A Paddling Trip on Lake Seliger

Day 1Svapushche → Khachin Island

After a leisurely breakfast and assembling the kayak, we put out on the water at 9 a.m. from the village of Svapushche. The weather was wonderful, and majestic clouds were reflected in the water's surface, untouched by either wind or motorboats. The sun shone, and only toward midday did a faint breeze pick up. Here and there along the banks stood new buildings: cottages and holiday homes; the tourist campsites were empty and only beginning to fill with vacationers.

On the first day we decided to take it easy, and after covering 18 kilometers in 3 hours, we stopped for lunch on Khachin Island. There we had a swim, ate, and finished testing the solar panel. The PowerFilm R-14 is a rather long and powerful panel. In sunny weather it can charge both phones and power banks very quickly.

About lunch. We turned the rear dry bag (a SealLine Baja) into the "lunch bag" — it held everything needed to cook a freeze-dried meal quickly and without climbing into the kayak. Freeze-dried meals save a lot of time and effort at lunch, when you don't want to waste precious daylight — though in mid-June there's more than enough daylight. We didn't carry fresh water, deciding to use lake water, but the whole lake was covered in duckweed, so we had to filter it. The MSR filter looks far cooler than a 300-ruble "Aquaphor," but you have to pump it much longer, and the filter element itself was coated with a layer of duckweed after just 5 liters and had to be cleaned. Then again, an "Aquaphor" couldn't have been cleaned at all. What we liked was that the filter screws onto the water reservoirs, so you don't have to worry about how to position the bottle, and you can filter calmly while holding it up.

After lunch we rounded Khachin Island from the north, and here the influx of tourists was already visible: crowded beaches, flocks of motorboats, even a single motorized hydro-hang-glider.

We managed to find a quiet spot on the eastern cape of the island, mainly because the approach to it ran through a marsh; the rest were taken by the "cultured" vacationers, mostly fishermen. We didn't shy away from the marsh, dragged the kayak across it, and camped in a wonderful pine grove — the site even had a big table.

The day was tiring enough — instead of the planned 25 we covered 31 kilometers, so we went to bed early.

Day's total: 31 kilometers and 5 hours 30 minutes of paddling time

Day 2Nilova Pustyn → Soroga

We woke at midnight to the sound of rain. After that we woke in sync every two hours. The rain didn't let up. The morning was gloomy and cheerless; the prospect of packing up in the rain always depressed us. But there was nothing for it — waiting for a brief break in the rain, we quickly took down the tent. It turned out you can conveniently remove the inner tent while leaving the fly up: you just stick the poles deeper into the ground, and then you can pack under the fly, which folds away separately and last. Once we'd settled into the kayak, we realized we could have set off earlier — with spray skirts and storm jackets it's dry, warm and comfortable inside.

The second day served up our favorite ordeal: a headwind. It drove a swell and lashed our faces with gusts of rain, but for us that's just part of the game. Especially given how well the Ladoga-2 handles a swell, we didn't lose much in average speed. In the wind it turned out very convenient to stop for lunch in the reed thickets — they hold the kayak and it doesn't drift anywhere.

After about two hours the rain almost stopped and we saw Nilova Pustyn ahead of us. Dasha had been there once, and by her account they sold excellent smoked eel. The account held up: we bought three eels, a trout and a pike-perch. The eel became a significant part of our diet for the day.

A bit about our diet. When we paddle, we stop every hour to drink water (in the future this will be an isotonic drink) and snack on dried fruit and nuts. It supports your strength wonderfully, and we plan to develop this practice. Six hours of paddling a day burns an incredible 2,000–3,000 kilocalories, and that hole has to be filled, so nuts make an excellent snack. The fatty eel helped a lot too. A shame we don't know how to fish, though on the other hand, after a day of paddling you really don't feel like making any extra movements.

After Nilova Pustyn we came out into the most open part of the lake, where even stronger waves and wind awaited us, and a little later the rain joined in too.

Despite all the speed and handling of our craft, paddling in such weather is very draining, and after a couple of hours we began looking for a lunch spot. We found one closer to the village of Soroga; from the water we saw an unfinished house. Pulling ashore, we discovered it was the grounds of an unfinished plot, and judging by its state, it had been like that for a long time. There were people with tents on the grounds, though — the owner and his friends — and they let us have lunch under the roof of the house, even though it had no floor. The absence of a floor didn't bother us, and we set about cooking lunch.

A couple of minutes later the sun came out, and we decided to spend an extra hour drying the tent and the rest of our things. After lunch we paddled in good weather already, and, surprisingly, with a tailwind that gave us at least one extra kilometer an hour.

To the southeast Seliger narrows and comes to resemble a middling river. Along the banks stood dozens of tents and cars, everyone on holiday, awful music blasting from speakers at maximum volume. By this time we were already pretty tired and looking for a place to spend the night, but it seemed every spot was taken — and not just taken, but plastered with vacationers (drinkers); from every direction came laddish music of varying degrees of unbearableness, and we were beginning to despair and brace ourselves for sleeping next to the booze-tourists.

We were lucky to find one spot you can't drive up to from the road; fishermen had clearly set it up for themselves. There were no fishermen, and judging by the hour, none were expected. We unpacked, cooked a splendid dinner to mark a hard day, and went to bed.

Day's total: 31 kilometers and 6 hours 14 minutes of paddling time.

Day 3Selizharovka → Volga

From early morning it was merely overcast, though here and there on the horizon menacing clouds were visible; they passed us by or moved off in an entirely different direction. We entered the Selizharovka river and immediately felt how much easier the going had become: the current reaches 3–4 km/h in places, and on some stretches we moved at 9–10 km/h. We could have gone faster, but fatigue was beginning to tell. In general, 30 kilometers a day is considered a long distance among kayakers — at least that's what all the fellow paddlers we met said. On the other hand, the Ladoga-2 was advertised as an especially fast craft on which you can cover one and a half times the distance in a day. Either way, the current let us rest more and paddle in a relaxed mode.

On Wikipedia the Selizharovka is described as a fast river with a great many rocks and rapids, but the paddlers' forums refute this, and rightly so. Along the river's course you occasionally meet large rocks, and nothing more. Along the banks you come across abandoned or nearly uninhabited villages.

On the Selizharovka we met many herons. Graceful birds — noticing us, they would fly off downstream a couple of bends ahead, where we'd meet them again a couple of minutes later. After five to ten repetitions of this relay, the herons would realize it was better to fly back. The river's nature is very beautiful and quite different from the rivers near Moscow, which is no surprise — it is, after all, a touch farther north. It seemed even the pines were taller.

But lunch spots, as it turned out, weren't all that plentiful. We found one, not far from the village of Koptevo. Apparently the place is especially popular, because the moment we finished resting and lunching, a flotilla of five kayaks arrived at our spot.

At the point where the Selizharovka flows into the Volga we found our first rapid, on which we struck the stern hard, slightly damaging the protective strip on the hull.

We'd planned to spend the night before Selizharovo, but couldn't find a good campsite near it, so we decided to try our luck and camp almost in the village itself, paddling on down the Volga. After a short stop in Selizharovo, during which I checked the bus schedules and bought more food, we set off to find a spot along the Volga — here a narrow little river you could wade across waist-deep. After a couple of attempts and some wandering through the bushes, we found a convenient little place on a hill, completely invisible from the river.

The sun was shining and we were just about to take a leisurely swim and sunbathe. It didn't happen. Literally twenty minutes after pulling ashore, peals of thunder rang out. In emergency mode we assembled the kayak and set up camp in about 40 minutes — something of a record. We had lunch in the tent already, to the cheerful staccato of the rain. By the law of meanness the rain stopped half an hour after lunch, but the sun was already setting.

Day's total: 42 kilometers and 6 hours 38 minutes of paddling time. The river's current helped enormously.

Day 4Tver, heading home

On Sunday we woke at 4:30 in the morning to catch the bus to Tver. In Tver we met up with Lyosha Brin; he and his wife showed us the city center, we had lunch and headed home on the suburban train.

With the June holidays over, the whole platform was densely packed with tourists, cyclists and paddlers, so we barely squeezed into the train's vestibules — different ones, as it turned out — and rode home separately.