- Restaurant
- Creme Brulee
- Crepe Suzette
Certain parts of the portage experience are a little bit negative. Some of these could be:
- Mosquitoes.
- Blackflies
- Hot, sticky weather.
- Rough terrain.
- Recent rain to bring the bugs out.
- Sweating because it's hot, you're walking over rough slippery terrain (because it just finished raining), and as the sweat dribbles down your forehead taking insect repellant into your eyes and making them sting, you get buzzed by mosquitoes that don't notice you are using the Deep Woods version with Deet. Then, when you try to wipe your eyes, the canoe slips to the side and to keep your balance you put your foot into a mud-puddle with a sharp stone arranged at ankle height and that's when a cheerful so-and-so coming the other way, carrying only a pack and a paddle, says "good afternoon, great day for paddling". And yes it is a great day for paddling but that's not happening again for another hour and before that you have to put in at the end of the portage with the stinking mud and bigger hungrier mosquitoes.
- Sitting with a snack and some cold water reflecting that it wasn't the worst portage ever.
- Swapping notes with other paddlers, and finding out about good camp sites and which ones are empty.
- Getting back into the canoe to paddle again.
- One less portage to do today.
- Best of all, once you drop off the canoe you can go back to pick up the last pack and the last paddle, walk along the same path and notice how beautiful it is, the trees are gorgeous especially with the steam of recent rain coming off them, there are butterflies and flowers and birds and chipmunks. As a public service, you can cheer up the guys carrying the canoes the other direction. It is neighborly to encourage them along a bit. Because it's a great day for a walk in the woods, or for a paddle, and they may have forgotten that at the moment. "Good afternoon, great day for a paddle", you say, encouragingly.
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| A wet portage landing: Howry Creek, between a couple of beaver dams, Killarney Provincial Park. |
Rental canoes have some very real advantages over your own boat. They can land at the beach much faster, they can go over beaver dams more quickly and surely, and they can run into rocks much faster before anyone gets concerned. But the essential part of portage is that it comes from the French term meaning "pick up your canoe and carry it, sometimes for quite a long way, over terrain that was not meant for a boat and sometimes isn't too friendly for pedestrians either."
So if you are renting consider the following.
- the lighter the canoe the more it costs to rent.
- the pain involved in carrying a canoe is not proportional to its weight.
- therefore rent the lightest you can afford
See the page on "The Canoe" for details about weight and material that you should consider.
2: Take The Right Stuff.
General Notes
First thing you notice is that lots of small items are a pain to carry. So make sure almost everything you take goes into packs you can carry on your shoulders. Loose items (paddles, fishing poles, camera bag) can go in your hands. And the loose stuff from the canoe - first aid kit, baler, map, water bottles, change of shoes - should go into one bag you can carry. The reusable bags you buy from a grocery store or from Wal-Mart are good, or a small dry pack will become super-handy if the rain suddenly starts.
There is balance here. For one, the packs can't be too big or they won't fit in the canoe - and they MUST go low down - heaviest lying on the bottom of the canoe - or your canoe will be too tippy. The other thing is - if the packs are too heavy the portage will be torture.
Food/Drink - how to make it easier to carry.
Everything you take needs to be carried. So don't take any more weight than you have to - and the biggest killer is WATER.
FOR DRINKING:
You're going to be camping next to a lake, so don't take much: take some empty plastic bottles and a water filter. You can filter a couple of litres of water in 2 or 3 minutes whenever you think you will need it - which is mealtimes, on a hike, and at the end of a portage.
In theory, you can boil water for a few minutes and then drink it, but then you have to carry more camp fuel, and who wants to wait five minutes for a drink of HOT water? Buy a filter - $80 and up is a rough guide. See the pages on essential equipment for some advice.
FOOD AND BOOZE:
Take dried food and reconstitute (ie put the water back in when cooking), take pasta, rice, instant potatoes and those wonderful boil-in-the-bag dinners for a special treat. You can't take cans or bottles into the parks, and fresh meat is a pain to deal with so take meat that's packed in plastic like hot dogs. It's easier to protect from perishing too: ice weighs as much as water. Good fresh cheese is difficult to keep - on the other hand, cheese slices are made of some sort of edible plastic and don't need to be kept cool. Sure they taste terrible at home but when you're camping everything tastes so much better. See the pages on "food and drink" for more advice.
Beer is a terrible choice - it weighs too much, even if you transfer to plastic bottles. And keeping it cool in July is a struggle. Wine is good in those multi-layer boxes, but they don't burn completely so you need to carry out the residue from the fire. Best choices are hard liquor: whisky, rum, brandy in plastic bottles from the LCBO.
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| Ready to portage. Three people for five days - nearly all our gear is in the two Seal-Line Pro-Packs (one blue, one yellow). The package at front is the tent plus the tarp for rain shelter. |
3: The Right Approach
There is an optimal way to do the portage, and it depends how many trips you need. If you only need one trip to carry everything, ignore the rest of this section. Just take your single trip, stopping for a rest if you have to.
Generally, most of us need two trips. Pack properly so you don't need three. So say there are two of you, with one big pack each and a couple small things to carry. And nobody wants to carry a big pack at the same time as the canoe. This is usually a reasonable assumption, although some youngsters and solo canoeists will do exactly that.
SHORT PORTAGES: 500m or less
For portages of less than 500m, just carry stuff from one end to the other, and go back and get the rest. It's just not necessary to do anything else.
MEDIUM PORTAGES: up to about 1.2km
First person picks up the canoe and carries it to the end. Puts it down, sighs and groans, says good morning cheerfully just to annoy the other people he meets.
Second person carries one pack and half the loose items half-way along the portage. This is a guess. From the map you know how long it is and count the steps. In lousy terrain, 3 steps is 2 metres (approx). Drop the stuff half-way, then go back and get the rest.
First person meanwhile goes back along the portage to find a pack and some loose stuff. Pick it all up, back to the canoe.
Now this does not always work: the people may be different sizes so you may not be able to transfer packs from one person to another. You may have a child that needs to be guided along the path. But that's the most efficient way, so it's an approach to consider.
LONG PORTAGES: over about 1.2km
This is partly a psychological approach and partly physical. Split the portage into shifts. Agree on (say) 10-minute or 15-minute shifts, which will cover about 600m or 1km respectively. Take half your stuff, drop it, go back and get the rest. Once all the stuff is in the same place, do the same again. What this does is it makes the "rest" (walking without carrying anything) have the maximum impact, and cuts down on maximum time with any particular load. That is - carry canoe 15 mins, walk back 15 mins, carry pack 15 mins, repeat.
4: Shoulder Protection
Before you even start picking up your canoe, your shoulders and neck will know what's coming and will start to hurt. Advanced campers have a technique using a "tump" - search using Google for "tump portage" or follow this link for an excellent description.
For those of us less-advanced (ie haven't tried it yet) one approach is to use life-jackets (PFD's) wrapped around the centre thwart/yoke. But that is a minor improvement as the PFD moves around, and that requires frequent stops to re-adjust.
A third approach is a shoulder protector such as what you can get from Mountain Equipment Coop called a "Hooligan Yoke Pad" for less than $15. This is what I have, and it has transformed portages. The only thing it sometimes does is to twist on the yoke. The cure is to get the Velcro tension right: too tight and the Velcro comes undone, and too loose and it twists. This summer, I drilled small holes in the yoke and used those to secure the pad. Transformed more! I did twelve portages, two of them being 3km for a total of 8.9km without adjusting it at all!!!
