulling in to drive us back to the US.

The end of a trip like this is always bittersweet, but this one is especially so- as soon as we get back to Vermont, we’re loading up my car with all my gear and MY canoe and I’m headed to Michigan for several months to work as a protection ranger and EMT with the National Park Service. It’s an amazing job opportunity for me and I’m totally pumped, but it means an entire summer without Steve in the other end of the boat. He’s driving west with me and then flying back, and I’m going to be absolutely crushed when I have to leave him at a tiny Michigan airport and set out on my next adventure alone. Going from “expedition mode” to the front country is difficult enough, but going from almost forty days in close contact with your favorite person to not seeing them at all for four months is a special kind of heartbreaking.

For now, though, we’re just looking forward to hot showers, a couch, and as many pizza rolls as we can stand. One creature comfort at a time.