Last summer one of my friends from highschool invited me on a canoe trip as they needed a 4th person for their group. Since a canoe sits 2, you need an even number of pals in order to make a trip enjoyable whatsoever. I was told that canoeing alone is challenging and especially tricky when trying do a 3 day portage so if I were to bring anyone, it would need to be in sets of 2. I took this as an opportunity to invite along the girl I had only been seeing for a few weeks (now my girlfriend) and my new roommate who had just arrived from Australia. He was dying to go camping and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get in a camping trip and… learn how to paddle a canoe.

Navigating day 3 of our portage trip

The assumption across the board was because of my outdoorsy interests and seemingly constant travel experience, I’d be an obvious addition to the team. Little did anyone know that outside of one time that I cried in the front seat of a canoe with my father as a child (leading me to abandon ship and swim back to shore) I had never been in a canoe. It probably would have been a good idea to tell everyone as this later caused some problems in the form of my boat being exceptionally slower than everyone else. Personally, I think I got the hang of it by like mid day on the second day but we’ll have to find out if any of it stuck when I go again this summer.

above is a collection of phone photos from the trip

I was tasked with being the group photographer as, well, that is my chosen career. I was also bringing along a couple of disposable cameras from an article I wrote for Format Magazine. My pack load was a little unnecessary. I brought 2 disposables, a cheap digital SLR and I took my Instax camera as well but unfortunately, those photos aren’t scanned yet so they’ll have to be uploaded at a later date. If I were to do it again, I would probably take half of those things but I wanted to do a good job on my first canoe trip.

Here’s the results from 3 days of learning how to canoe in Algonquin park.
Big thanks to Addie and Derrick for inviting me, to Sonja for the amazing food, to Chris for the laughs and to Lindsay for not giving up on me mid way through the first day when any normal human would have just taken the loss and moved on.

all above photos from the Fuji 800 Waterproof disposable camera

all above photos taken with the Kodak Funsaver 800 disposable camera

all photos above shot on a Canon T3i

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My name is Matt Moreland, you can see more of my photos on Instagram or keep up to date with my travels on Youtube. I’m trying to post every other day on my Blog and I write about my experiences on Medium.