River House Paddle

I keep calling it the 'boathouse.'

In my defence, I believe the Ottawa New Edinburgh Club referred to it at a boathouse when they owned it. They still operate out of this historic building along the Ottawa River, in Rockcliffe, but the building was taken over by the National Capital Commission, who wanted to preserve the landmark, and it's now called the NCC River House.

When DW, the Paddlefolk, and I kayaked out to it, the other weekend, I kept calling it the NCC Boathouse. When I put together a video of our trek, from the Blair Road Boat Launch, across the Ottawa River and around Kettle Island, and back across the river to the River House, I called it the NCC Boathouse.

Even the title of the video calls it that.

It wasn't until I was uploading the video to my YouTube channel that I discovered the proper name. I corrected it for the YouTube title but everything else in the video refers to it as a boathouse.

If you have eight minutes or so to spare, take a break and give it a watch:

This was a very nice paddle. The winds were calm and there was very little boat traffic at that time of day; especially, when we headed out across to Kettle Island. There was more traffic after we visited the pool area and had a snack, but because we were sticking to the southern shore of the Ottawa River, we had no issues on the way back.

Even the dozen or so jet skis we saw on the river were far away from us and were no bother. (Jet skis are a noisy nuisance, often driven by people with no respect for other boaters. Sorry, but that's been my experience.)

As always, if you like my videos, give this one a Thumbs Up and subscribe.

Kayaking the back channel of Kettle Island, we passed by the Gatineau district of Templeton, which brought memories from almost 50 years ago. I'll share them tomorrow.

Happy Monday!