Welcome to another episode of modern outdoor survival. This is a different style of episode for us, and I think it's possibly our most important episode so far. We have had guest episodes before, but rather than somebody telling me about their life experience or talking about one particular topic, this time is a story about a gentle river adventure that then quickly turned into a fight for survival. Real survival stories are nothing like those concocted, scripted, sensationalist TV game shows or movies. When I hear a story like this, there is always something that stays with me afterwards, and that's just how ordinary it is in real life. There's no orchestral soundtrack, no dramatic camerangle or foreshadowing plot device. There's just a noise, a shout, a slip, and then a glimpse of something happening in the periphery of your vision, and then they're gone. They're under the water, they're over the edge, just gone. The culture of outdoor survival has seemingly become all about expensive gear or showing off on social media, and this always tends to obscure one very important component that of death. Being in a survival situation means that one of the likely outcomes is death, and death is sometimes a lonely and quiet experience. Hypothermia, drowning, major trauma through injury. The people I know of who have died in these ways, they probably knew very little about the actual moments of their own death. There are a few different layers to this story, the people involved and their respective experience levels, the route and equipment they chose, the time of year, and the weather. It happened a couple of months ago now and involved my American friend Terry and a chap I'm going to refer to as Grizz. They've got some work related reasons to stay anonymous, and you will probably pick upon a bit of that during the episode, and there's a bit more information about that in the show notes. First, you're going to hear from Grizz, and I'll let him pick up the story, all right, So the uh, this happened on the West Fork of the White River, which if you were to look on a map, basically we put in a little north of Martinsville and we were going to paddle about twenty three miles over two days to the town aport. And it it looks like we're really you know, say, if you look at it on a map, we're paddling through what would appear to be pretty civilized country. But as we found out the reality of it is once you go past one certain bridge, you're on the river for at least fourteen miles. And the plan was to paddle about fourteen miles down the river to a piece of state ground that has no access from anywhere but the river. And I was looking at it, you know, I wanted to look at it as a possible place to hold bushcraft training classes and just you know, classes on introduction to canoe camping, things of that nature. It's one hundred acre partial of land that I don't have to buy. I hadn't been on this river and probably I know, I did a trip on it with my church sometime in the eighties, so it had been thirty five forty years since I had canoed this river. And the uh, why did we go when we did? Well, right now, that river is that flood stage When we went, it was not, And that's just you know, to get a scouting trip in before summertime, it had to be that weekend. So we went on a day when it was forty degree temperature, the water temperature was forty degrees and the wind was I would say between five and twenty miles an hour depending. Yeah, later it wasn't. It certainly wasn't like that when we put in because it was too early in the morning. Don't get me wrong, Terry. It wasn't more than I can handle. But it was not optimal for taking someone who doesn't spend eight, ten, twelve days a month in a canoe. Sure, and that's that's on me. I drug you into it. In the UK, there is something of a cultural divide between dry suit cloud whitewater paddlers, river drifting canoeists and wave riding sea kayakers, but there are some common themes. For any kind of whitewater kayaking or canoeing. You'll tend to see people wearing dry suits or at least wetsuits, even in the middle of summer. Sometimes that doesn't mean that you won't see people paddling in normal clothes in the warmer months, but within that subset of outdoor culture, you will find more people wearing some kind of protection against the cold water than not. This, of course, isn't the trend across the globe, and I know plenty of people in Canada or the northern States of the US who wouldn't bother with such protection when paddling a canoe. As long as the ice has gone from the lake, they'll keep themselves dry by just not falling in. I am mentioning all of this now because you'll find some slightly conflicting advice between different regions. And if you are listening to this podcast to get some information for your own adventures, then I can only urge you to read and research as broadly as you can. There's a lot of information out there, and if you only listen to one source, then it's going to be impossible for you to make an educated decision. There are two environmental factors to consider for this story, the temperature and the fact you will lose heat four times faster when you are wet, and you don't have to be in the water for that to occur. If you're wet from spray, rain or just a dunking in the river, then you are now going to be shedding heat faster than you can generate it. And if you add some moving air into that, you've got a high probability of hypothermia developing. That forty degree fahrenheit temperature they talk about in that earlier section. Well, for the rest of the world, that's about four and a half degree celsius. Terry mentioned a wind speed swinging between five to twenty miles an hour four the day. So if we put those temperatures into a windshill calculator with a ten mile an hour or sixteen kilometer hour wind speed, then we're going to get a feels like temperature that's much closer to freezing. There doesn't have to be ice and snow on the ground for hypothermia to be a real risk. Yeah, he called and said, hey, let's go canoeing next weekend, and I said, okay. I mean that's pretty much what happened. I was out of state teaching someplace else and and he called and said let's go. When I was like, all right, I'm game. So I'm always I'm always good with whatever, and usually I don't need to be watched. So well, yeah, exactly before we have formally started, I mean, you know, we were friends. We're not co workers so to speak, you know, and the way that I would treat a student, I wasn't in that mindset. No. Also, I mean obviously there's a certain element of you know, risk to not being in your living room, but experience level, notwithstanding, looking at this on paper, you could not fairly describe this as anything, right, you know, other than some things that I think that we observed once we got out there. There was a lot more debris, down trees and just you know, all sorts of obstructions. And I knew there would be a certain amount of that, and I'm sure you did too, but I suspect it was certainly worse than I thought it was going to be. And I mean, I don't know what your what your perspective on that was. And as missided, I mean, I knew it wasn't a clean river, but and you know, you say that the water was brown, right, and I'm used to the water being brown from the amount of tanning just from downs leeves. This is where I'm going. Brown is okay. There are lots of reasons for water to be brown, particularly river water, that are totally fine. However, I suspect not all of brown coloration came from tannins and oh yeah, now, oh that was yeah, that you know, and and the water being you know, well as measured by kestrel. Later in the day, you know, the water was thirty eight, the air or the water was forty two. The air temperature was thirty eight. So I think first, you know, first thing in the morning, it didn't quite have the aroma that it developed, you know, as the temperature went up just a little bit. So I think this is a good time to start talking about the location for all of this. You can look it up for yourself. It's the White River in the state of Indiana, downstream of Indianapolis and other urban centers. It sounds like it is suffering from the same pollution and contamination that many of our rivers in here in the UK are. It's also not an untouched remote wilderness. There's farmland either side of the river, roads in the distance. How is on the map it doesn't look that extreme, But when you start thinking about the logistics of rescue, then you will start to see that you don't need wilderness to be remote. If there's an incident on the river, then you'll first need to get to dry land, which can be a challenge in itself. Once you are there, what next can you walk? Can you move to a place of greater safety? Do you need to pull yourself up a steep bank or through the debris of last winter's floods. Can you even get out of the channel cut by the river to that farmland either side? If you've been in the water, then hyperthermire is quickly taking hold. So do you need to stop and sort yourself out before going any further? Do you have the equipment to do that? Or is that now floating down the river along with your canoe? And if you can resolve the immediate threats to your safety, how do you call for help? Does your phone have a signal down there in the valley? Do you have an alternate way of calling for help? Plenty of people have died quietly within earshot of a busy road or where in other circumstances they could have simply walked to get help for themselves. Think about this for your next trip. How long will it take someone to reach you if you were to call for help in the middle of that trip, if you had an injury, how long would it take for you to reach a point where you could find help. If a member of your group had an injury and couldn't easily move, what would you do next? We set off? What I mean it was, it was. It was light out, So about about seven we paddled, I think we paddled about four miles till we did that first stop just to have a pee break. And I actually I have to relearn this every time, it seems, but I had to flip the order that some of the gear was loaded in my canoe just so I would not be so but heavy m And then we uh so we and then we took off. We passed the the Highway thirty nine bridge, yeah, which is that is the last place that you can get off the river until you get to Perragon, which is about fourteen miles south of where we put in from. And the the accident, the incident, whatever we want to call it, happened about two and a half miles past the thirty nine bridge, so it was about six and a half miles from where we put in by my calculations, and so it seems about right. But I thought like the one was going fairly well, you know up to that point, I mean we were getting through the snags and we we hadn't we hadn't really faced that in your face wind that was the river, yeah, because I mean the river was was flowing about for five miles an hour, and add in, let's just say one person paddling a canoe, you can do it three miles an hour. So we should have been, you know, six to eight miles an hour moving downstream. But I don't think we were. I think we were being held back a little by the wind, not as much, not as much as the day as the day went on. Yes that because, yes, that the wind was well the wind. Hard turn in a wind is what caused the incident. I feel now, granted. I mean I saw it over my shoulder, you yelled, and still had my own snags and to deal with. There's another really important factor coming up now, the choice of boat, the gear they chose, and how it is stored. A canoe can be a very agile, responsive craft, but if you get the balance wrong, it can be a real pig to handle. Canoes have a lot of freeboard, the amount of vertical side between the waterline and the top of the gunnel. This is important to know about because that vertical surface is going to act as a sail catching the wind and it could overcome your efforts to steer it. The size of the canoe, your seating position, where you stole the gear. It will all make a difference the equipment you take, how you store it, and where you store it is important too, especially when you think about where it's going to end up if the canoe tips over. I asked the guys about like gear choices. I had a brand new hunting pack that I was just trying out, and but I mean I had everything in waterproof bags and I had the a bear barrel with my food in it. You know. I had a sleeping bag. I had a tarp that I was going to set up. I didn't have a stove other than a canteen cup stove and a couple of uh well, I had a handful of fuel tabs. I planned on cooking over a fire the the whole time, and just had that just to be able to make coffee under the tarp if it happened to be raining Sunday morning. Then I had a blue barrel in a harness that I had put all of my dogs gear in because I had Tika. My husky was wearing a PFD. But his uh panier panier, I don't know, it's it's a French word. His h his backpack and uh that hangs on each side of him with all of his food bowls and food all of that, and I spoil my dog. He had his own sleeping bag and his own ground cloth. So that was how I had everything. And I use these climbing slings. It's just tubular nylon that's sewn together to make a loop. And uh, I have a few of those with a lot of snap links, and I wrap, you know, I will wrap that around thwart and the portage harness and through all of my packs and everything so that there is no when when I flip, the gear just stays in the boat. I was paddling a sixteen foot cedar strip canoe with a keel on it. You know, a keel definitely helps you when you if you're doing anything other than just paddle on lake. Yeah, exactly. So mine was a sixteen foot fiberglass without a keel, which I'm sure contributed to some of that side slip that I was experiencing. And I'll and you brought it up when I sent that picture to you. You were you were also a bit butt heavy, and once again I wasn't in expedition leader mode and looking for things like this and telling you, hey, stop, you need to move your gear farther forward in the canoe like well, and I couldn't see that obviously, right, Yeah, I mean I had a couple of things that maybe I could have shifted forward, but you know, really it probably would have been better if I'd had a couple more things that weighed more, you know, all other things being equal, if I'd had more weight in the front, it would have been better, you know, right. So my gear was actually very similar other than my ruck was a little smaller. I was using a three day pack because we weren't going to be gone that long, and I had my like my food and things like that split up across a couple of the different dry bags. So I had a small three day pack. I had a large dry bag that had my sleeping bag in it, an additional snug pack jungle bag that I brought for hangus, and uh a woobie, and I mean it was basically all the all the sleep you know, the sleeping stuff was in that large dry bag, which worked fine obviously, and then there was a smaller dry bag that had some other you know, like I distributed most of my gear across all of the bags, so there would be some fire, you know, some fire making something in each one of them, some food in each one of them, you know, that sort of thing. In case I was to lose any I had on my body a a small you know, nutsack if you will, that I intended to put on when I left and take off, you know, essentially until I got back. And that had the space blanket. It had a couple of different you know, methods of creating fire in it, and some heat tabs and a VS seventeen panel and a small strobe and just a small knife. We weren't going that far, you know. I mean I could have, barring exactly what happened, I could have been okay with what I had in that pack for a night, no problem. You know. We brought enough water, you know, for the entire time, because I wouldn't have wanted to run that through, even through one of my purefires. I mean, I still wouldn't want to drink whatever came out out of the other side. And of course I had Angus and who, for everyone else, is a ninety pound Irish Wolfhound bearded Collie mix who is the best behaved dog on the planet. And we were both learning to PFDs. And he in no way. And I've had a couple of people say this in the last week or two. They're like, did he cause you? No, he could not have behaved better. He did not cause the accident. He did nothing to make it worse. As a matter of fact, at every point he did exactly what I would have wanted a dog to do in the movies. So yeah, he did. And oh, so I had a I had my sleeping pad. I had a half you know, a backpacking thermoor s pad that I brought, you know, both for the purpose of my sleeping on, but also put it. I put it on the floor of the canoe for him to lay down on so he wouldn't have to lie directly on the fire or glass and get you know, cold after some many hours or whatever. And so as I said, and we both had PFDs. And I then I had what I had on my body that I had that pack. I had of course my you know, I had a knife in my pocket. I had a butt strider. I had my glock nineteen X and two magazines on a lanyard on my belt, so it wasn't going anywhere. I had the foresight to get a good glass, a good strap for my glasses, which, as it turned out, I definitely would have lost my glasses if I hadn't been wearing that strap and that while that wouldn't have been critical, I'm not blind, it just would have sucked. It would have added a slightly bit you know, slight bit more suck to a sucky situation. So, you know, but everything that was on my body that I intended and secured to stay on my body even if we went in, you know, regardless of how rough we went in, all of that work, every bit of it. You know, I came out of that water with every piece of gear that I went into the water with no no complaints there, I guess. You know, you brought up all your survival kit. I didn't even talk about mine, and so I'm gonna I'm back up if it's okay with Richard. So I had a hill People gear kit bag with a survival kit in it that also included a oh about a six inch fixed blade knife under one arm and a small double bit axe under the other arm. And then I had a Glock nineteen in that kit bag. And then I was wearing a Rekie smock. I had a mile large sleeping bag and fire making gear and every and also in that kit bag because I'm not one of those people who I collect tinder for making fires on dry days, and so I had a roll of birch bark and some fat wood in that kit bag. Planning, checking maps, reading trip reports from other people, checking weather forecasts. All of this is vital. It's not particularly exciting, but it can make all of the difference when things are going wrong. It's also important to know what you cannot know, what has changed since the map was made, or Google took their last satellite photo, or what effects of winter storms have had. Springtime trips are always going to be interesting, especially when you may be the first people to venture on that route since the last ice, since the last storm or flood. You find this with rock climbing or mountaineering. The route that was nice and stable last autumn is now a loose pile of crumbling rock after months of freeze thaw cycles. The water gets into the rock and cracks it as it freezes and expands, and then you go to pull up on that nice firm handhold that you used last year, and this time it's now just a loose section and as you pull on it, you bring half of the crackdown. There's always going to be an element of the unknown, so you may as well do what you can to fill in the gaps around that and at least get some kind of firm grasp on what's likely to happen four mile of basically non incident, you know. I mean, there was there were a few snags that well few, there were, you know, several places that we had to negotiate through, and I felt like we did with no problem. And then now we had done sort of a map recon of of this, you know, on Google Earth before we went down it, so I already had kind of a picture in my head of where we were in any given time, and this particular place that we were coming up on was one of the places that that I had identified as being you know, potentially a little bit of a problem. It wasn't, like I said, there was nothing beforehand that I looked at this and thought there's this is unreasonably dangerous or whatever. But there were a couple of spots that that I definitely thought, Okay, this is this is a part that we're going to want to keep an eye on, you know, when we get there, and this was this part was probably the most significant one that that I felt like I had identified prior to that. So we're coming up on it, and many many large snags in the water, root balls, you know, just logs and in trees uprooted that have been you know, washed downstream from god knows where. And when we were looking at the overhead, there were on the imagery that we looked at, which was probably I think three or four months old, it looked as if you could either pass to the left and you would go around the sandbar and kind of end up in a pond for lack of a better word, and then you would you could go around the sandbar and then eventually rejoin you know, the main course of the river, or you could go straight through it and bear to the right and you know, pass to the to the right of the sandbar, and that would be a more direct route if you did that. It looked like there might have been a spot there about seventy five or eighty, maybe one hundred yards long where we would have maybe possibly had to drag you know, a canoe for no, I would say, no further than one hundred hundred and fifty yards, but it looked clear on the overhead, and then when we got there, there was enough additional debris, snags and whatnot that it was clear that there was really not a path to the right. I was And it's funny because this part I don't I didn't really remember correctly. But so I guess you were ahead of me, and so you started to pass through between those two snags, and you made it through, and I was on the same line. I mean I made the turn, you know, toward the to the left in exactly the same spot that you did, because I was trying to follow your track. So there are two fairly large snags. How far apart would you say, how wide that gap? I mean, I don't know, five yards Maybe that's I was. I was going to guess twenty to twenty five feet at the outside right. You know, it may it may even be tighter than that. But and there was there was I mean, that was the the visual, you know, on top of the water. That was the gap. There were there were things underwater that I was having to to scooch by and even scraped on pretty bad. Yes, I found through there. Yeah, So I was on I got on the same line that you did, and I was tracking to go exactly, you know, between those two snags on the same path. It was at that point that the one the wind dramatically increased, and I would I'm going to guess that it was it probably went from about a five four to six miles on hour breeze suddenly up. It gusted up to about fifteen, maybe almost as much as twenty miles an hour. And that was as it started. Right after I made that bend to the left and was following the same track that you were following, and this gust of wind came in, you know, with my course being you know, twelve o'clock. It came in right at about my two thirty, and it immediately started pushing my vow to you know, to my ten o'clock basically, and it was very powerful, you know, and I obviously I'm sure that being heavy in the rear gave more surface area for the wind to catch and all that sort of thing. And you know, once I'd made it so many degrees past, you know, to the left, then I also was getting pushed by the current from behind, which then basically pushed me perpendicular to the snag on the right, and I think that was when I said whatever I said, like we're going in or you know, or something like that. And because there was there was nothing I could do to stop it at that point, what I anticipated might happen, what I was hoping would happen, was that we would hit the snags basically in the center of the canoe, which was about what happened. And I thought that I would be able to lean into downstream basically and keep the canoe upright and maybe get it hivot with the current around the left side of the snag and maybe get us through it. As it turned out, that was not what physics had in mind. And so we hit the snag and we rotated upstream into the current if you know, if you will, So we were dumped to my left and we went under. It felt like we did a I did at least one rotation before I came up. Angus popped up right next to me and the canoe. Of course, once it was free of you know, everything inside it. Well, actually I don't know that everything dumped out at that point, but Angus and I did. Once it was free of that, then it pivoted around the snag as I was hoping it would have done with us still on board, and it was gone. You know, I've been in cold water before, obviously numerous times. That's that is probably the first time I've been dumped in with I would say I probably had four seconds from the time I legitimately realized we were going in until we were underwater, and so there's definitely a shock factor there. But we came up and I grabbed Angus's straps on his PFD and pulled him into me, and we were stuck on that snag and because of the current, so I pushed us off of that one. Unfortunately, I pushed us well. I pushed us the only way I could go, which was to the right and not to the left, which pushed us into another one. And this is where I encountered some of that stuff underwater that you were talking about. There were a lot of limbs under there, a lot of horizontal limbs, and at one point both my ankles got caught and we were starting to get pulled under by the current. But I kicked loose of that one and went to the left of that one, hit another one. You were gone at this point. The last thing I heard was you saying some thing like, well, you know, go to the sandbar. I was like, oh, well, okay then and that was that. Then we hit the third snag, which was a large root ball with lots and lots of you know, roots protruding, lots of pointy things, lots of it was all in addition to being hard and sharp, it was also very slippery. Let's see, how can I put this without being disgusting? I was thinking, you know, the biofilm that seems to be half an inch thick on all of these objects made it very difficult to get you know, any kind of traction with a boot on it and push myself away from it or whatever we were. We were stuck on that last one for what I now estimate to be probably close to a minute because of the water pressure being so He's so strong, and you know, there were so many things for us to be pressed up against that it was very difficult to get loose from. And and I wasn't using my hands because I had both my hands. I had my arms around Angus and I had my hands wrapped in his PFD straps. He once he realized we were not going to sink, which I think had hit him right about the same time I did it. That I I mean, I knew we weren't going to sync with the PFDs on, but it was interesting. It was like he felt it and realized that we weren't going to sink, and he didn't struggle, and he let me pull him in now and hold him, so he did not hinder, you know, the progress in any way. And I wasn't going to let go of him, you know, I was just like, we're either both getting out of here where neither one of us are getting out of here. But I'm not. I'm not going to let go of him and let him get because if he had gotten sucked down into the next root ball, he probably would not have been able to get out, especially if he'd gotten you know, his PFD straps or something snagged on some of those roots. That probably would have been for him. That's not an acceptable outcome. But I finally got us pushed off of that that third one enough that and thankfully to the left, which was toward the sandbar, and so it's washing us toward the sandbar, and I felt my toes touch and then I thought, oh, I know, I'm not going to be able to stand up in this current, so you know, I'm just going to let it take us in a little bit more, which I did, and I finally got to where I felt my knees touch and I tried to stand up and found that I could not. My legs wouldn't allow me to do that. I couldn't stand up. I didn't have the strength. So I still had a hold of him, and I just started pushing us forward up the sandbar, and I just kept doing that until we were just out of the water basically. Then the wind hit and you know, as I said, it was probably fifteen to twenty miles an hour at this point, and it was gusting, you know, fish tailing between my three o'clock and my twelve o'clock and as far as I could see, grizz is gone, My canoe's gone. I mean, they're gone. I was very cold, and I assumed that Angus was in the same state that I was in, which was probably not true, but that's okay. You know, I was rolling with that, So I kept a hold of him with one hand, and I got my my bag open and I got my space blanket out and discovered that I didn't have the dexterity or the strength to tear the packet open that the space blanket was in. So I reached down to my pocket, I got my knife out, got it and you know, opened cut the packet open. And I don't remember doing this, but clearly I did, because it was where I left it. But I closed the knife and stowed it before I did anything else. And then I tried to get the space blanket open, and I was having a very difficult time with that because of the numbness in my fingers and then the wind. Once I did get it open, I couldn't get the damn thing pinned so I could wrap it around us. And this was a double width space blanket, and so you know, there was more than enough room on there, you know, to cover both of us had I been able to capture an edge of it and get it, you know, to lay still. But I couldn't. And so the best I could do was I had I had at my left hand and I still had a hold of Angus with my right and I pulled it over him, like over my head and over our shoulders basically. But the rest of it was just not doing a whole lot of good I'm not sure how long we were like that, but you know, not long after that, I thought we may be in actual trouble because I'm not getting any warmer. The space blankets not helping. You know, the heat is going away because of the wind. You know, I could probably be screwed here. When I talk to clients about hypothermia and how it can completely blindside you, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It. It's not a case of just toughening up and dealing with a cold. You can be the most mentally and emotionally resilient human on the planet and still be reduced to nothing by wet clothing and a steady breeze. Hypothermia is bloody scary, especially when you notice it taking hold of you and you you know that you can't do much about it. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you can't walk or run anywhere where. It feels like you are wading through treacle. Every time you move, you're asking your body to do something, but it's just not doing that. That's what hypothermia feels like. And if it happens quickly and then you're soon going to be nothing more than a passenger in the whole process, and in wet clothing, in temperatures hovering just above freezing, and with a steady breeze, sucking what remains of your body heat away from you. Death isn't just a risk anymore, it's an inevitability. Without additional assistance, you're just going to drift away into a fitful sleep that you'll never wake up from. We did that hard left, and we have this, uh what solemn type of course that we're having to shoot through. I thought that I told Terry to just to wait till I got all the way to the other side, because I thought, I said, you know, there was I would say there was fifty to seventy five meters of just shooting through, you know, left right, hard left, right turns to get through all of these snacks. And I thought he was going to wait until I was on the other side. But anyway, I'm in the middle of you know, I would say I was halfway through this and I heard a shout and I look over my left shoulder and I see Terry and Angus get launched into the water. I once again I yelled it over my shoulder, you know, into the wind. People might think it's kind of crass, but I simply said, don't die, get to the sandbar. But and that was that was in the immediacy. That was all I could do because I still had to shoot through these, you know, another twenty five yards of obstacles. At this time, Tika, my husky. Tika and I have only been together since September of last year, and he's going to be two next week, so we don't know each other that well, you know. And uh, but he tried to jump in the water to go save Terry and Angus, and I grabbed him by the by the tail and kept him in the boat. I remember that I did see to put the tail end of that so to speak, right, I was laying, Oh, hell, that's not going to help. Yeah, he almost he almost caused us to uh, to flip the exact same way when doing that, and I had to, like say, I finished the obstacles and then got to that larger pond and got the canoe turned around. At that point, I started to see Terry's gear in the river that you know, the yard sail on the water, as I think is what somebody referred to it as. And I remember now seeing as the canoe hit and kind of launched the bungee cords that everything was lashed in kind of like just in slow motion, you know, expanding, and a couple of them breaking and things going into the water. But Terry packed his gear very well. Because his rucksack and one of his two or no, two dry bags were floating in the water. I grabbed his rucksack and just dropped it in my lap. It was rather heavy, and it bruised me literally my entire left thigh. And then I grabbed a couple other things. What I didn't grab was his canoe paddle. I saw it, but it was too far past and his tent, and I just grabbed what I knew had the expensive stuff in it. And then his canoe came and it was completely filled with water. And you know, the only moment of expedition leader type thing that I had had before is I had been very incessant that he tie a rope to the front of his canoe, and I grabbed that rope and I tied it around my waist and then paddled to shore with my gear, his gear, and a canoe full of water. And so then I got to shore and I immediately I grabbed his rucksack, thinking that that was going to be wear his dry clothes and and things like that would be because once again, we're two civilians. We're not we're not following a unit sop packing list. I just I just grabbed his rucksack, threw it on my back and started running back along this sandbar towards where the accident had happened. And there was a little bit of a hill and that I came up and I looked and I didn't see Terry and Angus anywhere. And I thought, oh god, I spent too long grabbing his gear, and he was sucked under and trapped by a you know, a root ball and drowned. And uh. And it was because I'm surveying and I'm not seeing anything, uh you know. And well the reason was I'm color blind. And his red he had the red on one side, silver on the other, uh, survival blanket and it was a very dark red, but it was camouflaged to me, and he had that around him and Angus and he was I would say, you were out. You had your chest or maybe from your waist up out of the water. Yeah. You you and Angus under that blanket that it was gray, it was it was sand to me. I finally what happened was the wind blew and the silver shined, and that's what I saw. Immediately I got got you to out of the water, up on the thing. I pulled that bivvy bag, you know, my our biv bag out of my uh, out of my smock, and gave it to you, and immediately started to get a fire going and telling you to you know, strip out of your clothes. The funny thing, like I said, we did, we didn't have a packing list in s op because you told me that your sleeping bag and your dry clothes were actually in not in your rucksack, they were in one of the dry bags. You know. I got the fire going, and I started running back to the canoe to get your dry bag with your dry clothes and such. And that might have been the second time I've run this century, because my parachute accident was last century, right, so right, and uh so I ran got that, got back and then yes, I got you, you know, just getting you stripped out of your clothes, and you were you were definitely you were definitely feeling the effects of the immersion. And yes, but got you in dry clothes, got uh you in a sleeping bag, got Angus dried off again. Props to snug pack enormous micro fiber camp pal huge in the dry bag, dried him off quick like, and then he was fine. Tika and Angus then went for a bit and they they they ran around the sandbar. It's like Tika got Angus to run and get his heat up and uh, and then he came and by that time you were in the sleeping bag and I was putting hot drinks in you and uh and then he laid down and was a a thorough set to get you warm. Yeah. We stayed there for about three hours. It was about three that this happened at noon and and I would say three three o'clock is when we we departed. Yeah. Uh so you called Michelle after I was in the bag, and I was you. I do remember you asking if I wanted to talk to her, but I couldn't because I was like dry heaving. And boy, that that seemed like it went on for a long time too. It did, because you swallowed a bit of water and and and I you know that uh, I was you know, almost going to roll you over and do the beached whale exercise on you to get some of that out of you. Yeah, well I'm sure that. Thank God that my hepatitis vaccinations are still up to date. We just had lunch. Yeah, and and and at that point I was doing a bit. I was assessing you and just your your mental state and and everything else, just because you know, I was, I mean, I carry search and rescue insurance, and you know, I can call a helicopter in to come get me. And I was pretty sure they're the only ways we were going to get out of there was a helicopter or to had continue on down the river. I actually I talked with somebody who is on the the White River Search and Rescue and yes, in that area, they don't even try and drive. They bring a helicopter. Yeah, because I'm I'm sure you could. I mean, you could get to their cross country from one of the roads, but you'd have to carry all of your rescue shit with you and then you'd have to carry the patient back out. So you know, at the end of the day, like you said, well, I mean we're infantry. We don't call nine one one. We made it all right, So so yeah, and that was, so, you know, that was the you know, we're recovered, and then you know, it came time to to leave, and I was pretty su sure the only way we were going to get out of there was to simply paddle to one of the access sites. But I wanted to give you some hope, and so I told you, well, if we come to a house on the river with a dock, we'll stop. And you know the really funny thing about that too, is as we're packing our shit up and you know, getting ready to drain the canoe, I was thinking to myself, you know what's really going to suck is I'm probably going to have to, you know, do some convincing at least a little bit to get Angus to get back in the canoe after that. But I got everything stowed and which, you know, this was one of those ironic little moments I wished i'd I wish I had had a camera running for when I was laying there by the fire, thinking all my ship was gone, I look up and here comes my therm arrest mat, carried by the wind very slowly, very slowly, thunk thunk, thunk, thunk, and it comes to rest right in front of me, and I thought I'm being punked. But but I'm putting the ship back in the canoe and I'm thinking, now, this is gonna suck. I mean, I know he'll do it. I you know, I never have to fight with him to do anything. But but I turned around and there he was standing there in eight inches of water, waiting to be told to get back in the canoe. And I said, angus, step and he just climbed right back in, laid right back down where he was, and was like, all right, let's go. That was fun, you know. I thought, Wow, that's pretty amazing because I'm pretty sure ninety eight percent of the dogs in the world would have been like trying to get a cat a bath, you know, trying to get him back to get back in the canoe at for that, and so that would be so yeah, So we're packed up, we we head out. It was seven miles to where we could get off the river because we paddled past houses that were on forty to fifty feet above the river and it was it was just a straight, you know, mud bank that there was just no way that we could It would have been practically impossible to get us and the dogs to one of those houses, and we still would have had to come back and to get the gear. The other thing that I just I did was, you know, I stuck an extra canoe paddle in your canoe, which did not dump. It was still there, which and it's my daughter's paddle that I gifted her when we went to the boundary waters. But and then I had that that can that kayak paddle that that I had just for uh, just to try and found that my brain will not process a kayak paddle. I'm too long in the tooth to to learn a new system. And that because you know, a very wide bladed racing paddle of you know, laminated wood, uh is uh, it's it's what works for me. So we're paddling back and we actually we got to the piece of state ground that that I wanted to look at, and the wind picked up even more, Yeah, to the point where we both had to get out of the canoes and we left the canoes in the water. But we just waited and pulled the canoes because the wind was so bad that even with us paddling and the current, we were being blown upstream. Thus uh thus ended our trip. Yeah, and you know, we we we hung out there, had a cup of coffee. The vehicle arrived, We get everything loaded and that we we we get two people, all their gear, two dogs, two canoes loaded up. We get into the jeep. Terry puts the uh the heat at maximum and then he just looks over at me and says, so that happened. At the end of every episode, we finish on three rules of modern outdoor survival. Number one, make good decisions at the right time. Number two. Prioritize training over shining new equipment. Number three, remember Instagram is not your training provider. The first of those is probably the most important. Everything we just heard about was a chain of decisions. Some were taken individually, some as a pair. The section of the river, the timing, the gear, and then the incident itself. There's something that you have probably heard me or others talk about before, right of bang and left of bang. The concept is that you have a timeline running from left to right, and in the middle of that timeline there is an event. There's a bang. Everything to the right of that event on the timeline occurs after the event, and everything on the left occurs before. And one way of looking at training and decision making is to split things down into stuff that happens before the incident and stuff that happens afterwards. And if you put enough effort into the left of bang, then the bang might not happen at all. I honestly don't think there's a huge amount that Terry could have done to prevent that unexpected swim for him and angers on that day on that river, in that boat, at that snag. A more experienced paddler might have foreseen the swing of the wind and the resulting tip of the boat, But then it would be a different man at the helm, and it would be a different situation entirely. From what I have heard speaking to both of them at some length about it, this was just a situation that got away from them. They dealt with it on the day, They made good decisions, and it became an anecdote. But it could easily have ended up being something much worse. If it had just been Terry and angers on the river, then it could well have ended in tragedy. And likewise, if they'd been unable to free themselves from that branch or unable to get to that sandbar. There are one hundred and one details that you could pick out from this. The foresight to keep some kit on his person meant that Terry could at least get somewhat out of the wind, and that certainly helped extend the timeline until Grizz could arrive. Color blindness isn't something I would naturally think of when choosing the color of safety kit, but it probably will be now. The change in safety dynamic between working as peers, working as friends together rather than having someone in a nominal role as leader and just remembering odd inconsequential details from the height of the drama. But you've just got some other parts of your memory just blanked out. It's strange what the brain latches onto and when it doesn't. In the after show, I'm going to talk through some of these points and more besides with Terry and Grizz. You can access that after show by becoming a supporter over on Patreon, and you can find all of that information in the show notes or in the pre recorded section that's coming up next. Thank you for listening.