Last year’s canoe trip on Ahja river was a hit so we did it again, but slightly differently. One canoe rental place has invented/introduced canoe rafts – three canoes attached to each other, with a wooden platform on top. It handles like a raft, sturdy, no wobbles. A bit less nimble but still decently steerable.
The big bonuses are that it’s much more social than a bunch of individual canoes – and it is very child- and dog-friendly.
There was eleven of us, and we ended up with one raft of adults and one of kids, with one dog each.
The dogs had to be split up and weren’t entirely happy about it. But two large, playful dogs on a raft getting the zoomies or starting to tussle with each other would have been too chaotic. They longed for each other, though, or perhaps they just wanted their herd to be all in one place.
We were on the same lake and river as last year, but only did half the distance, and in the other direction (upriver). Not that it felt like the direction made much of a difference – mostly we paddled along a lake with no noticeable flow.
At around the halfway point we steered our rafts into a little bay, tied them to each other, and had a lovely picnic. The rafts made it very easy. Dogs and paddles and kids and food everywhere.
The lake turned into a river for the last kilometre or so, and the paddling was more challenging now, with logs, submerged broken branches, sand banks and other obstacles.
I got fewer photos this year since the rafts didn’t exactly allow any darting around to the side to get new angles on things. And with four of us paddling, I couldn’t just stop my part whenever I felt like it, or we’d end up going in circles. Ingrid helped out and took over the camera for a while, too.