So you can see the theme of the past few days…bugs, wind, and less current. The picture of me in my big jacket above is post loading of the canoe, that we’d parked in a creek the night before because campsites on day 11 were very hard to find. The creek offered the best unloading option but also offered a gigantic leap in the number and peskiness of the middle mosquitoes.

We pitched our bug house so we could escape the “teeth with wings” during cooking and eating. It worked awesomely. The mesh is great for stopping mosquitoes and black flies but is too big for “no see ‘ems”. I’m currently itching in too many places from cooking dinner tonight because of the no see ‘ems. I did have a wonderful kitchen to cook in tonight, however, because of some ice jam damage that dredged up some kitchen counters for me.

Tonight I had a little extra time and energy so we had popcorn for a post paddle snack and toutons ( from scratch with teasers dough) and miso soup with cheese for supper. We are nearing two weeks and we’ve yet to repeat a dinner. The pantry system is working well for us thus far and the barrels are finally starting to get a bit lighter.

That’s the view from dinner. And breakfast. Though it’s likely to be raining in the morning so the sky might be a different colour. You can see the water appears very still. The current has slowed by a significant factor so we have to work much harder of making our goal of 49 kilometres everyday. Today we celebrated reaching the 500 kilometre mark at Chisholm, where we had lunch in a field of dandelions and butterflies.