Martin woke early out at the lakeside camp. The sun was rising but not yet over the hills surrounding the lake. All over the surface of the lake, a thin layer of mist swirled.
After collecting more wood, Martin got a fire going so it would be warm for Jack when he got up. Getting Jack out of his cozy sleeping bag turned out to be quite a challenge though! Oh dear, Jack's a proper teenager now! That said, *eventually* he did get up.
We lowered our bags down from the trees and packed up our gear. Jack carefully put out the camp fire with water from the lake. The canoe was soon loaded and relaunched and we paddled further north just to do some more exploration and for the sheer fun of it. The sun was now up and it was a beautiful sunny day. After exploring, we turned south and headed back towards the jetty where we had picked up the canoe the day before. Unfortunately though.... we couldn't find it! We soon figured out that we'd paddled too far south though (and conscious of the thundering waterfall further on!), turned back to retrace our footsteps.... paddle steps or whatever the correct canoeing expression is! Happily, we eventually found the jetty, which was simply really hard to spot from any distance away because of the bright sun shining in our eyes. We unloaded the canoe, lifted it out of the water and stowed it in the rack. After that all we had to do was hike with our gear back down the shore of the lack through the woods and back to the campsite where we'd left Marina and Bekky the day before.
Marina and Bekky had not had quite so much fun and hated the camp site, so we decided not to stay another day. Marina suggested we spend the remainder of the holiday on Vancouver Island, so that's where we headed. This was a 600km+ drive to the ferry port to the south of Vancouver. We drove via Kamloops and Hope on Highways 5 and 3 respectively. On arrival at the port at about 6:40pm, we were lucky to get straight onto the 7pm ferry.
Crossing the Georgia Straits, winding our way through smaller islands, we eventually arrived at Victoria at 8:35. We had a campsite in mind from our Rough Guide book and headed straight there. It was dark when we arrived and.... found the campsite to be full! So we drove to the other place recommended in the book, Thetis Lake Campground, and managed to squeeze our tents onto a tiny terraced pitch. It was by a busy road and quite noisy.... about as different to the camping that Martin and Jack had done the night before as possible. But it was somewhere to stay the night so we did just that, vowing to leave the next day for somewhere better.
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| The bags, hoisted up a tree for safety from wildlife (ignoring squirrels of course!). |
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| Views from the Clearwater Lake beach in the morning of our departure. |
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| Jack, preparing to paddle us out from the beach and further north up the lake. |
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| Martin was there too :-) |
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| Looking back at where we'd camped the night. |
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| Go north young man...... |
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| A last look back at where we'd spent the night...... |
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| Looking North up the lake. |