A Weekend in Calabogie

In July, when I was abstaining from alcohol, our friends, affectionately referred to as Paddlefolk, invited DW and me to a cottage they had rented on Calabogie Lake. They had the place for a couple of weeks but DW and I would only spend one night.

Naturally, we brought our kayaks to explore this lake again.

A couple of years ago, when our friend, Nina, first got her kayak, we had the good fortune of having excellent weather, late in October. So the three of us headed to the town of Calabogie, about an hour away from Ottawa, and explored the northeast section of this enormous lake.

I captured our adventure on video, though one of the lenses on my 360-degree camera was smudged. You can see that video on my YouTube channel.

This year, we struggled to get the kayaks from the cottage to the water, traversing about 70 steep, narrow stairs straight down to the water's edge. But we managed to get on the water for a sunset paddle.

The next day, we thought we would cross the lake to the town and stop for lunch. It was a hot and windy day, but we managed a very straight line across Calabogie Lake.

I've finally taken all of my footage from that weekend and produced another video. Have a look:

If you like my videos, I really encourage you to subscribe to my channel. Oh yeah, and hit the thumbs up, too.

Happy Tuesday!

The Shortest Route

Through the morning haze, we could just make out the twin bridges, more than five-and-a-half kilometres away. We weren't even sure that what we were seeing was right, though it was in the right position.

We started paddling.

Often, when we take our kayaks out for a trek, we follow the meandering rivers or we cross back and fourth, following no set direction, making almost a scribble of a pattern with our GPS trackers.

But this time we were heading across the vastness of Calabogie Lake, starting at a cottage that our friends had rented, straight for the town of Calabogie, where we planned to have lunch. Measuring the lake, online, the night before, we learned that a straight line would be more than 5.5K. In good conditions, that would take almost an hour and a half.

Normally, we would putter around, taking in the sights, following shorelines to spy birds in the trees. But this time, we just wanted to get across the lake.

I trusted that what we were seeing were the two bridges that crossed where the lake turns into the Madawaska River, on Lanark Road, and basically kept my eyes fixed on those points. There was a light breeze at our backs and the water was a bit choppy, but manageable.

All four of us were determined to get to our destination as quickly as we could, so we paddled with purpose. We would only make short stops, to take a quick rest or drink some water from the bottles that were strapped to our decks.

As we got closer, we were able to confirm that, indeed, we were on the right course. For most of the trek, I kept my bow pointed at our destination.

The trip took just shy of an hour and 15 minutes. As we neared a boat launch that we had used in late 2022, we noticed a couple of docks to the opposite side of the dams and drop-off of the river and saw that these docks were closer to where we wanted to ultimately go, and that was the only time that our course changed.

Total distance: 5.791 kms.

We locked up our kayaks and walked for two minutes, and had lunch at the Redneck Bistro, a pleasant and more charming restaurant than the name suggests. Once we were seated and had put in our lunchtime orders, I checked the route map that my Garmin watch had plotted out.

It's the straightest line we've ever paddled.

I love my kayak. Any time the wind picked up at our backs, I'd only have to edge a little. Waves were no match for us, even when speedboats would race by and send us a sizeable wave. With our eyes locked on to our destination, we stayed true to our course.

Happy Monday!

Dirty Lens

This is why I'm still a rank amateur.

I take my equipment for granted far too often. I assume that I can just pull a camera out of its case and start using it without doing simple checks.

Like, whether I have a data card in it or whether that card has enough storage space. I've gone out to do an entire photo shoot, only to discover, when I returned home, that the SD card wasn't in the camera. I've also had to cull photos that were already on the card so that I had room to shoot the photos that I had set out to take.

I've left the house with a camera that had a dead battery. The camera was essentially a paper weight. Fortunately, I haven't done that for any organized shoot with my photo club and I've had my smartphone as a backup.

But still...

And recently, I set out on a kayaking adventure with my 360-degree camera without doing a final lens cleaning before rolling. This blunder happened a couple of weeks ago, when DW and I had a friend join us on a beautiful late-October paddle of Calabogie Lake.

Of course, I could see the lens that faced me and knew that it was clean. But because I couldn't see the lens on the other side of the video camera, I didn't notice a greasy smudge on it, likely from a misplaced thumb as I was securing the camera to my kayak deck.

We paddled the afternoon away: me, capturing video throughout our trek. In the end, as I downloaded the video from the camera onto my phone and edited the files, I couldn't quite notice that some of the footage was blurry. It wasn't until I imported the files onto my computer and added them to my video-editing software that I could see I had a problem.

I had imported just over 19 minutes of video, but most of it was unusable.

I still wanted to create a video of our afternoon, so I whittled down my footage until I had just over three-and-a-half minutes of video, and even some of that was blurry. I didn't want to just include footage with me in the frame.

A week ago, I posted the finished video on my YouTube channel. Here it is:

Note to self: do a final wipe of your lenses once the camera is firmly mounted in place.

Happy Tuesday!

New Autumn Venues

Typically, when the autumn leaves glow their gold, red, and orange, I grab my camera gear and head up to the Gatineau Hills to try to do justice to the beauty that beams in the woods, around the lakes, and below the lookouts.

This year, with COVID-19 still going strong, I've opted to stay in my own province. Gatineau, this season, is in a pandemic red zone, and despite this classification thousands are still flocking to the trails to take in the colourful leaves.

No thanks.

Actually, I haven't gotten out much, but when I have taken my cameras out to photograph fall, I've headed to where I have plenty of private space. A friend, who has a farm out toward Plantagenet, has several acres of colourful woodland to capture with a lens. If you follow me on Instagram, you've seen many images that I've captured over the months and, lately, with the changing leaves.

But DW and I have also wanted to take in nature like we're used to in the Gatineau Hills, so a few weeks ago we ventured an hour northwest of Ottawa, just past the village of Calabogie, and hit the Manitou Mountain Trail and the Eagle's Nest Lookout.

When we first arrived, we were a bit nervous, as dozens of cars filled the small parking lots and along Calabogie Road. We feared that the trail and lookout would be overrun with like-minded hikers. I was ready to turn our vehicle around and head back to the city.

There are two paths that lead to the Eagle's Nest Lookout. An abandoned logging road offers an easy walk up a gentle slope before you hike a steeper slope up to the lookout. A second path, which seems to follow the cliff that is the lookout, starts steep for a couple of hundred metres, until you're along the cliff. You then follow the cliff, weaving around trees, until you come to the open lookout.

When DW and I arrived, there were only a few people on the steep path, so we took it as we headed into the trail. We were both huffing and puffing when we reached the clifftop, but an easier walk allowed us to catch our breaths as we periodically stopped to take photos.

By the time we reached the lookout, there were several people but not so many that we were unable to maintain a safe distance. We spent about 10 minutes or so, taking in the view, before we headed out.

Going out, we took the old logging road. We saw more people than we had on our ascent but the roadway is wide enough that you can pass people without getting close.

We loved this trail and will visit it again some day.

But these are not the only spots that DW and I have visited to enjoy the changing colours of autumn. Right in the city, along the Ottawa River, is a lake that is home to various species of ducks, birds, and other wildlife. Mud Lake is in the village of Britannia, between the yacht club and the water treatment facility. Several trails circle the lake, and while some of the pathways are too narrow for social distancing, we rarely encountered people coming from the opposite direction. And when we did encounter them, we could step off the path and allow them to pass.

Though it wasn't my first time to Mud Lake, it was my first time walking the trails. It won't be my last time.

This pandemic may have kept me from visiting Gatineau Park this autumn, but the silver lining led me to find equally beautiful venues on my side of the Ottawa River.