You love nature, rowing and a bit of adventure, join our association either yourself or through your rowing club and participate to our rowing tours.

The Ontario Adventure Rowing (OAR) promotes the discovery of the beautifull region east of the Great Lakes through the sport of rowing.The Association runs a fleet of touring quads and facilitates the organization of rowing tours within the region. The touring coxed sculling quads are stable and sturdy, are a perfect fit to explore the eastern Canada waterways as they allow rowers to cover fair distances safely and at a good speed.

Tour Schedule

You can find details about our rowing tours through the site, feel free to post our tour schedule on your club buletin board, we prepared a pdf version of our schedule for this purpose. Find it here.

Membership and Tour Participation

The tours cover part of the old fur trade routes, old transportation waterways like the Rideau Canal, the Trent Severn and vary in distance, duration and difficulty.

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive detailed informations on the upcoming tours and events.

To participate in the tours, you must be an experienced sculler and be a member of the Association (see membership).   Some multiple days tours or tours in canals, require experience on previous tours.  All participants are expected to help to unload boats, rig boats, and unrig boats, and load boats.  Tours are organized by volunteers in rowing clubs which are members of the Association.

To find out how you or your club can become a member of the association, see the membership section.

International Events

The group sometimes sponsors the participation in tours abroad.  In 2008, 29 ‘voyageurs’, mostly Ontarians, participated in the Rallye du Canal du Midi in southern France, rowed 206 km, and passed around 40 lock stations in 5 days.

Row Back in Time

The waterways of Eastern Canada from the Great Lakes to the St Lawrence River in Quebec are situated within the world's largest body of fresh water. The complex system of lakes and rivers of western Quebec and Ontario was first used by the natives. Native canoers traveled the rivers and lakes for hunting, fishing and fur trading. Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Nouvelle France traveled through western Quebec and Ontario around 1612 and was the first european to discover the beauty of the region. Champlain's trips to and through Huronia were along the Rivière des Prairies, Ottawa River, the Mattawan, lac du Talon, de la Tortue, Nipissing, The French River, Lake Huron and the Goergian Bay, the Severn, lake Simcoe, Sturgeon Lake, Pigeon and Stoney Lakes, Ottonabee and Rice Lakes, the Trent River, the Bay of Quinte and Lake Ontario. At the time, traveling was done in canoes and some sections required portage.

Later, the colonisation of Ontario brought canals to connect the rivers and lakes together to allow the transport of heavier loads faster and without portages.

While Champlain paddled in canoes, most of the rivers, canals and lakes are calm enough to be travelled by rowing boats.   Famous Canadian rowing boats include the 'batteaux' used in the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries, Durham boat rowed on the Great Lakes as well as the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers in the 1810s to 1840s, the York boats of the Hudson Bay Company which plied the rivers and lakes of Western Canada in the nineteenth century, and were employed on Arctic expeditions of discovery and recovery (e.g., the search for John Franklin's ill fated 1840s attempt to navigate the North-west Passage), the Red and Churchill Rivers of Manitoba in the nineteenth century, and the Ottawa Valley pointer boats used in the log drives.  As well rowing clubs staged long distance events like buoy races in more slender boats, beginning in the 1860s.  Ned Hanlan, who won the world sculling competion in 1880, participated in many long distance events on Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River. 

Row touring was introduced in Canada by European scullers in the mid-1990s.