Almost a Watery Grave - Part 3

We were both dragged back into the current and this is when we looked at each other and realized that having missed our first attempt at a self rescue, we were in serious trouble....

Andrew and I looked down river and decided on the next fallen tree to stop ourselves with. This had to work. We swam with everything we had left in us. The cold had sapped just about everything. We managed to get the nose of the canoe out of the centre of the river. We swam and pushed and as we reached the tree....whack... A branch of the the tree that was just under the surface of the water punched me straight in the chest. Then part of the tree got stuck under the sea of the over turned canoe. We finally made it to safety.

As I looked up to see Andrew I noticed that he wasn’t holding onto the opposite end of the canoe. Instead I saw him drifting slowly away from safety. Lucky for Andrew one end of the rope that we use to tie up our canoe to docks floated away with him. In his scramble to swim upstream towards the canoe he found the small yellow nylon rope. So, hand over hand Andrew pulled himself back to the canoe.

Now we found ourselves in knee deep water in a flooded wooded area at the edge of a farmers field. We flipped the canoe over to find both of our paddles and my knapsack containing our wallets and cellphones. We couldn’t just call for help because we were in the middle of a stretch of river that was inaccessible to everything that wasn’t stupid enough to go canoeing that day. Our other option was to portage the canoe across the farmers field and then play chicken across highway 401. So Andrew and I decided to do the most sensible thing that we could think of. We emptied the water out of the canoe, turned it back over, climbed inside and paddled out back into the river...

We paddled down the river now sitting right on the bottom of the canoe to lower our centre of gravity and we paddled hard to get down river because it would be another few kilometres until we could reach where my dad was waiting with the van. At the next bridge that we came across there was my dad, standing and taking our picture (my mom said he had to take a photo of us canoeing or he couldn’t come back home). So cutting our journey short by a few kilometres we beached on the side of the river and hopped out. We were on dry land and headed home.

And that reason survivors, is why you should always wear a life jacket while canoeing.