Category: Misc

From a 1979 review in The Observer

Anyone who has known me for awhile knows that every year — sometimes in August, sometimes in September — Becky and I go on a multi-day backwoods canoe camping trip with our neighbours and long-time friends Marc Staveley and Kris Robinson (I’ve written about some of these trips before here and here). This year, we decided to camp on Copper Lake for three nights — a trip we did a number of years ago but for some reason I didn’t blog about at the time. Copper Lake is in the relatively new park called Kawartha Highlands, the second largest park in southwestern Ontario next to Algonquin.

Marc and Kris have a canoe of their own, and I took one of my kayaks (the lighter one, which is ten feet long and weighs about 40 pounds), and we rented a canoe for Becky and our friend Patrice at the Long Lake campground, where we’ve rented canoes a number of times before. It’s just a little ways down the road from Anstruther Lake, which is where the actual trip itself began. Anstruther is a fairly large lake and has a bunch of cottages on it, which turned out to be a good thing, for reasons that will become clear soon 🙂

We paddled for what I would estimate was about half an hour, through a bit of a drizzle, which put us about halfway to the portage from Anstruther into Rathbun Lake, and a motorboat went by and kicked up a pretty huge wake. I didn’t think much of it in the kayak, but Marc and Kris had a bit more trouble — which I didn’t find out until I heard them shouting my name. Since I was a ways ahead (kayaks are always faster than canoes) I thought maybe I was going in the wrong direction, and then when I turned around I saw Marc and Kris’s boat upside down.

Continue reading “Canoe camping trip from Anstruther to Copper in Kawartha Highlands park”