Mid-summer kayaking trip

I was on a kayaking trip over a long mid-summer weekend. It was organized by a backpacking oriented local club. There were about 30 of us on the move around the Linnansaari national park area, part of the Saimaa great lake, eastern Finland. Here's an almost accurate map for you so you can follow along.

We arrived midnight on Thursday. We set up our tents and went to meet the rest of the group who had already made it in. Our rental kayaks were set up for the morning on the lawn.

With the gear set up for the night I pulled out my camera and set off for a canal we had passed just before arriving. The opinion in the front seats was "You could easily walk back here, it's just a couple of kilometers", as we crossed the bridge and I mentioned the pretty lit channel markers.

It was a 4 kilometer walk there and 4 back again, but that's ok, I also took twice as long to shoot



This is Haponlahden Kanava toward the south. And toward the north:



This being above 60 degrees north at this time of year means you only need flash lights indoors. This is a slight underexposure (the first is 2-3 stops below) - I was happily shooting away at 200 ISO. I love midsummer light :lust

Here's our starting location a bit before sunrise, which was about 3:30 am gmt+3 - our days are nineteen and a half hours long here and night is all bright twilight



(also underexposed for moodiness )

We were in a channel with boat docks on both sides and a narrow marked boat route in between.

Next morning were woken up by the sun turning our tents into great big cookers. After a long breakfast at the restaurant right next to us we pulled all our gear out of the car and started to... wonder actively and aloud how on earth we were going fit all of it into two singles and a big two-seater. We got it in there rather nicely and come noon, we were off on leg one:




I used my old Ixus 50 pocket camera with the CHDK software on it for the shots I took on the water - allows you to shoot in raw amongst other nifty features

Here's the view backwards, I'm in the front of our really inconspicuous, white, two-seater. I liked it from the start because it carried Donald Duck's car registry number That's my good friend Aki in the back seat. This is my second time in any kind of kayak - I've done motor and sail boats before, but just a short intro in one these things.



The yellow foil bag has potato chips in it - on the deck :lol3
Aki didn't spray them right away though.

We paddled as group of four. The larger group had split into smaller ones right from the start - that was the plan anyway. Here's Timo pulling along side while Aki consults the map - Tapio's single is visible further away:



We stopped for a little while on what I think was eastern Linnansaari. I wasn't reading the map at all, instead concentrating on perfecting my paddling technique.

The spot we stopped at looked like this:



That an old beaver's nest I'm standing on there. There was also a pair of whooper swans with three chicks nearby, but they were cautious about us and swam somewhere else, I didn't get a picture of them.

After a while we saw a beaver that was not really happy to see us so we left.

We headed to the north end of Linnansaari for lunch and met a good part of the larger group there doing the same thing :binge

On the menu was a nice chicken pasta, yummy!



As trekking lunches go, that was a good one. We packed up, and headed further north-west.

On the way we found a nice calm, almost lagoon like dwarf sized bay and decided to take a closer look:



Looked nice, smelled a bit because the water was so still and there was enough mosquitoes in there to have us moving on fairly soon. We paddled further north-west to our night stop at Kirvessaari and more food :eat

Again we found a good part of the group had chosen the same place. The short little strip of sandy beach was covered in colourful kayaks



Yeah, I've pushed the saturation overboard on that one :wink

We set up our tents while Aki cooked dinner. Had some nice select grilled bits of a pig and potatoes. Others were eating almost as well

Here's Antti flipping a pancake:


:hotcake

As the sun set further down I took a stroll to see if there was something worth showing to the camera. Indeed there was, I got a little bit of practice making stars:



This was with the Sigma 10-20 @ 20mm f/32.

At some point in the evening Aki tripped and hurt his ankle. It was good enough for him to limp on a bit in the morning, but we decided to switch places in the two-seater. So now we were going along well, but in a somewhat errant direction. I had my paddling technique down so well I had nearly jammed my back up tight before lunch on day one - I wasn't stressing my arms at all after a couple of miles. I had to learn to paddle well while staying relaxed on the second leg. So now leg three had me in the back seat learning to use the rudder - hence the lack of directional stability :lol3

We went by some fairly steeply inclined shores on leg three:



Just look where that pine has decided to grow! It was the same thing on all the islands, trees growing even on bare rock and anything inclined less than 90 degrees. I find that rather amazing, here's one more:



That's Tapio following near us and Timo is further away this time. It was getting a bit windy in places where the islands let the blow through. You could easily see where the wind rippled the surface of the water, to say you should tie your map down and secure your hat in place. We pushed through the windy bits quite quickly in our twin - enough so to get a complaint from Timo in a single that we where going so fast in places it was hard to keep up - we were laughing at his tone of voice, but knew he was right. We had even managed to take short breaks one paddler at a time (got a mention about that too )so Aki and me had really pulled ahead in places and had had to wait in the calm spots.

After lunching on mashed potatoes and meatballs at Linnansaari on day two, we headed around the south side of the island toward Sammakkoniemi where we stayed the night. On the way we explored more tiny little bays and stopped for a candy break in one:



Yeah, you guys in the front go ahead and have all the goodies...
(I did get my share though )

Just before we got to Sammakkoniemi we got drenched by a short but sturdy shower. I caught a rainbow as it subsided:



I didn't mind at all getting a bit more wet (it was just my shoulders really) to see that.

We had more bits of a pig and some bacon wrapped 'shrooms for dindin, a nice sauna and a good sleep. In the morning Aki wanted to try a single and switched places with Tapio. I had my rudder under some semblance of control and was navigating legs three and four so for leg five I assumed full command of, and I thought of it as sort of my twin now, the white 313 with Tapio in the front seat. Here we are admiring one of the Satulat-islands:



Satulat translates as 'saddles', and there were four of them. For fun I named them in terms of size: the Shetland pony, the Icelandic horse, the Finnhorse and biggest one, in the photo above, the Shire horse. Aki asked me if he should start worrying about me when I told him what I was mumbling to meself about :lol3

And then... it was over. We'd arrived back at Oravi, on day three exactly where we had set off.



We packed up and went to the sauna. And then headed home.

Thanks for looking, tell me what you think!