Day 5

The canoe people were no longer with us and were camping further downsteam. In the middle of the night, Christian, their guide, sneaked into our camp and stole our big coffee pot, replacing it with their smaller one. I guess this was a prank.

Today we were to pass through level 3, 4 and 5 rapids, starting with the ones just down river
from camp, so we had on our helmets and everything in the rafts was firmly tied down. We
passed through the rapids, very exciting, and stopped before going through all of them so the
guides could look at them and determine what was the best path.

At one time before lunch we stopped on an island of huge boulders to have a snack of the
remaining cake, to check the upcoming rapids and so Hugo could take some pictures of Roy for
the newspaper. I took some pictures of Roy too, and in a couple of them, he waved at the fans
because he knew my pictures were for them.

It was this day that the helicopters began to appear, flying over us from time to time, and obviously more than one. We surmised that they were from Hydro-Quebec because there didn’t seem to be any reason to have so much air traffic over this remote part of the river.

After lunch we encountered level 5 rapids that the guides weren’t sure we could get through without taking everything out of the rafts for portaging, but they decided to try. Derek called us together to tell us that it was rather dangerous and he needed 4 strong paddlers to take the raft through the very narrow pass, but he didn’t want to carry all of us because of the weight. Before he could finish his sentence, Roy was holding up his hand volunteering. The others of us took our paddles and climbed over the huge boulders that were along the river on the west side. The neoprene boots were really slippery, but by this time the sun was shining some so at least the boulders that weren’t in the water were dry. They were really tall though and hard to climb over.

The rafters made it through the rapids on their first attempt, and they were moving very very fast to do so. We all gathered together again and spent some time walking around on the boulders and taking pictures of the fierce rapids that surrounded us.

By this time it was much colder and getting towards evening, so we paddled to a sandy island on the east bank just down river from the falls to set up camp. Even though it was terribly cold, I
decided that I had to wash my hair, so after I set up my tent, I put on my Nike running top and my base layer pants, sat down in the water along the sandy river bank, tossed my head down into the water and washed my hair with my biodegradable shampoo in the freezing cold water. It was so cold that my hair didn’t dry even over night and, of course, looked even worse than it had, but at least it was (somewhat) clean, and I had acquired some sopping wet clothes that didn’t dry for the remainder of the trip.

There was wet sand everywhere, inside my tent and out, and no way to wash if off without getting covered with wet sand again. I finally gave up and put my clean(est) socks on over the sand on my feet, no choice.

This island was quite small, so our tents were very close together, and the latrine was set up on the far south end of the island. The kitchen and campfire were on the far north end, and our tents were in between.

After dinner Nicholas baked some bread in a skillet to save for the next day’s lunch. It was
another beautiful night with a full moon occasionally covered by clouds. The Big Dipper was
right over us to the south, some of the few stars we could see.