If you’re just joining us, HI! We’re so sorry if you’re here looking for stories of fantastic, sunny, glorious adventures that will make you want to take an extended canoe vacation. This blog is mostly for people who like reading about the suffering of those of us dumb enough to spend weeks at a time in a boat instead of the respectable “nice weekend camping on a lake” type of canoeing.
If you’ve been following the soggy-bottomed party for a while now, here’s what’s going on. We spent the last few weeks getting a nose job and a sweet rudder setup for the canoe with the help of Umiak Outfitters and some lovely folks from Mad River Canoes, and as I type this we’re sitting in a VERY seedy little motel outside of Cumberland, MD. I’m wrapping up some online coursework and preparing for a phone interview in the morning while Steve pores over our maps, and then tomorrow we’ve finagled ourselves a ride to Petersburg, WV to put in on the South Branch of the Potomac River. The goal is Point Lookout State Park in the Chesapeake Bay, and then paddling back upriver to a point where we can rent a car to get us back to the vehicle we’re abandoning in an undisclosed location while we make our way downriver.
Fun fact: the logistical work involved in these trips is WAY harder than the part where you’re actually in the boat.
We’re hoping to maaaaaybe be able to land a shuttle back up to the North Branch after hitting the confluence, but in a shocking turn of events the river is looking mightily LOW right now and if we end up spending the next week hiking the canoe through three inches of water, we might have to scrap that plan. There’ll be plenty of suffering either way.
Since we have a bad habit of drowning our electronics (and since I’m bad at typing with my thumbs), we’ll be doing a mass upload of Potomac blog posts once we get back in May. In the meantime, we’ll try to update our Instagram semi-regularly if and when we can pick up cell service, so follow us (@typetwofundamentals) if you want to see some sporadic photos of us in our natural habitat.
If you don’t hear from us in a while, we’re probably fine. We promise to let everyone know if we die, so hang in there and we’ll update when we can.
Summer of 2018 was sort of a bummer for us paddling-wise because I ditched Steve to work as a protection ranger at a glorious place called Isle Royale in Michigan. We had the best of intentions about getting the tales of our St John shenanigans online as soon as we got back from the trip, but two problems emerged regarding that plan: one, Steve hates typing. Two, it turned out Isle Royale had questionable internet at best, being 99% wilderness area, so I was stuck on an island with a pile of field notes and no way to post. This one’s on me, folks. At some point there will probably be some cool pictures from my times canoeing around ISRO and I’ll talk about how sad it was to go paddling alone, or maybe I’ll just tell the story of how I had to punch a moose.
Anyways, we’ll be making up for lost time over the next couple of weeks because our next bad idea in a boat is about to get underway. The first week in April we’ll be heading SOUTH (…it’s almost like we learned something from our St John experience) to track down the headwaters of the Potomac and make our way down to the Chesapeake Bay. More details on that to come, but let’s just say there’s a non-zero chance we’ll get arrested for putting the canoe in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Stay tuned!
We swear, not everything we do is a godawful miserable time. See? That’s some nature right there.
Despite the number of times we could/probably should have died on the Delaware River, Steve and I made it about a month before formulating a rough plan for a second river trip. We spent the remainder of the summer drinking beers in the sun on the local reservoir (or nursing our sunburn in the shade on the porch at Burt’s) arguing about the specifics.
My boat, on a decidedly pleasant camping trip to Maine. Sunny days are okay when taken in moderation.
Our standards are simple: at least 400 miles, goes from source to sea, and involves at least a handful of stretches that guarantee a miserable physical struggle.
We tossed around a few ideas. The Susquehanna (460+ miles, upstate New York to the Chesapeake Bay) was a solid contender, as well as the Potomac (400+ miles, various upper branches draining into the main channel). The Potomac pulled ahead because of the various gnarly upper branches running through national forests and because both of us were sorely tempted by the prospect of pulling the canoe out of the river in Washington DC, sprinting across a few lanes of traffic, and seeing how far we could paddle down the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall before security took us down.
And then we heard mention of the St John River. This “Rhine of North America” runs over 400 miles from the headwaters on the Maine/Quebec border through remote New England wilderness into New Brunswick before flowing into the Bay of Fundy via the infamous Reversing Falls at the city of St John. The farthest reaches of the upper branches can only be successfully paddled shortly after the snow melts when the water is high, and the lower end is subject to some of the most extreme tides in the world.
Barely-above-freezing river water? Black fly season in the north Maine woods? Tides so extreme they change the direction the river is flowing? SIGN. US. UP.
Being a huge fan of Stan Rogers’ song “Barrett’s Privateers” (an enthusiastic drinking song about a miserable ocean voyage… aka all our favorite things) Steve immediately proposed that we end the trip in Halifax. He had no concept whatsoever of the geography of the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, or frankly the Atlantic coast of Canada in general, but once he realized he could be belting out the bit about “I’M A BROKEN MAN ON A HALIFAX PIER” from an actual Halifax pier there was no talking him down. At all. The few times I tried to explain that there was an entire province and a very large, very mercurial body of water between the city of St John and the city of Halifax, he just burst into song.
Steve has to steer on expeditions so he’s forced to remain focused; otherwise our productivity goes completely off the rails.
Lucky for Steve, I love a logistical challenge and my current job involves a lot of time sitting at a computer getting yelled at over the phone by angry tourists. I plotted out some routes, crunched some numbers, and determined that with about six weeks and some VERY careful monitoring of the tides… we might actually be able to pull this off.
We had nailed things down to the point of the trip being mostly-not-sketchy, and then a massive wrench was thrown in the works: I got a job offer in northern Michigan as a park ranger and EMT that requires me to report for duty on May 28th. Since we had originally planned on reaching Halifax sometime around June 14th, this was slightly inconvenient. Fortunately some research into the climatological records of New Brunswick revealed that the ice traditionally goes out on the St John around the end of the first week in April, and since we’d been planning to order dry suits for a while anyways, we decided that we might as well just push the start date back to April 17th. It’s not like the water would have been that much warmer if we started in early May, anyways.
At this point we’ve collected the gear, stocked up on camping food, put together every map we can find, and scraped every last penny out of the couch cushions to throw into our adventure fund. It’s a matter of days until we load the boat on the car and head north, and we look forward to sharing the shenanigans with everyone paying attention to this blog. Since we won’t always be able to update here immediately, feel free to follow us on Instagram via @typetwofundamentals.
We’ve also spent hours trying to convince our friends, families, and coworkers that we (probably) aren’t going to freeze to death, drown, or be eaten by bears. Neither of us can fathom how anyone who’s heard about our past trips would hear “Steve and Emily armed with rocks paddles vs. fully grown black bear” and not put money on us.
