Bighead River

Last weekend we paddled the Bighead River into Meaford. We put-in at the 11th Line bridge and spent two pleasant hours paddling a few class 1 sections to the 7th Line bridge before lunch. But the next 45 minutes to the take-out at Beautiful Joe Park (Edwin Street) was fantastic – essentially continuous fun, shore to shore, genuine class-2, river. In hindsight, we would have just paddled the last section twice because the car shuttle is so quick. A solo paddler could use a bicycle or probably even a local taxi.

There aren't any complex ledges; there are plenty of mid-river boulders for catching eddies, especially in a kayak; and as you will see in the video, lots of fun maneuvering for a tandem canoe. Higher water might push the take-out about 100m down to the other end of the park and if the water level dropped another foot it might have a couple fun sections but it would also be rather shallow. The first five seconds of this video clip show me doing a little ender.  The water office graph shows a 16 discharge and 11.45m water level.

Back on the Mag

In June we paddled the Magnetawan River from my house to Britt. I didn't do much in the way of video or photos this year -- just one clip of Kevan & Tom running a typical drop we encountered. The water level was at least two feet higher this year -- compare some of the shots in Jean's video to the video I made last year. There are more photos on the canoe club site.

Next summer

Plans are progressing for the 2011 David Thompson Brigade.

Spring on the Magnetawan

Friends from the Waterloo Wellington Canoe Club came up to the cottage for some canoeing. Kevin is an excellent canoeist and made my job in the bow easy, notwithstanding the canoe full of water that resulted on Sunday when I pulled us off line.

Brigade Video DRAFT

Editing video is both fun and time consuming. With about ten hours of video and a few hundred photos to work with I am slowly working towards a 10-15 minute video. I will also assemble a bunch of other clips together to make a DVD to distribute to the crew members and other crews. This is a link to my .mac account which will eventually morph into my mcmurtry.ca site.