My Watermark is Woodlawn Lake, Ontario.

I used to fly in to do maintenance on a cabin in Woodlawn Lake so I knew there was some pretty good fishing and camping and stuff to be had on a whole bunch of little lakes in that area.

A friend of mine and I decided that we were going to hike there to do some camping. We had all our gear, and we were pretty excited. We followed a compass heading straight through the bush, trying to go east and we eventually came to a body of water. It looked pretty muddy, so it didn't look like a place for really good finishing or anything like that. We couldn't tell how big it was. It wasn't very far across. We thought for a second about maybe going around. Then we realized we might end up way off course if we tried go around, so maybe we should just build a raft to head straight across. We started slashing down tress and tying them together with some string that we had. Then we had it all latched together, flipped it up, and down into the water. It hit the water, and all the strings and the knots were bad, so it fell apart. All the logs, and trees just sank. But we were pretty tired, and sweaty from all the hard work, so we jumped in the water for a swim. We swam across, and it turns out it’s just a beaver pond. We looked back at all of our stuff and it took us about five minutes to walk back, grab our stuff and go around. But by then, it was getting late and we were tired so we just camped out on the other side of the beaver pond for the night, and had to continue on to Woodlawn Lake the next day. But we made it!