Sarah Hooper's blog - Chapter 2 (Pre-trip Planning, Gear & Food)

As you may know from previous posts, much of the river we paddled was relatively unknown.

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Much of Dave's interest in this river was about John Rae himself, the Artic explorer [ more about him later ] Whilst not quite bold enough to say we were the first to paddle some of this, we can say that the only account of this area we were able to find was a couple of years ago by the Borealis Team, and they paddled the stretch of the Rae River from Cox lake to the mouth. We paddled approximately 100k (thats a guess - I have not confirmed this yet...) above this and have not been able to find any reports of this being done previously.

Dave spent a lot of time trying to gain as much information as possible about the unknown area but without much success - other than being able to study the maps (on which significant falls and some rapids are marked but obviously without grading) None of the pilots we asked or any of Dave's friends from Yellowknife knew anything about the upper section of the Rae or its south branch (now named La Plante). Water levels were unknown and we couldn't be sure even if there would be any ice in this area.

Mark registered our trip with the RCMP in Kugluktuk and Air Tindi were also aware of our trip schedule with emergency contact details for us all.

Dave & Mark were definites on the trip from the start and Dave posted on the MYCCR webpage advertising for other paddlers to join them. Originally he had intended an ideal number of 6 paddlers, in 3 boats, but found that only Gene & I 'applied'.

Emergency

In addition to the SPOT device we also had hired a satellite phone and Dave had brought is PLD, along with a plentiful supply of spare batteries for all of them.

SPOT

A spot device is a relatively new device, readily available now for ( when I last looked - $100 plus a yearly registration fee ) It allows you to send GPS co-ordinates along with a standard 'I'm OK' message to pre-determined email addresses or mobile phone numbers. It also has one option for a personal message - ours in this case was ' OK but wind bound ' and finally a SOS message. If you wish it also has a tracking facility which you can activate but this requires the GPS to be on all the time. For more information check out the link i n my 'relevant links' section of the blog.

SAT PHONE

Sat phones are easy to hire and is a standard piece of emergency equipment for such remote northern trips.

PLD (Personal Locator Device ?)

I'm still not too sure about this and how it differs from SPOT...more research needed.