Kayak trip to Lake Opeongo, Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada 25-30 Aug 2013

The main advantage of a canoe is that it can carry cargo (e.g. beaver pelts or 3 months of food). Paddling is not ergonomic; you have to lean over the side. Paddling a canoe in a straight line in any wind requires two people (you will always have wind).

A kayak doesn't have much storage space. A 1 week trip in fine weather is about the limit. Paddling is more ergonomic. One person can steer a kayak. If you're solo and want an easy time paddling, you have to be in a kayak.

In both cases, you need two people of my strength to portage. In this trip, I stayed within one lake system and did no portaging.

Once waves reach a certain height, in both a canoe or kayak, you can only go at right angles to the wavefront, without risking swamping or rolling (you can't paddle while large waves are striking you at an angle). Once you reach that stage, you shouldn't be out there. You only need a little more wave height and you'll roll. The wind only has to pick up a little bit more, or by statistics, you get hit by a single large wave.

In my solo trip on the Ottawa R, I was caught out in a sudden squall. I was close to one bank, but it was large boulders against a cliff. I wouldn't have been able to get out there even in calm weather and there was no way to pull a kayak out; it would have been dashed on the rocks in wind. The river was about 1km wide and I saw the rain coming towards me from a distance. Shortly after the rain moved from land to over the river, I started getting small waves, which grew larger and larger as the squall approached. Initially I turned parallel to the waves, but as the waves became more peaked, I couldn't keep the kayak stable with respect to roll when I was at the top of a wave; my paddle couldn't reach the water anymore. I turned at right angles to the waves and let them flow towards me along the deck and over the spray skirt. When the wind hit, the waves were in every direction. The squall only lasted minutes before passing onto the land behind me. With no fetch behind me, the waves disappeared in a flash. I was glad I wasn't left in the water, in sun and calm, trying to figure out how to right a kayak against boulders and a cliff.

On a hike, a constraint is weight. In a kayak, weight is no big deal (I brought cans of soup and plastic bottles of orange juice.) Volume is the killer in a kayak. There are day kayaks and there are touring kayaks. According to the outfitters, a week is a long trip in a kayak, so they gave me the biggest touring kayak. I had expected it to have lots of room. It didn't. The storage is at the ends of the kayak in conical compartments, which have 1/3 the volume of a cylinder with the same base. (I guess if you want volume, you take a canoe.) You can't go much beyond a week in a touring kayak in pleasant weather. The access holes to the waterproof compartments are too small for canoe bags, so anything you want dry, has to go in individual ziplock bags. Having a million little ziplock bags is an organisational nightmare.

Although I've hiked and been physically active all my life, I'm not particularly muscley or strong. I'm a 1.75m, 55kg ectomorph, with arms like canary legs. My main upper body strengthener is a keyboard. When hiking, your larger legs do all the work. In a kayak your arms do the work and the rest of you is baggage. Still I have reasonable endurance and 6-8hrs of paddling gets you as far as you need to go, at least on this lake. Not having paddled for 6 days before, I started out with 4hrs of paddling the first day (an afternoon), building up to 8hrs on the last full day. I didn't want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere, because I'd pushed beyond my limit and my arms couldn't get me back. I had expected my biceps to be sore, but the main effects I felt were on the triceps and the muscles on the outside of the shoulders. Your main work is pushing the end of the paddle furthest from the pivot point (the paddle). The end of the paddle that's being pulled is only moving half the distance.

Compared to hiking, where you can jolt from rock to rock, paddling is gentle and continuous and I didn't tear or sprain anything. You aren't getting scratched or torn up. With the pleasant temperatures, and all the water for swimming, you come back as clean as you left.

For planning, I used the Average Weather In August For Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada. The actual weather was exceptionally pleasant, being 18° in the morning and 22° at sunset. I had planned for nights at 10° and brought my 3 season sleeping bag. I could have easily used my summer bag.

The worst of the insects (black flies) are earlier in the year. I brought bug spray, but didn't need it. I had a few mossies in the evening, but they weren't a problem; they were slow and easy to swat.

It's windy much of the time. You have to plan for a stiff breeze now and then. I had some wind almost every day. On the first afternoon and 2nd morning, I had 0.5m waves, coming over the deck. A rudder, rather than a kedge, would have been useful. Other than that, the wind could be easily paddled against.

Several mornings the air was dead still, the water like glass and the air filled with fog. With the rain, initially I couldn't tell whether the fog was low clouds or warm water fog. When later in the morning, it did start to clear, I could see a clear space above the fog and below the clouds. I expect most of the fog was warm water fog.

It rained on and off the first two days. Being in a kayak, it wasn't a real problem.

You need to get the maps before you arrive. The Park sells a map of the whole park. It shows all the lakes and portages. It's useful for pre-trip planning and selecting the lake(s) you want to visit, but the map is physically huge and the scale is too large to use when you get there. For the trip, I used the "Lake Opeongo" 1:50,000 map from the waterproof and robust "The Adventure Map" series by Chrismar. The scale is suitable for kayaking and the campsites are marked, so you can head straight for them. Algonquin Outfitters, situated on the shore of Opeongo Lake, has all sorts of Chrisma maps, except for the lake they're on. (I got a cheery "come back in a couple of weeks, we should have one". I said I'd be out of the country in a week. Fortunately I still had my map from my 2004 trip. I expect they don't sell many maps.)

I have a one man tent in Australia that's wonderful. It has a single pole and needs only 3 pegs (can use more for wind). It can be put up in minutes. It's windproof with a large flap that can be unzippered to reveal a mesh wall. In cold or wind, you're instantly warm on getting into it. It has a porch large enough for a pack and which in a pinch, you can prepare food. I'm pretty sure I've cooked (well, boiled water) on a stove there. I haven't seen anything comparable in the US. It was made in NZ and I haven't been able to find another to have here in the US.

I brought a one man tent from LLBean mainly relying on the good name of LLBean. The tent is all mesh with a fly. The all mesh design gives no protection from the wind, which comes in under the fly. The fly doesn't go to the ground, leaving a gap where rain and wind can come through. The thing is useless by design.

Figure 3. LLBean tent: fly doesn't go to the ground.

LLBean tent: fly doesn't go to the ground. There's not even an overlap in some places. Note the gap between the tent and the fly visible under the "L.L.".

There was no porch to store anything out of the rain. There was little room to store anything in the tent, like clothes, bug spray.

Figure 4. LLBean tent: flap open

LLBean tent: flap is open, but not big enough to prepare food, rearrange your gear or store a pack.

There wasn't even a pocket for your glasses; you're supposed to roll over and crush them in the night. Because there's no room in the tent, everything had to be kept in the kayak at some distance. This required getting in and out of the tent multiple times. You need a porch where you can eat and prepare cold food in bad weather and rearrange your wet gear. In rain, you should be able to cook from (I originally said "in") the porch. In no wind, there was no way for the tent to breath and the inside of the fly was dripping in water in the morning even with the fly unzipped. To avoid the condensation in good weather, I had to fold the fly back over the tent, making the tent just a mosquitoe net.

Fortunately there were enough gaps in the rain on wet days that I could cook dinner outside the tent. But you need to be able to eat even in the rain.

Here's words from Steve about tents and cooking in the rain. Steve was my companion on the Colorado 2002 trip and lent me one of tents then.

The LLB tent, now that I've seen it, has issues common to many tents, including a couple I have used. It looks like most of the ultralight 1 (or 2) person tents I've seen. The one of mine you once borrowed had the mesh and fly issue, with snow blowing up under the fly and melting on the screen (door and window were scree mesh). The one I used that time, the mesh had a zip cover, but also had the fly not reach the ground, supposedly to improve ventilation and reduce condensation in the habitat. As consequence, the water from the fly drips onto the waterproof lower area of the tent and runs across a seam. This once caused a wet trip due to a "defective" water proof component.

I now use a Hilleberg Nallo tent. Not free standing, but the fly goes to the ground. I've been in storms with gusts I estimate in excess of 50mph (healthy aspen trees blew over), snow with 6+ inches on the ground the next morning (frequent wake-and-shake overnight to knock snow off the tent), and blowing rain, all without complaints. Sometime after the windy trip I noticed a small tear in the fly fabric, and Hilleberg did a really professional repair for a very small sum of money.

I would never cook under the fly of one of these tents. I put on my rain gear and cook in the weather. The tents are not flame resistant. When nylon burns, it melts, drips, and continues to burn while clinging to anything it touches (campers' napalm). The same is true of the nylon clothing I wear (if escaping a forest fire through area with embers or low flames, strip to your boots....).

Steve does a lot of snow trips, which is out of my leaque. My limit is Sydney winter, which around here is called 3-season. Most of my early hiking was done with cotton or similar non-flammable fabrics (e.g. japara) and I haven't changed my thinking to keep up with the new fabrics. Much of my clothing this time was flammable, which I hadn't thought about. I've just recently found that you can't use polypropylene for a shirt. I had one wear through, where my pack sits on my back, in a week.

The LLBean tent has a complicated set of poles to allow it to be self supporting. I initially decided this was a virtue, since I've camped on rock platforms. The poles for the tent have to be flexed to incredible tension to get them into the tent. I can't imagine that the sewing on the tent will last. You need to put one end of the pole against your foot and push the poles with both hands. I expected the poles to bend permanently. Even though the tent is self supporting, in wind it still needs to be pegged out, so the self supporting pole structure is an unneccessary complication.

There is an extra short single piece of pole to spread out the fly. Since the inside of the fly is wet in the morning and had to be hung up to dry, I wound up leaving this fly pole at a campsite on the 2nd night I used it. This pole should be a part of the main set of poles, making it impossible to forget. LLBean doesn't have any replacement poles; they'll be available next year (I hope).

Figure 5. LLBean tent: missing fly cross-spreader.

LLBean tent: missing fly cross-spreader. The fly is sitting down on the tent.

The tent comes with a fitted groundsheet (called a "footprint", a word that doesn't mean anything; what's wrong with "groundsheet"?). It's smaller than the tent floor and looks more like a thong than a groundsheet. I expect it's not supposed to stick out from the tent and catch rain. You would hope that enough of the poles poked through the tent eyelets to clip the fly and then the groundsheet to the tent poles, but the part of the pole poking through the tent eyelets isn't long enough. As well the fly and the groundsheet aren't under the same tension as the tent and fall off the end of the poles. You still have to peg them out, defeating the purpose of the self supporting tent. I never figured out how to put the tent up in a stiff breeze. If I pegged the groundsheet down first, it was soon covered in leaves and twiggs negating the puncture protection I was expecting it to provide for the tent floor. Because the poles weren't long enough, I couldn't attach the groundsheet to the pole system directly and then plop the whole thing (tent, fly, groundsheet) on the ground.

Tent manufacturers put flaps over the zippers. In tent reviews, people seem to like these. All they ever do for me is get caught in the zipper and require careful two handed operation. Can't manufacturers make waterproof and windproof zippers?

The LLBean tent was more of a bivvy bag plus than a tent. I expect the design constraint was "what's the lightest tent that one person can sleep in on a gym floor?" rather than "what's a functional one man tent for an extended trip, including rain and wind?" You pay a large price for a self supporting tent, which still needs pegs in a breeze. I had expected the LLBean one man tent to be functional like my Australian tent. It's hard to imagine that anyone has tested this tent. It's a general all round bad design. It's unusable.

I brought the amount of food I'd need to hike; I only ate half of it. Presumably being limited by arm muscles, I was doing less work than if I was hiking. Here's my daily food intake:

Yes it was austere, but it was all I needed for fuel. I wasn't going for a gastronomic experience. The only comfort food was the orange juice in the morning.

Whenever I do a lot of exercise, my appetit-o-stat is reset and I don't eat food nervously, like I do when I'm at home confronted with the insuperable problems of life. I had plenty of energy and just wasn't that hungry. By the end of the week, I'd lost a nice bunch of tummy flab, which I was most pleased about. There not being much to do at night, I got plenty of sleep.

There are 4 interconnected lakes (called arms on the map). As part of getting a permit, you declare to the Park Service, the arm of the lake you'll be in on any night. After that, on the day you can pick any of the 30 or so campsites in that arm. The campsites are marked by large triangular signs on a tree, easily visible from the middle of the lakes.

There are about 100 campsites spread out around the lake system. Each area is cleared of brush, has a fire ring and back in the woods somewhere, a short drop thunderbox. Many people have made tables out of natural materials (and nailed them to trees). At all the campsites I visited, I prepared my food standing up at one of these tables. Despite granite being everywhere, there is about 10cm of soil for tentpegs. (The soil is podzol Algonquin Provincial Park, one of the best agricultural soils. It also helps that there's lots of fresh glacial till.) Even though you are nominally in the wilderness, if you ignore the paddling, you are really just going from picnic spot to picnic spot.

One thing I'm not used to is pitch on pine trees. If you're used to grabbing trees as handholds, here you wind up with pine pitch on your hands. It's sticky and doesn't come off easily.

On arrival at a campsite, you can't always tell that a campsite is occupied till after you get out. There may be no canoe on the shore, but back in the woods you'll find a tent. The people are there for multiple nights and just now happen to be out paddling about.

When hiking, your tent, pack and cooking spot are in proximity. When kayaking, your kayak is your pack. In Algonquin, the kayak is on the edge of the lake and not within arm's reach of your tent or cooking spot. It's often 20-30m away from the cooking spot. I was constantly making trips backwards and forwards. At night, all food had to be returned to the critter-proof kayak compartments. Not having done much kayaking, I hadn't figured out the optimum algorithm for moving food to and from the kayak or in which compartment to store an item. Even by the end of the trip my gear had not reached equilibrium. Even worse than having gear in a sub-optimal location, was moving it to a new location; then I couldn't find it in its new obvious location.

The lakes are in the Canadian Shield. The hills and shore are deformed granite. Most of the shore is 30-60° sloping rock or rocks. About 2/3 of the campsites are reached over rock like this. On this type of sloping shore, you don't have to go far out before you're standing in water up to your neck. Getting into and out of a kayak at these spots is a hazardous moment, particularly in waves, and being by myself, with little chance of recovery if something went wrong I wasn't up for anything dramatic. You have to magically land your craft without dashing it on the rocks and then drag it far enough out of the water that it won't disappear overnight. This being freshwater, there's no tide, but having grown up in Sydney with the tidal water, I expected, while my head was turned away, for the lake level to rise and lift my kayak off, leaving me stranded, even after tying the kayak to a tree.

I looked for campsites with gently sloping approaches, and with a beach (rather than rock), where I could put feet down on both sides of the kayak, when it was parallel to the shore. When I came to a new lake, early in the afternoon, I would look for a campsite with a gentle approach, then setup camp, have dinner and later go for a paddle around the new lake. If I waited till the end of the day to look for a campsite, I'd be left with a campsite with a rocky approach.

On my first night, I didn't have the landing part worked out yet. I arrived at a campsite in wind and with relatively large waves parallel to a gravely shore, that was too steep to come in normal to it. I turned parallel to the shore, thus putting me parallel to the waves and at risk of rolling over. I quickly unclipped the sprayskirt, and before I got my feet out, the next wave poured over the gunwales, filling the cockpit, soaking me and nearly tipping me onto the shore. I still had to get out and stop the kayak from being dashed on the rocks. After that I carefully chose gently sloping approaches. Fortunately the first day turned out to be the only one with waves on landing.

With landing places few and far between, you had to plan to be in the kayak for extended periods. This meant you had to crap at the campsite. It also meant that you couldn't pee a whole lot. On a solo day kayak trip along the coast of Massachusetts, on the way here, I was in waves where I couldn't see over the tops, dying to pee, on a rocky coast where there was nowhere to get out for 2hrs. (I did have a rudder, which helped with the waves.) It really cramped my enjoyment of being on the water. As a result of this experience, in Algonquin, I ate the minimum amount of fibre and didn't drink anymore than I had to. Eating my main meal in mid afternoon helped with timing things next morning and with not having to pee in the middle of the night.

Sitting all day, without being able to move your lower body, is hard. My hips get sore and I get a numb bum, and that's if the seat cushion is dry. I guess the early astronauts had to do it. I sat in a mockup of a Gemini capsule once. It was much smaller than the front of a VW beetle. You could barely move your arms. There was no room over your head to stretch your arms and you couldn't straighten your body. They were in this thing for several days. It was like an MRI tube, without the thumping.

Leaning back in your seat, out in the middle of a treeless lake, you get a good view of the clouds. You can watch the weather all day. It can be quite pretty. It's better than having bushes whack you in the face all day.

Unlike walking in the rain in the bush, where you get soaked from both the inside and outside, being in the rain in a kayak is no problem at all. You have your sprayskirt and a jacket and you are sealed tight. As long as everything inside the cockpit is relatively dry, you're set. I paddled for an afternoon in the rain in comfort. The temperature was pleasant (low 20's). I expect it might not be so much fun if it was cold. The hard part is knowing that you're going to have to setup camp and prepare food in the rain. Preparing food in the rain is the same whether you're hiking or kayaking. However on the rainy day, I waited for a break in the rain in the afternoon, found a campsite, setup, had dinner, and then resumed kayaking when the rain started again.

You need the sprayskirt in rough weather (wind, rain). It stops waves and rain from coming into the cockpit. However you can feel the humidity inside the cockpit in your body and legs. If it was real warm, it wouldn't be much fun.

In contrast to paddling in the rain which is quite pleasant, in sun on an open lake with no shade, but wearing a lifejacket and longsleeve shirt, you cook. It's like being on snow. Even though I put ZnO on my nose and used #30 sunscreen, I still got sunburnt. I put almost nothing on my forehead thinking the helmet would shade it, but it blistered. Not having a mirror, I didn't realise what had happened till I got back. Obviously I didn't put enough sunblock on.

Some people I met said they'd been drinking the lake water every trip. To be safe, I treated it with iodine (tetraglycine hydroperiodide) or when cooking, boiled it first.

Recently I read that the iodine taste can be removed with ascorbic acid. I was stunned that it's taken this long for anyone to realise it can be done. I was a chemistry nerd of the first order in high school (LC in 1964) and spent most of my adult career in chemistry. I never thought of ascorbic acid to neutralise the iodine taste. If you'd asked me in high school "what chemical, harmless to humans, could you add to remove the excess I₂?" I would have come up with nitrite or sulphite on the spot. (I didn't know the chemistry of ascorbic acid.) Apparently no-one else has figured it out till recently either. This shows that the most important part of science is not knowing the answer to the question, but being able to formulate a question that can be answered (easily). The first person who asked "what can neutralise the taste of I₂?" would have had the answer in minutes.

Not having bought any iodine tablets recently, and expecting mine to be out of date, I picked up some ascorbic acid from the pharmacy on the way to REI, where to my surprise I found that iodine purification kits are now a binary set; tetraglycine hydroperiodide and ascorbic acid. How nice.

• As we all know, iodine is purple. The iodine tablets are dark green/violet. If you don't already know the colour of iodine, you'll find out when you open the iodine bottle and see that the cotton plug is brown and the exposed part of the plastic cap liner is dark.

• The ascorbic acid tablets are white.

The metal screw caps for the bottles have different colours too. One is white and the other is dark yellow. Obviously this is so that in the dark, the lashing wind and pouring rain, you don't have to find your glasses to read the microscopic font on the bottles to figure out which bottle to open first. Guess which cap is on which bottle ^[1] ?

Being on a large set of lakes, there's plenty of water. This time the water was colourless. Last trip the water looked like red-brown tea which was caused by pine tannins in the rain run-off. You can wash or swim anytime you like. I had expected to accumulate clothes with a week's sweat and grime. Instead, I wound up quite clean.

One of the down sides of having water everywhere is that water is everywhere. With two days of waves and rain, much of my gear was at least damp, most of it from the water that came in the cockpit on my landing on the first day, that seemed to get spread around everywhere. Your hands are always wet and when you reach into a dry bag for a camera, the water from your hands goes back into the dry bag. One of my dry bags had a transparent window; the inside was always covered with drops of water. There may not have been water sloshing in the dry bags, but they were always 100% humidity. The window on my map case was always covered with drops of water on the inside. By dumb luck, I brought a regular bathroom towel with me. There were plenty of things that needed drying off.

You need to carry something to mop up water (e.g. a sponge). The cockpit of this kayak is like a tyre; you can't get all the water out by turning it over. Tipping out a kayak requires a gravel beach with no rocks. With your feet and legs wet and the kayak deck wet, the gravel/sand sticks to things and gets everywhere. As well when rolling the kayak, you risk gouging out the ends of the kayak and scoring the deck. The kayak is about 35kg and not trivial to move. Rolling a kayak over on land is not something you really want to do and I only tried it once. If you flip the kayak to stop it filling with rain, you no longer can get at the compartments.

You're always flipping water into the kayak, even just from your feet getting in and out. On a hot day, maybe you'll dry out, but paddling and roasting in the sun on a hot day is no fun (you don't want to pray for a hot day to handle excess water). I didn't bring a sponge and used a T-shirt to mop up the cockpit. The T-shirt smelled like bilge by the end of the trip.

On the way to Algonquin, my cell phone failed (it drained the battery in a couple of hours, rather than a week and then I couldn't recharge the battery). The full story is in "The Tale of 3 cell phones". Since I was going to be kayaking solo, I was counting on having a cell phone on Opeongo Lake as backup. Thinking I had a battery problem, I called at a cell phone store in Potsdam NY, where they opened up the cell phone and showed me the pink water indicator on the battery and cellphone, indicating that the cell phone had been damaged by water. At home I walk every day with a pack, with my cellphone in a shirt pocket. In the heat I sweat and by the end of my walk, my shirt is soaked, and the cellphone bag is damp. Apparently this was enough to stew my cellphone and I had to buy a replacement on the way to Algonquin.

Later on the lake, in the rain, with water droplets visible on the inside of the dry bag window, I was worried that the water would do the same to my camera and the new cell phone. (They survived, but to be safe, once the rain stopped, I put everything in the sun for a day to dry them out.)

Consequently I don't have any photos in the rain. Sitting in open water, surrounded by hundreds of intersecting circles in the water from heavy raindrops is quite pretty. You'll have to take my word for it.

So I was out on a lake, kayaking in rain, with a camera and a new cell phone. Everytime I reached into my dry bag, it was with wet hands. The inside of the dry bag's transparent window always had water droplets on it. Although there was no water sloshing in it, it was damp. I wished I had some dessicant with me.

When I was a chemist, we'd dry our crystals overnight using (blue) silica gel in an evacuated dessicator jar. I never tested whether it made any difference; I did it because I was told to do it, in the days before I questioned what I was told. On my return home, I ordered bags of (blue) indicating silica gel thinking it would sop up water on my next trip, just like it did when I was a chemist. According to specs I found on the internet, silica gel can absorb 40% of its weight in water. This would absorb any amount of water I was likely to have to deal with. The drying would need to happen overnight to be any use. If it took a week, you were likely to be done with the trip, or have a sunny day first.

	Note
	silica gel contains cobalt as the indicator. This is toxic. You must not let the silica gel get into food.

Here are 3 different packagings I found.

Figure 6. silica gel packages

• left; 3 columns of plastic packets, increasing in the amount of water they've absorbed (becoming pinker)

  The small plastic bags look like they could be easily torn. I expect I'd need many of these in a camera bag. It would be nice not to have to keep track of multiple easily torn bags of toxic chemicals.

  I tried storing the packets in ziplock bags, but the silica gel turned clear in about a week. It seems that ziplock bags are porous. I expect if you're going to use silica gel to keep cameras dry, you'll need to arrive at the start of the trip with freshly activated silica gel in a tight container. I expect at the end of every day you'll need to replace the silica gel, as it will be wet.

• bottom right; plastic box pack,

  The box pack is made of hard plastic. I expect it would shatter or break on any physical abuse, like you'd find on a typical outdoor trip.

  In testing (below), I find that this box absorbs water many times slower than the small packets. The air slots only expose a small fraction of the surface area of the box. Presumably the moist air can't get inside the box fast enough. This box is useless for drying anything. It may be useful for long term storage with things that are already dry, inside a box which is only opened occasionally.

  In the air of my kitchen (20° 40-50% humidity), the packets become pink overnight. The box is barely beginning to turn pink in 5 days (even blowing air over it with a fan for a couple of days didn't make it go pink any faster).

• top right; perforated aluminium canister.

  The aluminum canister has a single plastic window. It has a black box design (any light entering is scattered by the silica gel and never exits). Thus on inspection of the window, all you see is black with vaguely discernable gel beads. As the beads absorb water (becoming pink) the view through the window is still black. Unless you shine a very bright light, or direct sunlight, on it, you can't tell the state of the beads. This canister is designed so you can't tell the state of the indicator (or else no-one has tested it). A better design would be to have another window on the other side of the canister, to let light in from the back. You need to be able to tell the state of the silica gel on casual inspection. You don't want to have to pull the canister out of whatever box or case it's in and go to bright sunlight to tell if it is still capable of absorbing water.

  While with some trouble, you can tell if the silica gel around the window is used up (pink), you can't tell if the rest of the silica gel is still blue or not. The area of the pinholes seems comparable to the slots in the plastic box. I would have to weigh the cannister to see if it's absorbed any water, negating using the blue indicator.

It would seem that the only packaging that could possibly work in the outdoors is the fragile packets.

When the silica gel absorbs water, the indicator turns colourless/clear (actually pale pink). You drive off the water (reactivating it) by putting it in the oven for a couple of hours at 60-70°, when the silica gel will turn blue again. You can also reactivate the silica gel in plastic bags (but not the silica gel in the aluminum canister) in a microwave oven. I found even the lowest setting on the microwave made the box pack too hot to touch. Water droplets formed on the inside of the box pack and I was afraid that the heat would crack the box pack. I would run the microwave oven for 5mins at 10% power and then let the box pack cool for about 10mins. It took multiple cycles to reactivate the silica gel. Clearly just putting the silica gel in a low oven and forgetting about it for several hours is simpler.

I didn't know how long it takes to absorb water. Here's two boxes of silica gel starting to absorb 7ml of water inside a ziplock bag at 20°. The vapour pressure of water at 20° is 17.5mmHg, making the air inside the bag 2.3% water.

Figure 7. silica gel absorbing water

silica gel absorbing water

I had expected that all the water would be absorbed by the silica gel in a day or so. In fact overnight nothing obvious happened at all.

Figure 8. 300g of silica gel not absorbing 7ml of water

300g of silica gel not absorbing 7ml of water. The packets that have been in the bag for longest (about 10days) are at the back and they're mostly pink. The packets had been in the plastic bag for about a week. About 3/4 of the water in the cup was gone (say 5ml absorbed). This is takes a week for 300g of silica gel to absorb 5g water. If you want to dry something on a trip, it would be better to bring a 300g dry towel in a ziplock bag. I don't now where dessicant would be useful, but it sure isn't going to help here.

The plastic box in the front has been sitting in the kitchen air for about a week. It's barely starting to be pink.

Figure 9. comparison of silica gel in a box and in a packet

comparison of silica gel in a box and in a packet. These both were left out for 24hrs in my kitchen at 20° 50% humidity. The box doesn't absorb much water (it has stayed blue, barely turning pink in a month). The packet has absorbed water (it's pink). Presumably the narrow slots in the box prevent the air getting to the silica gel.

This testing makes me realise that the method I used for drying crystals when I was a chemist, was probably a waste of time. If it helped, it would have only been from the evacuation, but not the silica gel.

As part of my testing, I put my water damaged cell phone in a sealed container full of silica gel packets for a week. After this, the battery life is normal again. Presumably the water damage was reversible (except for the red water indicators) and the original problem is fixed. I can't test the cell phone though, as I would have to pay to reactivate it. I guess I have a spare cell phone.

	Note
	I now have two cell phones and four batteries all with water indicators in the red state. All work perfectly. The water indicators are unduly sensitive. The indicators seem to be a way for the cell phone companies to unilaterally abrogate their warantee.

While life jackets (the PC and absurdly longer name is "personal floatation device") are required when using rented equipment, helmets are not (the US didn't require people to use seat belts till recently either). From reading outdoor reports from Australia, some of the helmet preventable deaths have been from people tripping while not on climbs. I wore a helmet. At the outfitters, when I came into the equipment room, the guy looked instantly at the bright yellow helmet I was wearing. I asked him if it was rediculous to wear one in the flatwater here. I got a politically correct answer - it was fine with him - he's seen people wearing them. On my trip I saw about 2 dozen people. I was the only person wearing a helmet. In my red kayak and yellow helmet, I expect I was visible for quite a distance.

In case I rolled and lost my expensive trifocal glasses, I bought two pairs of cheap single focal length reading glasses from a pharmacy, one for long distance and one for reading maps. My regular trifocal glasses were stored in the kayak compartments to be brought out at night. I don't remember using my trifocals much (if at all; I wasn't doing any reading at night). The glasses were attached to my head by an adjustable cord, which is designed to keep glasses on, when rolling without a helmet. Inside the helmet, the glasses were tight enough on my head that they wouldn't have come off in a roll without the cord. I didn't do any heavy duty navigation, so most of the time in daylight, the long distance glasses were all I needed to read the map and the compass.

I have soft keyboard hands. I wear bicycle gloves while paddling.

The only footwear I brought was rubber sandals with velcro straps. These were mainly to handle getting in and out of the boat and were fine for walking around the campsite, which was grass on soft soil and granite. I was never further than 20m from the water's edge and didn't need any hiking grade footwear.

While you would have to deal with a capsize by yourself, you aren't alone here. About half the campsites are occupied, so you could stop there. The ubiquitous water taxi is always zooming by you. A couple of times a day you'll pass other people on the water. In the popular North Bay,I could see my neighbour in his campsite 100m away on the same beach. (At the other campsites I couldn't tell where the next campsite might be, except by looking at the map.)

This kayak had a kedge and not a rudder. A kedge is a small tailfin inside the kayak, that drops down to help you steer straight. A rudder is a steerable fin that helps you go where you want to go. In wind these are different. A kedge is fine when there's no wind, otherwise you need a rudder. A kedge is perfect for an indoor swimming pool.

With the kedge up, you can turn easily; with it down, you go straight. The kedge is moved by a knob in a slot on the outside of the hull. You can't see the knob from the cockpit and there's no marking on the hull to guide you. To turn, you stop paddling, take a hand off the paddle and your eyes off the waves, fiddle around on the outside of the hull, move the kedge and resume paddling. When you've turned enough, you reverse the procedure. Taking your hands off the paddle and your eyes off the water is a real pain and, in wind, dangerous.

The kayak doesn't steer neutrally in wind, something that I would expect to be a design requirement. (It's not as bad as in a canoe, see my last trip.) Sure a square rigged sailing ship needs to steer to face into the wind when unreefed in a storm. This is a matter of life or death for the crew. In a kayak you just want to be able to get across the other side of the lake in a stiff breeze. You have a limited ability to steer with a paddle; you can put extra strength into one arm for a few strokes, but for a long crossing, you would need to decrease the pull on one arm. To steer in wind you need a rudder, not a kedge.

Sometimes the kedge doesn't work at all. One morning I set off in wind, across a lake to find 100m out that the kedge was jammed. There I was, like Apollo 13, with a disabled kayak. I had to steer with paddles till I reached the other side. There, like Cook at Cooktown, I careened the kayak and fiddled with the kedge till it dropped down. I can't imagine why anyone would choose a kedge over a rudder. Sure a kedge can't be snapped off by backing hard into a rock, but it doesn't work either.

I guess if you own the kayak and you're renting it out, you want your kayak to have a kedge.

The spray skirt keeps rain and waves out of the cockpit. If it's the slightest bit warm (or not cold) you can feel the humidity, inside the sealed cockpit, with your legs.

At night when the kayak is onshore, the spray skirt should cover the cockpit so it doesn't fill with rain. Unfortunately, when you aren't in it, the sprayskirt collapses and functions like a funnel, collecting the rain straight onto the spongy cushion in the seat in the cockpit (eew). You should be able to have the sprayskirt sit up, like a flattened cone, with the hole where you sit all closed up. I didn't have a pack to put in the seat (you can't get it through the covers in the deck remember). It took a couple of days before I figured out that I could pile non-food items into the seat, to prop up the spray skirt. I covered the hole with my helmet; the hole wasn't completely sealed up, but the rain was no longer funnelling into the cockpit.

In the end compartments, I stored everything in their own bags, in dry bags or in ziplocks. The bags weren't really necessary; the compartments were watertight and the only water came from things that I put in wet e.g. the tent. If the weather had been worse, I might have needed all the bags, but this time I didn't. The sleeping bag just had its regular cover - nothing special. Clothes were in ziplocks.

The cockpit was another matter. Water was still sloshing from the exit on the first night, mixed with the inevitabl gravel and dirt from getting in and out. In the cockpit you need; camera, lunch, water, jacket (on rainy days) and sunburn cream. A pencil and paper (for writing these notes) were in my shirt pocket. The paper got wet soon enough and later dried out.

Any bags I put on the floor in front of me, between my legs, would get wet and dirty and would be in my way getting in and out. A gap behind the seat held a gym bag, with everything except the camera. I hoped the contents wouldn't get wet. They did. The gym bag was sitting in a puddle. Oh well. When you lent back in the seat, the gym bag was stuck pretty tight. Between the spray skirt and the tight fit, it was almost impossible to get anything out of the gym bag without getting out. On rainy days, I kept my jacket on all the time.

So the camera: On rainy days, it was in a dry bag jammed between a hip and the side wall of the kayak. When I got to Hailstorm creek and the weather was nice, I put the camera (it its dry bag) on my lap, under the spray skirt, so it would be handy when taking a photo. (I didn't really need the spray skirt that day, but having nowhere to put it, I deployed it for wet weather.) When I decided to take a break, I pulled into shore, popped the spray skirt and stood up, whereupon the camera (in its dry bag) plopped in the water. oops. The camera was fine. However I never found a good spot for the camera. I went back to jamming it between my hip and the kayak wall.

There's nowhere to secure the paddle when your hands are doing something else, like taking a photo, changing the position of the kedge, or getting in and out. No kayak has this. Kayaks should have someway (a pair of clips, one on each side of the cockpit?) to hold the paddle.

A conventional compass has to be level to work. After some confusion, I now keep my southern hemisphere compass in Sydney and my northern hemisphere compasses in the US. Because a kayak pitches and rolls, a normal compass is useless; instead I used a spherical compass (look for it in my photos, next to the map case). These work in both the northern and southern hemisphere and in any orientation (including upside down). I got these at the map store in Parramatta.

When hiking, to locate yourself on the map, you have 3-D information about the land around you. On water, you only have 2-D information; all islands close up look round, you can't tell if a peninsular is an island till you go around it, you can't tell if the bay you see turns around and keeps going behind the land (remember Cook missed Port Jackson).

On my previous trip here, I tried using the standard 3-D navigation from hiking. On unexpectedly entering a bay filled with islands, I couldn't figure out where I was. This time I used the method of navigating a 2-D maze; run your finger along the wall. I just followed the shoreline with my eye, even if I was in the middle of the lake. (The lakes were small enough that I could always see both shores, except in short periods of fog.) This time, I had no navigation problems. It also helped that I recognised much of the land from my previous trip.

From last trip, I'd accepted that there'd be power boats (and the noise and the wake) at any time of day, mostly from the water taxi of Algonquin Outfitters. It seems that most people on the lake aren't paddling the whole way. They load their gear and rented canoe into the water taxi and are taken at high speed and high noise level to a campsite, where they stay for a while and just paddle around for a bit.

My trip was 5 nights, the time it took to explore every bay. I would have thought my trip was the normal one. At the end of the trip, on check-in, the cashier's eyes bugged out when he saw on the form how long I'd been out.

An eskimo roll is used on river kayaks after you've capsized and passed your obstacle. Out on a lake or open ocean, if you capsize and right yourself, you're right back in the situation that rolled you in the first place. The thinking is that if you roll, you shouldn't even be out there. Unlike a river kayak, a touring kayak has a broad beam, is quite stable and if rolled is equally difficult to right. I can do an eskimo roll in relatively flat and swirling water in a river kayak, but not in rapids. I wouldn't like to depend on being able to do an eskimo roll in waves in a touring kayak. The short lesson is that in weather, not to expect an eskimo roll to save you. If you're out there by yourself and you tip over, you're in trouble. You shouldn't be out there. I expect an eskimo thinks about this differently, but they're out there every day and not once every couple of years.

As I've alluded to in the section on dessicant, shortly after I left home on the way up, the length of time my cell phone held its charge dropped progressively from a week of being idle and on, to a couple of hours. I could only turn it on when I wanted to use it. Eventually it reached the stage where it wouldn't take a charge. Since I was going to be kayaking solo, I was counting on a cell phone on Opeongo Lake as backup. Thinking I had a battery problem, I called at a cell phone store in Potsdam NY, where the helpful assistant opened up the cell phone and showed me the pink water indicator on the battery and cellphone, indicating that the cell phone had been damaged by water. At home I walk every day with a pack, with my cellphone in a shirt pocket. In the heat I sweat and by the end of my walk, my shirt is soaked, and the cellphone bag is damp. Apparently this was enough to stew my cellphone and I had to buy a replacement on the way to Algonquin. As a result of this purchase, I now had two cell phones, my brand new one and my old, now deactivated, cell phone.

The US, always being the only country in-step, has been diligent in its effort to be incompatible with the cell phone system in the rest of the world (it's called innovation, something that only the US can do; Hillary Clinton talks about it all the time). For 20yrs now, an Australian getting off the plane in Paris and walking across the tarmac, can dial home and say "Hi Mum", without making prior arrangements. In contrast, for the same time period, anyone from Europe arriving in the US or Canada, with a standard European cell phone, hasn't been can't make even a local cell phone call.

Usually the US tries to be compatible with Canada, so I had expected that my US cell phone would work there. Sure enough, shortly after leaving Potsdam with my brand new US phone, as I drove over the St. Lawrence River at Ogdensburg into Canada, I got 3 txt messages on my new cell phone, two welcoming me to Canada and telling me that I may have to pay roving charges. Another gave me a 908 area code number (in New Jersey, back in the US) to call to ask about my roving plan. These calls confirmed that my newly purchased US phone worked just fine in Canada. Hooray!

It wasn't till later in the day, when I stopped for lunch at the Subway in Renfrew, that I found I couldn't call any US numbers, even with good signal strength. I got an immediate disconnect. I couldn't even phone the 908 number to find out about my roving plan. So why did they tell me about it?. The friendly and helpful proprieter at "The Source", on Rte 60 on the way into Renfrew, explained the situation to me. Canadians who took their cell phone with them to Florida on vacation using a roving plan, would come back with a bill of 2k$ for a week's phone usage in Florida. Even though my US prepaid phone worked just fine in Canada, the Canadian cell phone companies were not going to service it. If I wanted a prepaid phone in Canada, I would have to buy one at Walmart just down the road.

Since there was cell phone coverage at spots on Opeongo Lake and I was going solo, I wanted some backup, so I bought my second prepaid cell phone for the day. I had the choice of a phone that worked with the Bell company or one that worked with Rogers. I'd never heard of Rogers, and thinking I would have better coverage on the lake, I got Bell. I now was the pround owner of 3 near identical looking cell phones, all by the same manufacturer (Samsung), but all with different user interfaces (it's called innovation folks; we put the brake pedal in the back seat for your convenience). At least the chargers are interchangeable.

When I got to the lake, I found that coverage was only with Rogers. So my new Canadian cell phone was just another piece of plastic. Still on the way back from Opeongo to the US (about 8hrs), I did get to call my friends in the US on this phone, thus burning up the $50 of prepaid phone time, which would expire if I didn't use it. I used this cell phone for an hour, mainly to burn up the prepaid phone time. (I'll take it with me on my next trip to Canada.) Thanks to dessicant my original US cell phone revived. I have more cell phones than I can use in my lifetime.

On trips over the last 30yrs into Canada, I've had to handle paperwork about cars; forms saying that I will take the car with me when I return to the US rather than selling it in Canada, and proof of car insurance. I had brought the required letter from my insurer, but I wasn't asked for it and I just breezed through immigration and customs. I think it's possible that now I'm a US citizen has made the process simpler.