first time is the hardest

first time is the hardest

OK, that was educational. It was also terrifying at times.

First off, I have way too much stuff in the boat. I'm going to have to move a lot of cargo from my little boat to the raft. There is so much stuff in the boat that I can hardly move my oars, which can't be good. Speaking of the oars: one of them came apart on me. The paddle part just unscrewed itself in mid-stroke. It's a damn good thing that floats. I was able to bring myself close to shore and then snag the paddle as it floated past.

As I was getting all collected after retrieving the oar, I sort of chucked my bail bucket - a one gallon ice cream pail - into the boat. Big mistake. It went sailing right over the boat and into the river. I hopped into the boat and started paddling furiously, and made two attempts to grab it; almost caught it once, but I ended up losing it. Damn, that thing was really useful too.

I got soaked pretty thoroughly today: all that fooling around with the oar and the bail bucket brought lots of water into the bottom of the boat.

It took a long time to get ready today. I didn't get all my stuff down to the river's edge until after 1pm, and then took well over an hour to get the raft and boat all set up and everything packed. I didn't get on the river until about 3, and was off the river by 3:45. I guess today was a sort of shakedown cruise, getting all of the bugs worked out of the system; I probably only went a couple of kilometers. That's OK, tomorrow I will have everything packed better and will be launch much earlier in the day.

I grabbed the nearest shoreline around 3:45. I'm not sure if this is an island or on the riverbank; at any rate I'm done for the day. While wandering around on the "island" looking for a good campsite, I found some excrement. It isn't human, and there seemed to be rather a lot of it. It wasn't from cattle or horses either, I've seen enough of that to know what it looks like. I am pretty far from bear country, so I have no idea what made that deposit. Hopefully I don't find out at all.

From the time I came ashore until the camp was set up and supper cooked was about 2 hours. I figure that if there are no portages, then I should be able to go quite a ways tomorrow.