How did we get started canoe touring? What was our first experience of it like? How woefully prepared were we? And what about it made us come back for more? This is the story of our first time canoe camping. It wasn’t necessarily pretty, but we did enjoy it and it is something we keep wanting to experience. If you are unsure about trying out a canoe expedition then maybe you’ll feel a little better after reading this. Everyone has to start somewhere!

Where it all started

Back in the dark days of Lockdown in the UK, we were itching to get outside and on the water. When the restrictions first lifted a little we were keen to get back in our kayaks, but it still felt a bit confined as we were paddling the same stretch over and over again.

After a late evening, having fallen down a Google hole, Robert came across a National Geographic article that really piqued our interest. When restrictions were lessened just a bit more, the inevitable question of “is there anywhere new we could paddle?” got asked one day, and Robert replied “Well, I did find an interesting trail online...”. It didn’t really solve our immediate paddling problem, but much to his surprise he got buy-in from our whole group of friends. I think we were all going a little stir-crazy, but before we got too carried away we thought it was a good idea to go have a go at this canoeing touring thing first and see if we liked it. That’s pretty much what led the six of us to this adventure!

The two of us getting to grips with a Silver Birch canoe

What we were looking to get out of the trip

I suppose the first thing we thought we were looking to get out of this trip was an answer to the question “Do we like canoe touring?”. On reflection, there was a more fundamental question we needed to answer, and that was “How do you canoe?”. Our group of six were pretty much kayakers up till this point, but touring involves a certain amount more kit than our kayaks could fit in them (not to say you can’t kayak tour, we just decided canoeing might make the kit situation easier), so we’d have to learn how to canoe first.

There is a certain amount of blind confidence that Rob has with things like this though, and when he comes out with “people have been doing this for thousands of years, it can’t be too hard” you know he is just going to throw himself at the problem until he can do it and we are all just along with him on the journey. So we then started looking for somewhere we could all get a bit of tuition on how to handle a canoe, and then give a night away a go. All rolled up nicely into a single weekend so we could truly jump in at the deep end.

When was this adventure?

This was an adventure we had back in June 2021! It may seem a little strange to write about this adventure almost 4 years later but we thought it would be good to show how much we changed in the two years between this and the Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT), from not having really sat in a canoe, to being able to happily complete the 740 mile NFCT. Also for anyone who is a little unsure as to if this is the sort of thing you want to do with your time, then an adventure like this is a fantastic way to find out.

A little about Canoe Trail

After a bit of Googling we came across Canoe Trail. They are an outdoor company that are in a unique position of not only being able to run canoe training, but they also have their own wild camping site which is a couple of hours by paddling away from their centre, allowing for overnight trips. We contacted Rich at Canoe Trail directly explaining what we were interested in doing, and he was eager to help us. He even went so far as to have a virtual meeting with us to talk over what we wanted to do training wise, and how he and his team could help us.

Canoe Trail, as well as offering paddle sports training, has a plethora of guided trips. We would have likely later gone on one of the guided trips with Rich in preparation for the NFCT, but unfortunately we could not make the dates work.

Overview of our Itinerary

This adventure is the first but not the last example of us wanting to learn something and luckily being in the position of being able to pay someone to help us. It is wonderful to be able to receive personal guidance from experts in any subject, and we would highly recommend this for anyone who can. From the conversation with Rich we put together a bit of a plan, which involved a day of training, and a couple days self-guided paddling and camping. Here’s how that worked out for us:

Day One - Friday

We had a lot planned for our first day and this began with an early start for us to drive the 2 hours to Bedford. We ended up arriving far too early, but at least we managed to miss most of the traffic!

After a quick meet and greet we got to it, spending most of the morning learning basic control techniques, alongside the general principles of safety in a canoe. In the afternoon we learnt different types of rescue and what to do when things went wrong. This was all good learning, and most of which we have had to use at one point or another during subsequent adventures. At around 16:00 we got out of the river, got changed into some clean, dry clothes and packed our boats with all the kit we thought we needed for the next two days.

We practised both self and assisted rescues. The water outside of the Canoe trail centre has just enough flow to make you aware of it without it being too much of an issue, which is good.

With a map in hand, canoes with everything packed (including all the water and fire wood we would need), we were set loose downstream to find the Canoe Trail campsite.

We were not the fastest paddlers at this point, and we may have started a bit lackluster as it took us almost 4 hours to get to the campsite that evening. We also experienced our first couple of portages, and it was clear we had a lot to learn! By the time we made it to the campsite we were all feeling the effects of spending all day in, on, and around the boats. The tents flew up and dinner was nothing fancy, but sleep came easy to us all that night!

Day Two - Saturday

We are not proud of it but Saturday was a slow morning. Some of the group were finding muscles that they had previously never used, and it also became apparent that we had brought far too much kit. For example, at breakfast we found that as a group of six we probably did not need seven stoves! By the time we had finished breakfast it had gone 10:00am, and we knew that if we wanted to eventually do a 3 month paddling expedition then we’d have to get a bit faster and more comfortable in a lot of tasks.

The major activity of the day was to have a go at some of the things that we had been taught the day before and investigate the next stretch of river. We got back into the boats and it was fantastic how much of it just came flowing back to us (Rob will not pardon this pun). We went a bit further downstream, found a nice spot for lunch, and then began the paddle back to the campsite. We ended up having to use some of the rescue skills we learnt just the day before, due to one of the seats falling out of the canoe when Rob jumped back into the boat after lunch. It surprised us all how flexible the hull of the boat became when the seat was no longer there to brace it. We used the painters at the end of each canoe, and a rescue tape, to make a “pod racer” configuration out of the three canoes we had. Once we got back to the campsite, we informed Rich of the issue and he ensured there was a fresh boat for us to use the next day. A definite benefit of doing your first trip out with an experienced company!

Saturday evening was spent chilling around the fire and making some tasty dough sticks. We also made use of our hammock to get some much needed back support. As a group we confirmed that Rob is the most tasty to the bugs, but that his Original Bug Shirt would be well worth bringing with us on trips like this (foreshadowing for the NFCT trip, much?)

Rob in his bug shirt with the hood down for the photograph.

Day Three - Sunday

After another good night's sleep we were up packed and on the water quite quickly. The day before we hadn’t even made breakfast by the time we set off on Sunday. It was the return journey up steam back to the Canoe Trail centre that morning, and it was not long before we all settled into a steady rhythm of paddling. There might have even been a touch of flow stat happening, as somehow even though it was upstream it took us less time to get back to the centre than it did on Friday to get to the campsite! After a rather chatty lunch with Rich and the team we then all headed home, tired but enthused to do this whole canoe touring thing more.

Accommodation

As mentioned above we spent two nights camping at Canoe Trail’s wild camp site. This site is rather back to basics. Amenities included:

Fire circles
Long drop toilets
Places to put your tent.

All potable (drinking) water had to be carried in with us. The water in the river is just too polluted to even consider trying to filter.

Food & Water

We carried with us far more food and water than we needed to on this adventure. For food we fell back to some classics for us:

Breakfasts

Keeping it to a crowd favourite for this group, we cooked up steaming piles of pancakes (We’ve got pretty good at these, and are happy to share all of our secrets).

Katrina happily mixing up pancake batter for breakfast.

Lunches

We tried to keep it simple for lunches, using wraps and shelf stable proteins (corned beef, tuna, chicken pouches). We also carried with us a variety of snack bars. This worked really well.

Dinners

We did not do anything extravagant for our evening meals. For Friday we made fish cakes from tinned fish, and on Saturday we had what we like to call “Adventure Stew”, which is just really comforting. For Friday dessert we had Angel Delight. Some of our group were a bit fast and loose with the water needed for theirs, and it resembled a lumpy brown milkshake, much to the merriment of the rest of the group, but it is possible to make Angel Delight successfully on camp. On the Saturday we knew we were going to have more time, and so we took the opportunity to make bread twists with jam over a fire for dessert. They’re always delicious.

We even got to crack out a Kelly Kettle. Note the bread twist cooking over the fire.

For this adventure we carried more than enough food. We knew at this point that we needed to work out more shelf stable meals, and optimise the amount of food we needed to carry. We are constantly tinkering with a lot of recipes, but from this trip to the NFCT it got a lot more frequent, so now you can find a selection of our most successful recipes over in The Outdoor Pantry section of our website.

Lessons Learned

This adventure made so many things obvious to us that we needed to change, and we have captured the top ones in three distinct themes: personal; equipment; and nutrition. Believe it or not we actually had a video call the following week and we ran a lessons learned activity. It felt a little bit odd to begin with, but in itself it was a lesson learnt as we found that we all had noticed subtly different things we could improve on or do better.

Personal

This adventure really demonstrated that we all needed to be significantly fitter than we were at the time. The two of us were significantly smaller than the rest of the group and we know that size does matter when it comes to physical tasks, so we were going to need to be fitter and stronger just to be able to keep up.

From just the two days we were together doing this activity, it became clear that even though we’ve been friends for years, some group bonding activities to bring us together as an effective paddling expedition group would be quite helpful too.

Equipment

The six of us have all done various amounts of outdoors stuff, and have most of the kit that could work for a trip like this. However it became abundantly clear that very little of what we had was optimised for this type of activity. Like, it all worked, but we just realised our kit could all be adjusted to be a LOT more suitable if we were carrying on doing this as an activity.

Coordinating the kit to be carried across the group was a priority after this. As we mentioned above, we probably don't need to carry more stoves than we have people. Also if anything was to happen to the kit in one boat we wouldn't want to be missing anything critical.

The portages felt brutal even though they were not that long. We needed to get the weight and bulk of the kit we were carrying down to just make long portages possible, let alone pleasurable.

The bags we used were wholly unsuitable. We needed to find out what people use while canoeing. If nothing else we needed more and better dry bags.

Carrying the water in the canoe was a right faff. A large ex army water can is probably not the best way of carrying water. We were sure there are better, more boat-friendly ways to carry water.

We knew that while on the NFCT we were going to have to filter water. This is something we just don't do in the UK, due to most of our waterways being so polluted with chemicals it is just not worth it, but something we definitely needed to investigate the ins and outs of.

Our clothing had been optimised either for being sat in water (kayaking) or staying mostly dry and walking (hiking / backpacking). So we needed to find clothing that is more suited to canoe touring, where you don’t get nearly as wet in the boat, but you will need to portage in the same clothes comfortably.

Our load out for this trip, we definitely needed to play around with what equipment we would take in the future and how we trimmed the boat in the water.

Nutrition

To remain effective over a long period of time doing physical exercise we realised we need to actually work out what macro and micro nutrients we would need to carry with us, and then more broadly, in what quantities. A 3 month trip whilst maintaining a relatively healthy diet felt like it might be interesting after this trip.

Would we recommend this adventure?

Absolutely. 100%. Rich and his staff at Canoe trail were incredibly helpful and opened our eyes to canoe touring with this trip. At the end of this weekend we were all fired up to do more. At the end of the trip we spoke to Rich and organised another two sessions with him. The first being an introduction to whitewater in the canoes, and the second being based on a modified Foundation Safety and Rescue Training (FSRT) course, to help us with the potential situations we could encounter while out on the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. This adventure more than met our expectations, and gave us the confidence that this is something that we all wanted to go and do a lot more of!

Introduction to Canoe Touring