The Paddler Autumn/Fall issue 2017

Day three – evening paddle
getting quite slick, each of us taking a trip with
personal bags first, and returning for the canoes
and communal food bags on the second leg. This
portage was only about 150 metres, and
followed a small path between the boulders.
It was on the second leg that it happened, just a
few metres from the end. Carrying my canoe on
my shoulders, I came across Dris’s load
abandoned by the trail; clearly something had
occurred. Reaching the put-in, we found Dris sat
on a rock in clear pain.
Carrying the big food bag, he’d slipped on a
relatively simple bit of path, and turned his ankle.
Badly. It was unclear if he’d be able to continue.
Being lunchtime, we stopped for an hour to give
him chance to recover a little. Everybody was a
little quiet, each of us pondering the
consequences of the injury, and whether Dris
would be able to move at all. We even wondered
if he’d broken it, and if so, that was likely to be the
end of the trip, other than finding a way to
extricate ourselves, call for help, or deploy the
‘SPOT’ emergency device that we carry.
Fortunately, Dris reckoned it was only a bad
sprain, but he could only just hobble about. I
helped him bind his ankle, deployed some
ibuprofen, and took stock. We were on the
shores of a kilometre-long lake, it was midafternoon,
and at the other end of the lake we
knew there was a hut marked on the map. We
decided to head for that, and have an early finish,
giving Dris time to recover a little before we
made any further decisions in the morning.
Rain clouds approached, matching our unsettled
mood, as we paddled the lake, the hut a clear
target in the distance, a real haven in the
ThePADDLER 95