Rouge river
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
route:
length: 1 day
difficulty: beginner
participants: Laurent Tauveron, James Van Roon
report:
Thanks to the heavy rain fall last week the rouge river water level seemed
high enough to go for an “after work” paddle, one more time. My friend James
and I left a car on old finch road and drove up to steels avenue where we
put in at the bridge. For the first km we are paddling through the
magnificent Cedarbrae golf course and I mentioned to my friend that this was
probably the most dangerous part of the river. I did not have time to
finish my sentence that a loud PLOUF erupted 3 feet from the stern . No one
in sight.
We pause, this trying to make sense of the unexplained noise. Then, we saw
them. Two golfers on top of the hill , 1000 feet away, weapons in hands.
Could this be Deliverance II ? I suspected they had made the challenging
bet of landing a golf ball IN the canoe without knocking down any of the
paddlers. Pretty close. Cedarbrae golf course is private property but the
river itself is public ( as far as I know most are in Canada, unlike Europe)
so we had every right to travel here but at our own risk. A few powerful
stokes and we were out of range of the club happy golfers. The rest of the
travel was great fun with many technical class 1 rapids. Around and between
numerous boulders and dead trees, Great Fun . I got my fist mosquito bite of
the season, spring is finally here, I guess.
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