George River Solo 2018

Day 13
Start Time: 7/27/2018 1:24 PM
Duration: 5:57
Distance / Total (km): 14.7 / 164.1

I got up at 9:00am and moved over to the Pod, which was slightly on the buggy side. It was already 19° in spite of dropping to single digits overnight. The sky was clear other than a few small puffs of cloud near the horizon. Periodic bug kills were required in the Pod, my technique is to burn a bit of mosquito coil, this slows them down, makes them stupid at which point they become an easy kill, a few minutes and I am bug free for an hour or until I open the door to go in and out a few times. I had my standard tea & oatmeal, there is a bit more cloud moving in, for now at least the lake remains calm. I started the packing process with the Marmot, spent a few minutes wandering the camp; quite a nice spot that would not be out of place in a southern Provincial Park.

I was on my way around 1:20pm, about 2 hours to cover the 8km to the north end of Adelaide Lake, had no trouble finding the channel across the narrow strip that separates Adelaide from the final small pond. It was shallow, the current modest and I was easily able to walk the boat through most of the 135 meters with a bit of dragging at the end.

The pond is about 900 metres across; the bugs are bad, black flies, mosquitos, deer flies & horse flies with a few bonus bees. A strip of flat & treeless land about 135m wide separates the pond (Newfoundland) from Lac Hubbard (Quebec). I briefly examined the shore in search of any signs of a trail, finding nothing I simply picked what looked to be the shortest distance across. Other than right at the water’s edge the vegetation was quite low, nothing much over knee height, the ground was damp in places but nothing serious at all. It took me an hour to complete four carries and a “heavy” canoe drag. I was briefly muttering, “What the hell am I doing with all this stuff? Seems to happen on every trip at the first portage but in the end I am usually glad to have had so much. Of course, this was so much easier than yesterday’s boulder field drag that any complaining was unwarranted.

Clouds replaced the sun; the light wind was at my back as I made my way to the north end of Lac Hubbard. The outflow channel is shallow, very shallow, impossible to paddle pretty much any of it. I started walking, then pulling, there are numerous little bush covered “islands”, difficult decided to go right or left. I made steady progress, even able to paddle a short bit near the end before the final couple of heaves that completed the 900m and deposited me onto the shore of the West George River.

My maps indicated a possible camp about 1km to the east, I was optimistic given the quality of last night’s camp but the terrain did not look good, low and swampy. I found the spot, a tiny beach of reddish sand; behind the sand were thick bushes and very wet ground that left me with no option than to squeeze the tent between two boulders and do the best I could to level the sand with my paddle. Daylight was beginning to fade, I cooked up a bag of Pasta Roma (Alpine Aire), it’s a nothing special veg option. Once that was “cooking”, I tossed everything I would need for the night into the tent and crawled in. I was feeling quite tired, wrote up my notes before drifting off to sleep thinking about trying for an early camp tomorrow night with a more satisfying selection of food items.

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