Almost There
Niki Choo
One of the scariest points on the trip happened three nights before the end. We knew there was a storm coming in and our plan was to hunker down in the tent and wait it out.
We were camped on a spot 2-3 feet above the water and didn’t even think much about how far off the water we were. We also knew that the tides only came up a foot in Tuk so we didn’t even think that in the Mackenzie Delta it would be much different. So, when we woke up in the morning to big winds and rain, it didn’t really phase us. It was also a non-event when high tide happened in the morning.
But then at around 4pm in the afternoon the wind shifted and started coming in from the Northwest, basically straight into our tent. High tide was at 7:30pm, so we knew if we could make it till then, things would start to get better.
But at 4:30, the tail of the boat was in the water, and the storm surge was making us think we weren’t going to make it till 7:30. Jared walked the beach to see if there was higher ground anywhere close by but there wasn’t. We could retreat a few feet behind us but it wasn’t much better.
Our choices were to haul gear and boat up the steep bank behind us or try and find a spot further along the coast. The seas looked bad, but not too bad, so we decided to pack the boat and get in the water. We paddled half a mile, the boat would teeter at the top of the wave and then smash down, sometimes a third of the boat was out of the water.
We knew we had to get off the water soon, and then as soon as we lost the protection of the islands things got hairier. The swell was even more chaotic, the wind even more intense, so we said ‘we have to risk it to get into shore’ but the shore we were looking at had logs pushing up against the shore. We really had no choice but to point it straight and hope for the best. We prepared to be in the water if it didn’t go smoothly. It was hard keeping the boat straight in winds and swell like that, but we managed to do it. Jared jumped out first, over the logs and used the swell to pull the boat a little out of the water, and then I jumped out and we hauled the boat over the logs and onto shore.
