It’s crazy to think how close our departure date is becoming. The guys have come a long way since our first meeting, and at this point, we have covered all the skills that needed to be successful during this trip. So now, we are focusing on refining skills. It’s usually said that the more you do off trail, the more you can do on trail.
Wednesday we did just that by starting off the meeting with more portaging practice. The guys were able to push through and make it all the way to Pine Point Road almost doubling our previous furthest distance. After portaging, we put the canoes right into the water. The main focus of the paddle was cleaning up and practicing various strokes that help with canoe control like draws, cross-draws and prys.
Today was an exciting day that we all had been waiting for! Route Planning! All the maps were laid out, the guys were shown various starting point possibilities and a couple ending point spots. The rest was all up to them.
Figure 1. - Credit: Chat GPT
Around lunch time, we took a quick snack break that quickly turned into critical thinking about very realistic ideas that Les Voyageurs may add to future trips to allow crews to be dropped off into even more remote areas quickly and fuel efficiently. The first question at hand… would a canoe survive being thrown out of a plane if properly oriented and correctly targeted towards the water? It took a lot of consulting of Chat GPT and a use of many physics equations that went way over my head to come to a conclusion. The canoe would survive! We will be bringing our scientific findings and ideas to Jack Grabinski.
On a more serious note, by the end of the meeting we had a solid rough draft of a route that we will touch up during our next meeting. It gets really exciting to see marks finally being made on a map!