Day 4
Monday Sept 26, 11pm, Ottawa
I’m back in Ottawa, where it’s still raining, contemplating sleeping on something thicker than a slice of toast.
We slept in till 7:30 and had a leisurely mango pancake breakfast. We were on the water by about 10am.
Matagamasi is one long lake. And its south end has many bays and peninsulas. And we explored all of them while looking for the car. The pictographs are neat. Worth a visit, easily found on the west shore.
The navigation lesson for today is that in Chiniguchi, everything is further away than you think. And Matagamasi is just like that.
We made it down the east arm okay, but for some reason - in too much of a hurry to get going after getting lost on the way to he put in - I didn't waypoint the car as I usually do.
And there’s always some ambiguity/interpretation to be done in transposing a narrative route onto the topo map. There. That’s my rationalization for why we killed an hour looking for the bay with the boat landing where we parked.
I loaded my day one track file to find that it tracked us all the way back to Klondike bay where I'd driven us first in error. It indicated we were 12km out from our destination. Oh and that section of the topo map wasn’t on the GPS. In the end we stopped and asked a nice man who was working on his cottage and even I coudn’t screw up his directions: “just follow the shore around this point and you should be able to see it.”
Later I discovered I had drawn my route starting from the wrong peninsula.
We found the place at 11:30. An hour later we were packed, had our dip and were on the road. There was mobile phone service as soon as we hit highway 17 and I texted home that we'd be back by 6:30 or 7pm and we were. I was right for once.
