Many Waters:

If you’re going to spend 160-plus days together in a canoe going across Canada, make sure you do it with someone you know really well.
It was a piece of advice from Carrie McGown, 23, and Martha Mortson, 24, a pair of recent graduates from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, who paddled into town Sunday night in their 17-foot Kevlar canoe en route to Saint John, N.B.
“We’ve been best friends since we’ve born,” McGown said, who hails from Parry Sound along with Mortson.
“That helps,” she added. “We’ve seen the good and the bad and the ugly, which is really important on a long trip like this.”
“You want to make sure you can still be friends afterwards,” laughed Mortson.
Calling it the “Many Waters Expedition,” the pair began their trek in The Pas, Man. some 63 days ago. So far, they’ve encountered four-foot swells on Lake Winnipeg, several thunderstorms, and stronger-than-normal currents due to heavy rains in the past month.
It’s put them back about 26 days where they thought they would be, McGown admitted, but noted she and Mortson are not infected with “behind-itis.”
“We’re not worried about making it up,” she explained. “My father says, ‘You eat an elephant one bit at a time.’ When you paddle, you paddle. When you can’t, you can’t.”
“We’ve been putting in 11-hour days,” Mortson said. “We can’t do any more.”
Mortson has dreamed of paddling across Canada since she was 17. When she and McGown entered the Outdoor Recreation and Tourism Program in Thunder Bay, Mortson said all she had to do was convince McGown that it was a “good thing to do” with her.
On Jan. 1, 1998, the two signed a contract with each other, stating they would be going on the trip.
“I thought, if I’m going to get my hopes up to do this trip, I want to know for sure that we’re going to do it,” McGown said.
A year later, the two began charting their course along Canada’s waterways and raising funds for the trip. They managed to get 16 sponsors, including Bluewater Canoe of Guelph that donated the canoe, and XY Company in Atikokan, which gave them their paddles.
“One of the neatest stories is our canoe,” McGown said, noting it was the top-of-the-line model she had picked out in a magazine. So in February, she called Bluewater Canoe to inquire about it after writing them a letter previously.
“They had actually thrown out our letter but when I called, they were discussing us,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Call me back in five minutes, we’re talking about you.’
“I half expected a discount on the canoe and he said, ‘You can have the canoe. How do you want it?’” McGown added.
Mortson said they got an equally energetic response from Don Meany, owner of XY Company in Atikokan, who phoned three days after she had sent him a letter.
“He said, ‘You’re Canadian girls, you’ve got to do that,’” Mortson said. “He canoed across Canada himself during the centennial year [1967]. He was so excited for us.”
“One of the reasons we wanted to go on the trip was to explore Canada through its people, and I sort of expected that would start when we started the trip,” McGown remarked.
“But it really started when we started looking for help for the trip.
“And when so many companies came forward, it was like Christmas every week in our house,” she added, noting she couldn’t believe “just how interested people were” in them.
The pair hope to reach New Brunswick sometime in late October or early November at the latest.
Then it’s a six-seven month rest before the two get ready to complete the second leg of their trip, which will be from The Pas to Tuktoyaktuk.
“So we’ll have completed the Atlantic to the Arctic Ocean when we’re finished,” McGown said, with plans to do another year of touring afterwards, this time with a slide show of their canoe trip.
“One of our goals was to share our experience with other people,” she noted. “When we get into a community, we want to go to a school and do an ‘achieve your dream’ presentation.”
McGown and Mortson portaged around the dam here yesterday and set out east across Sand Bay. And other than developing a case of tendonitis, the trip has been an enriching experience so far.
“It’s such an amazing way to see the country because you’re not going very fast,” Mortson said. “And you meet so many different people.”
“And it’s a good challenge,” echoed McGown. “We can face just about anything if we can persevere [through this].”