Have you ever received clues as to how your camping weekend was going to go before the trip even started? We have. This trip was doomed to be hilarious from the get go and we could see it coming. Well most of it.

And of course… When your camping friend isn’t coming on the camping trip… You have to make fun of him. So this was also sent out before the trip started.

We drove up to the Temagami area on Friday night… and the trip was underway..

After camping out in the truck at the Matamagasi Lake access Friday night, we continue driving up a logging road to get to our launch spot on Saturday morning. Fallen trees, a few washed out roads to cross and following a map that was terrible… We finally found the portage that cross the road (Wolf lake to the South and Dewdney to the North.) We unloaded the canoes and all the gear and headed for the water.

We checked the crappy map and pushed off the first canoe. Brad and Johnny loaded their gear in the second canoe… A canoe given to us by my father in-law. It’s an older canoe, but has seen some mileage and had been on many trips before. I was excited to have this boat with us… it’s probably more experienced than all of us! But I’ll sum up what happened in one sentence: Boat goes in water, gear goes in boat, boat fills with water. Whoops… Maybe we should have tested this canoe first. There is not one… But four holes in the bottom of said boat.

We pull out the gear and re-shore the boat. Gathering around the boat, we all stare at the boat like men looking at a car with the hood up. “What are our options boys?”

A Master Bushman is not someone who knows everything; But someone who can adapt, adjust and rework things to handle an situation thrown at him.

Clearly we have two options:

1. Drive to Sudbury and rent a boat (only about 4 hours worth of time and driving)

2. We’re ManCamping: We can fix the boat!

Option 2 it is. We get to work layering Tuck Tape and Gorilla tape as boat-length Band-Aids across this beast. We have now gone through the boat naming conventions and eventually came to calling this boat The SS HopeSheFloats.





More on this trip to come!