made it to the Toronto Islands, finally

• Posted on September 23, 2007 at 12:25 PM
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If you set the bar low enough, anything is a victory. So huzzah for me, for finally making it to the Toronto Islands in my whitewater kayak.

As the (no doubt) avid readers of my blog (hi mom!) have already learned, I've had a couple of false starts in getting out to the island. But I finally made it yesterday. Got out in the boat at about 9:30 in the morning. Was hoping that the early start would let me avoid the wind. I was wrong, but the wind was blowing in such a way that if everything went wrong and I wound up in the water, it would have blown me right back in to Cherry Beach where the car was waiting for me, so I figured the risk was only to my dignity and not to my health.

At first I tried crossing from the bay over to the south side of the island, which is the open water side. That meant I was crossing in open water, as opposed to the security and shelter of the channel itself. Next thing I knew, I was in swells that were about 5 feet, maybe more, from tip to trough. And in a bout that's 6' 6", that means I was getting chucked around like a cork. Bad idea. A flatwater kayak would have been so much better. As would a crossing in the channel, away from the swells.

Anyway, I peeked around the breakwater at the south side of the islands, and all I could see other than one tiny beach, was an uninterrupted line of concrete wall lining the shore. So just about no place to land other than the tiny beach (immediately around the corner from the channel breakwater), until you get to the big pier about half-way down the island (more than a kilometer away, I think).

I decided that wasn't for me, all alone, so I turned around, headed through the channel and into Toronto Harbour. And suddenly the wind is in my face, coming from the northwest (it had been southwest before -- what happened?!), and there are whitecaps all over the place. I learned later that the wind was gusting to 41 km/h. Very unpleasant. The trickiest spot was right where the channel opens into the harbour, presumably because that's where you get different currents bumping into each other, along with the odd wake from a boat.

From the opening into the harbour, it's a hard left, past one small beach, over to the beach right by the Ward's Island ferry. I took out there, had some coffee that I had brought with me, and sat on the beach pondering the wind. Couldn't decide if I should quit, given that I was inappropriately outfitted with my small boat, or wait it out, or something else. Decided to go exploring the channels between the islands, which is really the whole point of going there anyway. So I popped down the first channel, on the west side of the ferry dock. 50 feet in, it was very calm and warm and sunny. Not a very interesting paddle, to tell the truth. I was hoping for something more scenic. If I recall, though, the prettier stretches are at the east end of the island, and I was still over on the west/central part. I made it as far as RCYC, then decided I was tired and wanted to go back.

I basically retraced my steps, crossed the channel without incident, and made it back to the bay at Cherry Beach. And wouldn't you know it: no wind at all. No swells at all. No waves at all. A totally different place than the one I had launched from about three hours earlier.

Glad I did it, but it's out of my system now. I won't be going back until I have a proper flatwater boat. And I'll keep a closer eye on the wind conditions. On a peaceful day, in a sea kayak, it would be a nice, easy day trip. I imagine that if you made it through all the channels to the far side of the island and then back again, you could be gone a full day doing this.

I took 20 seconds of lame video, but it gives an idea of what these little canals look like. The map plot marks the spot where I shot the video.