I have entered at BH twice, and made one trip to French and one to Nym. I would say, as a 65 year-old, that either is doable, with the French way harder by virtue of the Olifaunt-Fern 1-miler being uphill towards French.

As someone else said, you could easily enter BH and/or Cirrus and have a ton of water to paddle without significant portages. If it were me I would enter Cirrus from BH, explore it, move down to Q, explore it, then come back to BH and out. (I may do this solo in 2010, 9-10 days.)

If you do decide to go across the park, in either direction, I'd allow one or more days for wind issues, and remember that wind USUALLY favors west to east travel. 10 days would be ideal, I'd think.

Finally, I had not heard that Stanton Bay had re-opened. If it was open, I would prefer entering there for a Pickerel-Rawn-French trip. (By all means try to fish for smallmouth in the narrows between Stanton Bay and Pickerel!)