How long will it take...

Sherwood Botsford

"How long will the Mujatik take us"

For years I was 2/i.c. and navigator for trips at St. John's.  I would often do a lot of the detail route planning.  Here's some of the factors I used.  Feel free to send me comments This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

First question:  What is your pain threshold?  How many hours are you willing to work per day?  With the kids, I would general figure on an hour per grade.  E.g. If the boys were mostly grade 9's I'd count on

9 working hours in a day.  Grade 11's 11 working hours in a day.  I didn't count meal time as working hours, but the short 5 minute breaks we took roughly once an hour were counted as working time.

Next question:  How fast do you paddle?  Flat water.  Average pace over a day.  In the big voyageur boats, with grade 10's we'd do 8 km/hour (5 mph) for the first two hours of the day.  By day's end, that would be 6.5.   On a hot humid afternoon we'd do 5 and feel like the lake was made of molasses.

In tandem canoes it wasn't as fast.  The day would start at 6 to 6.5 kph, and would be 4.5 by the end of the day.

Work on this, and decide on what you expect your average speed will be.  If this is your first wilderness trip, be pessimistic, and use the end of the day figures.  You may find that your numbers vary from mind.  Send me details.  I'm all ears.

Now the route itself:

I don't have a lot of river experience.  Over 90% of my experience has been on the Canadian Shield, where most routes are "Pool and drop".  Lakes varying in size from puddles to monsters you can't see across to long skinny sausages, all connected with fairly short sections with measurable current.  For this discussion 'flat water' is anything that has a current too faint to measure.

Routes can also be categorized as skinny bits and fat bits or single line and double line.  On the NTS maps, waterways can be drawn as a single line, or as a double line with shading between them.  The transition is somewhere between 30 and 50 feet -- 10 to 15 meters.  Double line rivers are mostly paddleable, especially in tandem canoes.  Single line rivers, well, that depends.  A single line river can be as narrow as your canoe, and deep enough to lick a postage stamp and leave you some spit left over.

Here's some hints:

Count the grid squares that drain into that creek.  You do this by penciling a line on the height of land around that chunk of creek, then count the grid intersections inside the loop.  This will underestimate the actual area, but it's fast, and ultimately the whole method lacks precision.  At 100 square kilometres, you likely have enough to float your canoe.  Probably will be hopping out a lot to take it over gravel bars.  At 250, you can probably paddle it just fine, with suitable allowances for sweepers.

Of course we did our trips in June.  If you do yours in August to escape the bugs (or trade spring bugs for summer bugs…) you may find that you have to change these numbers somewhat.

Single line river will average half the speed of double line.  You are spending a lot more energy turning the canoe.  Taking voyageur canoes up the Mirror river we changed bowmen every couple hours.  They were exhausted from repeated draws and pry.  Tandem boats may not lose as much speed.  We figured on 3 km/hour on single line rivers.

Obstacles.

I didn't distinguish between rapids and portages.  The key thing was the obstacle count.  Different types of obstacles were rated differently.

1.  Known rapids and known portages.  These are rapids that are marked, lakes with no cute connecting line, or one that from drainage grid counts you know won't be kind to your canoe.

I figure ALL rapids at 30 minutes.  If it's big enough to be marked on the map, its generally big enough to need to be scouted from shore.  Allow an hour for the first few.  You will use that time to teach the others your skills in reading water, and to assess their own skills on these lines.   Some single bar across the stream rapids you will end up taking a quick look standing in the back of your canoe.  Some you will spend two hours crashing though the bushes trying to get a look down the gorge.

Sometimes you will spend 30 minutes scouting the rapid, then realize that you can't shoot it today with this group.  Then you spend another half hour portaging it.  But overall 30 minutes is par for the course.

Overall I find that shooting and portaging take about the same time.  Shooting the rapid is a lot more fun, but with people wanting to watch to see how it is done,  wanting to take pictures, recovering from the occasional dumping, it averages out about the same time.

Except…

(there's always an except…)

If the rapid has length -- it's not one bar, but 12 spread over a kilometre -- figure on adding 2 hours per kilometre.

This last figure is true for portages too.  2 hours per kilometre.  This assumes:
It's not much of a trail
You need to make two trips with gear/boats (3 passes over all)
You will get faster with experience.

Now other obstacles.

▪    Any time that a single line river widens into a double line (pond, lake, fat river) then narrows back down to single line river, there is an obstacle at the bottom end.  Might be a beaver dam you can lift over, might be a water fall.  They are usually easy to deal with, and some of them are just the river narrowing again.  15 minutes each.

▪    Any time a double line river narrows to 1/3 of it's width, you have about a 1 in 3 chance of it being an obstacle.  Call them 10 minutes each.

▪    Any time a contour line crosses the route you have a 1 in 2 chance of it being an obstacle.  Call them 15 minutes each.

You will adjust these numbers to your own experience -- the methodology is what's important here.

How much big lake is there?  To me a big lake is one that has a far edge that fades into the distance.  It's a lake that is big enough to get windbound on.  We would figure that big lakes would leave us watching the wind between 1 day in 5 and 1 day in 7.  The bigger the lake the more likely it is.

Now:  How long is your route?  I count blocks.  I count every square kilometre the route travels through, making no difference between the ones where it just nips a corner, and the ones where it crosses diagonally.  This is fast.  It gives you a number that is about 5% below the number you get carefully running a string or map wheel along the route.

Let's say my route is 480 km long.  This is the 'flat water distance' for the route. At 6 km/hour it will take 80 hours.  After adding up the obstacle points, I get 60 hours of obstacles.  That's 140 hours.  At 9 hours a day, that's 15 days.

This will likely give you enough time to get windbound once or twice, spend a day when the sleet is coming down huddled in camp, instead of trying to make progress.  If you are faster than this, well, you can quit earlier in the day, spend more time fishing, play in the rapids a bit.  If you are slower than this, it's easy enough for you to put in a longer day.