Wednesday, 2 October 2013

Pitt Lake

31/8/13

For Labour weekend we decided for a spot of kayaking on Pitt Lake. Keen parties were Brandon Fisher, his Dad Jim Fisher and Mike Carrunthers (Brandons uncle). We all met at Mikes about 9am and I was a little hungover as usual on a Saturday morning so we stopped and got a feed of maccas on the way to Grant Narrows. After packing all our shit into the kayaks we headed off. We found it was pretty low tide so there was a bit of a sand bar in our way:


While we were skirting the bar we found a wee inlet so we headed up it. All was well for about 20min or so except for paddling against quite a strong current. Then the channel got wider and wider until it was to shallow to paddle properly. Brandon and his Dad were in a a canoe so just had to resort to pulling the canoe along:



Mike and I battled on but it was more just pushing ourselves along on than paddling. It was pretty tedious. On the other side we started up the West side of the lake. We came across some pretty cool reflection stuff on the cliffs on the way up. I got a video but that seems way to complicated to embed here. Further up we went ashore at Dark Creek for a bit of lunch and a quiet moment of reflection looking out at the lake:



We ate some dodgy un-refrigerated salmon and trail mix for lunch. Up further we pulled into Defrauder falls for the night. View of the falls when we were pulling in:



The falls were pretty awesome and after setting up our camp Brandon and I went for a sketchy climb up the rocks around the fallse. We didn't even get very far or see anything interesting. Just nearly died multiple times. Back at the camp we just dicked around for a while. Brandon set up his hammock so I lay in that for a while and got all "arthouse" on my camera settings:



For dinner we had a magical pasta-mushrooms-sausages mixture. Unfortunately there was also some glue mixed in as the fry pan we were using started to melt. This was our camp for the night:


The next day we packed up and and ate rehydrated spud and bacon for breakfast before leaving at about 9:30am. We meandered our way up the lake until we started to get hit by some pretty nasty wind. Fortunately for us it was mostly a tail wind but it was kicking up quite a few waves. We were still aiming to make it to the head of the lake but realised that we would probably have a shit of a time paddling back into the wind and we wanted to get a fair way back down the lake to make the Sunday paddle out short. We decided to turn around when we could see the mouth of the upper Pitt River:



We stopped at Vickers for some cheese and Jagersausage. When we got back on the water the wind had calmed down a bit so we had a fairly nice time paddling back along the East side of the lake until we got to our destination: Osprey Creek (North). After setting up our tents we set about trying to rig the hammock. This might sound trival but we probably spent a good couple of hours on the project. We had one good tree and just had to try various configurations of driftwood to make the second support. One failed system saw Jim break one of the supports and drop a couple of inches to the ground. For dinner we ate some dehydrated food that Mike had sitting in his garage for about 8 years. We figured it couldn't really have gone bad though! That night at dusk I spent some time taking long exposure photos of the water which turned out to be pretty cool:


In the morning we got up to a fairly nice day:


We had some Beef Stroganoff stuff for breakfast and packed up our stuff for the mission back to civilization. On the way home we saw a couple of seals. When we were getting closer to the sandbar there was much discussion about whether we would try and go over it again or if we should just flag and go around. Going around was going to be a hell of a lot further though so we decided to give the sandbar another try. We were lucky to find that the water was slightly higher than it was when we went out (but not by much!!). Made it back to Grant Narrows and packed into the cars before going to hit up the pub for lunch. What a fantastic way to spend a long weekend.

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