Issue #11 - Ottawa Outdoors Magazine

SHOW ME THE DIMBULB who first declared “ignorance is bliss,” and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried whitewater canoeing.

Most sporting pursuits come easier to those who have been properly trained. That’s why we pay homage to teachers, coaches and mentors. It is pure folly to take up a new sport without getting some grounding in equipment and technique. Jumping into the deep end with no training can leave you cold, as a group of us proved on an early summer charge down the Petawawa River a few years back.

After many years of flat water canoeing through Algonquin Park, we hit on the idea to challenge the Petawawa. We’d leave our sleek kevlar and cedar canoes at home, and rent some big ABS bathtubs near the park’s east gate. We prepared ourselves on the shores of Lake Traverse beforehand by reading aloud from a “how-to” leaflet on draw strokes, pries and braces. Jeepers, we knew how to steer a canoe, and there’s only one way you can go on a river, right?

Wrong.

Lake Traverse funnels at the far end into a natural sluiceway that blasts like a water cannon into the narrows. Our party of six hit shore in our three rented canoes at the top of the portage to unload. We carried our packs — still heavy with food and bulging wineskins — to the bottom of the portage, and returned to run the canoes empty through Big Thompson Rapid.

Four of us managed to fight and fumble our way downriver in two canoes to the landing where the equipment was stashed. The remaining canoe was a nice, new, red ABS craft with nary a scratch on her yet. The outfitter joked that we should pay extra because this was her inaugural trip. As the last two guys pushed off from shore and plowed straight into the middle of a two-metre haystack, it became pretty evident it was their inaugural cruise, too.

The haystack spun the stern around like a midway carnival ride gone berserk, and the canoe fell sideways over a shelf onto the roaring roil below. As inexperienced newbies are wont to do, both guys grabbed the gunwales to maintain their balance, and (almost) everyone knows that never ends well. One gunwale slid slowly under the froth and the lads pushed off into the cold river, wild-eyed and gulping air like it could be their last.

Mother Nature and her devoted disciples (the Laws of Physics), would normally float that boat downriver to an eddy where the rest of us would retrieve it and haul it ashore. Ms. Nature was obviously not amused at the dearth of acumen in our little group, so she opted to teach

us a lesson. The half-submerged (and now slightly scratched) red canoe floated downstream keel-first toward a fridge-sized boulder protruding from the middle of the hard current. Rather than pivoting harmlessly to one side, the canoe hit the rock in the hull’s epicentre and the open face was immediately engorged with raging river. Freight cars of driving water pinned the boat to the rock and split it open like a pea pod. The forest exploded with footsteps crunching over dry leaves as unseen creatures literally headed for the hills. It sounded like small arms fire when the canoe’s back broke, shooting the metal seats and yoke 15 feet into the air. The shell wrapped itself backwards and inside-out around the big rock. And there she stayed, probably until the ice nudged it loose the following winter.

It’s probably no coincidence that some among us enrolled in a whitewater canoe course on the Dumoine River the following year. We would later learn that our pre-course competence was limited to lashing the canoe to the car top. Some errant instinct had been convincing us to paddle hard into the tops of rapids when we should have been gently backpaddling, and we were predisposed to take the most perilous routes through standing waves. Our selfacquired white-water technique was akin to learning how to shoot a gun by looking down the wrong end of the barrel.

Listen to the experts and learn. Would we try to drive a car without prior instruction and supervised practice? Why then, do we think we can intuit how to ski, climb, kayak, windsurf, parasail, scuba dive, golf, glide or play pairs ping-pong? The results are far superior and a lot more fun after the experts have been consulted.

Now, has anyone seen a really well-used, red canoe? The outfitter wants it back. – Brant Scott is the editor of Ottawa Outdoors Magazine and a marketing communications consultant. Visit his web site at www.capitalideascommunications.ca or email him at brant.scott@sympatico.ca.