Bloodvein River Solo 2015

Wednesday Aug 12 – Day 17 Time: 5 hours 58 minutes Distance: 20.0 km I managed to get up at 11:30am, mostly cloudy with a fairly strong wind from the South. Feeling pretty beat up from yesterday I struggled to get my gear down to the dock. By the time I left,. Around 2:30pm the cloud had gone away, the sun was beating down and it was quite warm. While the wind felt nice when standing around it was no joy on the water, the extra energy required to paddle against it outweighed any cooling effect. The wind never got really bad, just a constant negative which affected my moving average. There were a couple of short stretches where the river turned giving me a little push. Towards the end of the day I once again found myself paddling into the low sun, this was my punishment in exchange for the calmness which came around the same time of day.

About 3.6km from the cabin there is what looked from the water to be a decent campsite. Past that there are a few other spots that would work but if you have come this far you should continue to #48 Chap Falls where there is an excellent site beside the CIII/IV that would make a great play spot. I dragged the fully loaded boat over the flat rocks at the top (left a fair bit of vinyl!) then ran the bottom.

The next section of calm water was quite nice, lots of rock and trees, not dramatic but very pleasant viewing. I saw dozens of possible campsites in this area; some might require a short climb to get to a flat area above the shoreline rock.

Rapid #49 was a very simple little CI ledge river wide, not much further was #50 was a nice CIII, wide with a choice of lines, some good and some bad. The sun was falling low on the horizon, I was not in the mood for risk so I lined and dragged the top and snuck the rest hard right.

This was pretty much the end of moving water for the day other than the final CII at #51 where I hoped to camp. I had wantred to be off the water by 7:30, I estimated 5.5km to go, and clearly I wasn’t going to make it in 10 minutes!. It turned out to be 7km and getting dark fast before I came to the rapid. I ran the rapid on centre left as recommended, took one small wave then headed over to RR to scan the shore. There was an easy landing and a nice flat spot on dirt nestled in the trees but with a clear view of the river and the rapid. The sky was perfectly clear so I set up my solo bug tent, if it should rain it would be easy to rig up a tarp in a hurry.

It had been a good day for birdwatching, after yesterday’s pelicans I was rewarded with a pair of swans, half a dozen bald eagles and lots of geese. There are many beaver in this part of the river, saw a few swimming around earlier in the evening and trying to scare me off with their tail slaps. There were a few bugs around, the little tent not being suitable for cooking meant that I settled for munching on lunch stuff that I seemingly never get to during the day. Even almost two hours after dark it’s still very warm, around midnight after the bugs had gone I made a mug of tea and sat out staring up at the stars. I’ll aim to underway in good time tomorrow; I’d like to camp early.

 

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