7/27/08 St Lawrence River

We have been moving too fast, but this State Park game is a learning experience as we must make reservations about a week in advance for the next weekend or all spots with electricity get grabbed up by savvy RV’ers and tenters – it’s a whole culture . We could do without electricity and run off the battery in the Aliner...but we haven't done that yet and we don't know how well that'll work or for how long - we do like lights and computers and radios and refrigerators and fans. We have a solar voltaic panel, but it only puts out 26W, probably not enough to restore the battery, although the fridge’ll run on propane and V can cook on the propane stove instead of the electric skillet. We need to get off the grid, but we’re busy looking around more than taking care of business.

I need to go to one of those interstate truck weigh stations and find out what we have – it seems we have a big load and we don’t need to add much to it. I also need to see about reinforcing the back bumper before it even thinks about tiring under the load of the trailer.

Back on Lake Erie we had to relocate the Aliner after having parked it at the wrong angle, it turned out, so I had the bright idea to move it without first dismantling, so I hitched it up to the little truck and pulled it around and under a tree for better shade…it being like 90 degrees in the shade on a sunny day. Well, the truck made it under just fine, but I dragged the front of the Aliner peak roof into a pine limb enough that it busted the middle vent cover opening mechanism (3 opening vents up there), so I had to seal the vent shut with a screw. We need a vent with a built-in 12V fan anyways…that’ll replace the broken one.

A few days ago we got a reserved campground on the St Lawrence River, just E of near Cape Vincent, where the Great Lakes start their run for the ocean. Let's see...Burnham Pt St Park. Before that was Selkirk Shores St Park at Port Ontario, on the Salmon River…they say there are salmon in the lake…not like there used to be, but we didn’t see them in the river. We paddled up the river till the rapids got too shallow and rocky, found a beaver dam on a tributary (beavers stayed hidden)…ran into some deer and itty bitty fawns, ate some crabapples (some serious orchards and vineyards along the lakes, with everything green and small), chewed some stems, watched herons and ospreys watching us…and there was a lighthouse at the mouth of the river.

So from there we went up to where the St Lawrence River begins and went to Burnham Point St Park - we set up the Aliner and swam in the river (something like 8 miles across, including islands, from bank to bank) and drove that evening to Tibbets Point Light:

http://www.capevincent.org/lighthouse/lighthouse_001.htm

…and the place is fine enough, but the thing was the foghorns projecting out, and a building devoted to building up steam to drive the horns – it must have been something on a foggy night.

Next morning we sailed the kayak out about a mile on a 10-15mph SW wind with just enough angle to get to the downstream end of Carleton Island, got behind the island hidden from the wind, and had a leisurely swimmingly clear-water gazingly paddlingly nice wander until we got up to the front of the island an hour or two later, away from the wind shelter, where the wind had increased to 20 or so and the whitecaps in our face make progress slow and strenuous, but fantastic as we stepped through the seas just off the shore…where the rocky shore was wall-like, reflecting waves kicked up a jostling seiche – there were houses along the coast all the way around but with long open areas between clusters of structures, we used those open areas for our own…and we wondered why there were so many houses on the upwind side of the island – there is a prevailing westerly, and the downwind side was so much more pleasant…and on the upwind side was an amazing edifice, a stone shell caved-in roof castle, built by the Remington (firearms) typewriter guy:
http://www.carletonislandvilla.com/cv.htm

…so we then sailed back downwind among the whitecaps with just enough angle to make it back to the campground.

Then we peddled up the river to the town of Cape Vincent…about 5mi to look around a little, and the next day we parked the truck there and took bikes on the ferry to Wolf Island, Ontario Canada, pedaled around 8 miles across through short-growth wheat fields and tall-growth flowers and past a bison ranch to the N end and took another ferry over to Kingston Ontario, a thriving metropolis of around 150,000 at the end of Lake Ontario where ships have ported for 300 years – big stone buildings, British-French flavor, and Canadians! Cool people, although they seem to relish those powerful, rich-tasting Canadian cigarettes a little too much, but they have a hardy bohemian character and a style of establishment-hippie independent thinking that puts most of us duped Americans to shame. It must be the winters that make them so tough…but everything seems pretty pricy, and it may be just too dern cold for us. It rained a few times during the day, thunderstorms that caught us in our raincoats and turned us cold and shivery, so we drank big beakers of coffee and pedaled up and down the streets of Kingston, witnessed a dedication of the Rideau Waterway by govt officials, complete with bagpipes. I forgot the camera, but the place is real photogenic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston,_Ontario

So we pedaled back and caught the last ferry to Cape Vincent, and then this morning when I went swimming a couple of young otters, I think, were chasing each other among the sandstone shelves along the shore. Later today we relocated down the river a little to Wellseley Island State Park, in the Thousand Islands, where we’ll be for 4 more days before we get to our next weekend reservation.

Campgrounds and houses and towns, human stuff, and no too much in the way of wildlife have we seen except what was mentioned, but trees and the rest of the summer plants are lush in this fairly wet year after a record setting snowy winter, and then a rainy spring in the midwest that filled up the Great Lakes - last summer the water at Cape Vincent was about 2 ft lower than now, and it is more than 3 ft higher than it was last November, and I was told it caused a fair amount of boat damage on rocks - not this year, though! Clear and deep fresh water flows among the islands, and we'll go take a look.