Members of a Guelph, Ont., family are back home after an 1,800-kilometre canoe trip of a lifetime.
They spent nine years completing the journey, which started on the Speed River near where they live and took them all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Husband and wife Jeremy Shute and Leslie Howarth, their two sons, his brother and several other loved ones were part of the adventure. Sometimes, it involved 10 people at a time.
“It’s just magic out on the water,” Jeremy said. “It’s a whole different thing when you pull into a city by the river. You see everything from the water. It’s like a whole different place.”
The family paddled through lakes and down rivers and canals, taking in the front-seat view of some of Canada’s most beautiful waterways.
Jeremy said the family did some organizing and juggling to get the time needed for the trip. Some of them took the summers off work and others are retired or were enjoying the summer holidays from school.
The trip started on the Speed River in 2017. Each summer, they took on a new leg of the trip. They’d paddle out as far as they could for about two to three weeks, stopping to restock on essentials like food and water before heading back out.
From Guelph, they went to Niagara Falls, Mexico Bay and Quebec City. But their ultimate goal was always to reach the Atlantic Ocean.
“We discovered all sorts of things. It was a real exploration. We didn’t know where we were gonna end up,” Jeremy said.
He said there were some scary moments on the water.
“We had these two ships passing us on the right with their big wakes…. We were going up and over theses wakes. We were way too close to the boat for comfort and it was an uncomfortable situation.”
But that didn’t stop their adventurous spirit.
“When we went through the Lachine Canal in Montreal, we stopped at the Atwater Market for lunch….This was the first canoe trip where I actually marked fromageries on my GPS before going. We would stop and get fresh bread and fresh cheese where we could.”
To figure out if they were getting closer to the ocean, they would taste the brackish water to see if it was getting any saltier.
“And then one day all of a sudden I hear a yell from behind my son and he’s like, ‘Taste the water, salt water’ … So we’re thinking, ‘OK … we’re getting to the sea,'” Jeremy said.
“We saw a seal … we saw shrimp, and kelp and eider ducks” out in the sea.
But that’s not all.
When they finally reached the village of Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse, just downstream from Quebec City, they were greeted by a family of another sorts at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean: a pod of beluga whales.
“Doing something hard, doing something beautiful, something meaningful, all of us together, was a tremendous privilege,” Howarth said.
Shute’s 86-year-old mother, Anne Shute, couldn’t come along on the journey, but she’s living vicariously through the stories her family brought back.
“They felt the energy of the river … of the belugas … loved all the people in the villages,” she said.
“It’s so heartwarming to think in this world of woe and horrible things happening that there are these special moments that really capture your heart.”
