Most paddlers can attest that, as soon as you push off and feel your weight buoyed by the boat, you leave behind the weight of your worries on the land. Like the weight of a canoe after a long portage trail, my day-to-day concerns remain mostly onshore and I leave them ever-further behind with each paddle stroke.
The Trent-Severn Waterway has no shortage of poetically-named communities lining its banks from Scugog to Omemee, Bailieboro to Buckhorn, but my favourite of all is Coboconk. I’m hard-pressed to think of another place in the world that contains more alliteration in one name!
I recently came across a clever design that superimposed a public transit network map over the Trent-Severn Waterway. In the same way the TTC subway map is separated into various routes, this metaphorical map includes such lines the “Scugog Connector” and the “Kawartha Line.”
From the globe-traversing outriggers of the South Pacific to Amazonian dugouts to the birchbark craft of Turtle Island, the canoe is a fascinating example of convergent cultural evolution: in many isolated cases around the world a very similar design of craft has emerged to answer the question of the most beautiful and efficient way to navigate the regional waterscapes.
Made famous by The Tragically Hip’s rhyme with “constellations,” Bobcaygeon rests upon three islands right at the meeting point of Sturgeon and Pigeon Lakes. These two waterbodies create the distinctive zig-zag pattern of the Kawartha Lakes section of the Trent-Severn Waterway.
Great paddling routes don’t just “happen.” It takes a network of people interested in developing them. There is an amazing network of cyclists in Kawarthas Northumberland, all of them discovering, developing and planning amazing cycling routes.
Nogies Creek is one of our reflective paddling spots right in our back yard; located near Highway 36 between Buckhorn and Bobcaygeon, it’s less than 45 minutes from downtown Peterborough.
Escape to Another World: One of the uncanniest sensations that canoeing creates in the mind of the paddler is the sense of being so close and yet feeling so far away.
Wolf Island Provincial Park is another unsupervised provincial park on the list of hidden gems along the Trent-Severn Waterway. The park covers 220 hectares between Burleigh Falls and Buckhorn Ontario.
The key to micro-adventuring with kids is to set yourselves up so you can surf the chaos when it happens. And sometimes, picking the right place is all the help you need to enjoy both the plan and the un-planned parts of your trip.