Day 13: Cart-astrophe!

As i'm sure it is apparent, this entry is a few days late in its posting. However, Sunday's events absolutely warrant a comment from the Source to Sea gang.

Throughout the duration of our journey, portages have been a constant test of our group's enduance and ability to work together as a team. Route finding around the dams, with the help of some Google mapping, has been fairly straightforward. Finding a good lunch spot above the dam and a feasible put-in below the dam has also gone without hitches. On the other hand, the carts we had planned to carry our canoes and gear during the portages had been giving way on us starting on their very first day of use. The interesting plastic-on-plastic bearing choice proved to be a very good technique to produce molten hot plastic lava. Fortunately, we were able to work with the pieces that had managed to half stay together.
Then came day number thirteen of our journey, and the inevitable finally occurred. It was out Lake Wylie dam portage and it was time to pull out our "trusty" canoe carts. ("Trusty" in the sense that you can trust something will go wrong.) Our original three carts had been whittled down to two because of bearings melting and tires blowing out, so we set off on our portage with out two "good" carts and a bag of spare parts. Only having two carts, however, meant that instead of two trips to transport ourr six canoes loaded with gear, we now had to do three, which makes a considerable difference when the Lake Wylie portage is about a mile and a half.