Warp Bay, ONT to Agawa Bay, ONT: Daily miles 27.3, Total miles 803.8
This most certainly does not feel like the last day July. The guidebooks for paddling on Lake Superior tell you that now is the perfect time to be on the lake with warm water, few storms and mild temperatures. Bologna, I say. It is cold, storms all the time and the wind rarely stops blowing. We had a moose walk through our campsite last night. I didn’t see it but I heard plod off of the beach a few feet from the tent and I saw it’s tracks this morning. The paddle was pretty generic. It was mostly the big basalt flows we have been seeing for the past few hundred miles punctuated by the occasional cliff and sand beaches at the river mouths. The forest has begun changing from the boreal, with it’s spruce, fir and birch, to a more diverse hardwood with some white pine and maple. The weather was nasty for most of the day. Cold with a constant light breeze with rain on and off. The only saving grace was the miraculously calm water. It barely moved in the breeze and reflected the grey, featureless sky that gave it the appearance of liquid mercury or smoke as our boats rippled forward. We stopped for lunch in Victoria Cove for lunch; some kind of weird tuna concoction we bought. We saw a few hikers but took off quick due to the cold. In the last five miles the sun made a stand against the clouds and for and finally won. We paddled past the famous pictographs on Agawa Rock. The red images you find painted on cliffs throughout the North country and dessert Southwest have always intrigued me. These ones are especially interesting due to the presence of some kind of horned sea beast. The last few miles into camp were a breeze. I felt bad about calling it quits while the sun was still so high in the sky and the lake so calm but this sand beach was just so easy and we definitely paddled a full day. We hunkered down, preparing for a major storm that is supposed to roll in tonight. There is another group down the beach from us who obviously hasn’t heard about what sounds like the storm of the summer. They have their tents set up right down on the beach not far from the water. It might be a rough night. We listened to the weather radio and for the first time in a month picked up the U.S. station. It made me homesick to hear about the weather around my beloved Upper Peninsula. I know I am only two and half paddling days from there but it seems so distant. I want to be there now.
