Day 9

Time: 4 hrs 10 min

Distance: 11.5 km (103.1)

Up at 9:00am, reasonably bug free in the hut. It's still raining more on than off. No rush today, which means pancakes for breakfast, we chitchat about a better shelter design and waste away several hours doing not much of anything. Eventually we start the long packing procedure, added to the usual we are dealing with wet clothes and transitioning to food barrel #2. There are plenty of leftovers in #1 so we simply added some lunches and 2 MIAB for later. I finally rigged up my fishing rod, hoped to drop a line today, perhaps a fish dinner is in the cards.

We set off at 3:00pm in a light drizzle and a brisk headwind, we paddled through rolling waves punctuated by white caps where the surprisingly strong current conflicted with the oncoming wind. This must be a nice stretch here on a calm day. The river is very wide, 2 - 400 metres, we pass a couple of swifts(?) at the constrictions. Just past the mouth of the Larsen River there is a section on river right that looked good for campsites, we continued past going right at Brown Island. There is obviously very fast water here, a giant swift? a CI?, the high water and strong headwind obscures the truth. Even with the wind the current is pushing us along, unfortunately this assist is brief, the river widened and turned slightly to face more directly into the wind, we are forced to creep along the right shore. We had earlier agreed 4 hrs would be enough for today, at 6:30 I said, "another half hour and I'll find a spot", the rain fell harder, the winds increased,

I stopped at the first potential site, it offered little except a long hike back to some very wet and lumpy moss, the second spot a little further along was much better with a good flat and relatively dry spot 30 feet back from the shore, we decided to pitch the small tent, dumping our wet river gear and crowding inside to recover. We munched on cheese & crackers before consuming 2 MIAB (Mexican Rice / Lasagna). We missed out on lunch again today so that means we are still technically on food barrel #1, it's looking like we may have brought a bit too much food in spite of cutting down slightly during the original packing stage. At Midnight it's still raining as it has now done for well almost 36 hours, it's been a short but unrewarding day on the river, we haven't covered much ground and it's been fairly unpleasant, cold, wet, windy about the only good thing has been the relative lack of bugs.