It was a beautiful spring day on Sunday with perfect conditions for a paddle. The sun was shining and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. The UV index was reasonable and the air temperature was around 16, even the water temperature was merely chilly, not frigid.
Shirley's Bay is on the Ottawa River and is a part of the NCC Park system. There is an excellent launching point for both powerboats and kayaks/canoes there. The park itself is quite nice with some walking trails nearby and a beautiful view of the River and Gatineau in the distance.
We have paddled this stretch once before, last year, and knew the route so it wasn't a trip to discover the wilderness, we just wanted to stretch our paddling muscles some!
We headed west along the Ontario bank of the river. There is a rifle range on the Ontario side (the road to the launch point is called Rifle Road) so you can hear random gunshots going off.
After you paddle for about 30 minutes you will come along a little island. Normally this is a great spot to pull up on the beach and have lunch as the island is small, surrounded by beach with real sand and right in the middle of the river. On this occasion though the water level was really high so there wasn't much beach, and what beach was there was covered by seagulls! Dozens of them. So we kept on paddling.
The only other event was coming across the set of buoys marking off the DND water. These were bright yellow, scattered everywhere and marked with big Danger! signs. Suffice it to say we left it at that.
So that was the first paddle of the season, not too exciting but a good stretch.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
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