Amazingly, on October 20th this year, Environment Canada was still forecasting a 20C day! It was also looking like a lovely sunny day with some medium winds. So I loaded up my 14ft Widgeon kayak and headed for Black Donald Lake. Black Donald is a reservoir lake on the Madawaska River southwest of Calabogie. I wanted to explore the less developed SW end of the lake and the Madawaska River's channels towards Centennial Lake. When I got down the lake's west side on Highway 65, I could not locate a suitable launch spot for my kayak. There's a public launch in the middle of Black Donald's west side, but it would have been a long paddle to the SW end. So I opted to go a bit further and get into Centennial Lake instead. Centennial Lake is upriver from Black Donald and also a reservoir lake.
I launched off highway 65 at "Hwy65 LP1" waypoint (Wilson Lake) and paddled under the road into Centennial Lake. Centennial Lake is full of channels, fingers, and islands. I was on Centennial a few years ago with my MYS15, but it will take a few more trips to explore fully. On this trip, I did about 10 km of paddling and managed only to explore a few islands and two of the lake's fingers.
About 1km from highway 65 down the channel from Wilson Lake, there's an island with a campsite (CS1) – a small sandy beach for easy kayak/canoe landing. I had a snack at CS1, and then I made my way towards another campsite that I'd seen on my previous MYS15 trip. The campsite (CS2) was still there, and it looked well used. I had lunch at CS2 and some rest. I spent some time watching two guys in a boat flying some remote model airplanes over the lake. After lunch, I decided to explore one of the fingers of the lake (F1). F1 is about 1.3 km long and comes to a dead end. There wasn't much to see other than trees (mostly pines) and rocks. I did come across a few Canada geese and some ducks. I reversed my route from the dead-end of F1 and paddled back to the launch point and my car.
It was a great paddle on a beautiful October day!
 |
| Campsite 1 (CS1) |
 |
| Campsite 2 (CS2) |
No comments:
Post a Comment