2 Friends Paddle 200 KM on REMOTE Arctic Watershed River | EP. 4 | We're in the thick of it now

In last week's episode our progress was slowed. We entered the section of river where it starts to drop and drop fast. Something we were equally excited and nervous about. Facing a series of challenges we are now walking more than we are paddling. Our work is not done yet but we remind ourselves that with great challenge comes great rewards. Welcome to this week's episode. How bad is your back hurting this morning? Dude it's actually it hurts to look up at the camera right now. I don't even know if I'm gonna be able to stand. I haven't tried that yet. I'm sore today. Yeah today uh you can you can feel like it's day seven. It feels like it's day seven. I feel like I'm in day seven of a trip in the Hudson's Bay lowlands. Still having fun though. All right so it is the morning of day seven. I can't believe we've already been out here for seven days but also if you think back to like what happened on day one and day two it seems like forever ago. Time's definitely like a weird thing out here where like I feel like there's times that it feels like it you've been out here forever and then there's times that it's like time's just flying by. It's the nice thing about these longer trips is that eventually you just get into such a rhythm where I find like on weekend trips and stuff you just you end up thinking about you don't really get immersed in uh your trip that much like you do like you're out there you enjoy yourself on the weekend but like it's only it maybe it's just so much shorter and then like when it's longer you appreciate it a little bit more because it's like we've been out here for seven days now and like really the only things that you're worried about when you're here is like what you have on your hands that day. Like yesterday was a really messed up day we literally made it three kilometers I can tell you I didn't think about anything else yesterday it was just literally like getting past that section of waterfalls and and islands but yeah it's pretty cool just being completely immersed out here where all you're worried about is making your breakfast your lunch making distance down river being careful with everything that you're doing out here. Our oatmeal blend this morning is steel cut oats with walnuts and some shredded coconut the sweetened thyme and some figs. Figs are probably my favorite part. I feel like the time has been flying by on this one but still sweet that we've got 10 or 11 days out here probably not actually that many because we're likely going to be getting to Moosonee a little bit early we're traveling along James Bay with weather delays with tides we don't really want to be leaving that until last minute so we'd rather you know get across there as quickly as possible. This river has been absolutely amazing I think it was more than either of us really expected to get out of this river so it'll be exciting to see what's ahead of us today and I'm sure we've got some more fun rapids and hopefully some more beautiful sections of river. So we're just packing up the final things that camp here it looks like the clouds have rolled in a little bit more and there's kind of that feeling in the air that makes you think that it might rain. So we're just packing everything into dry bags really quick here getting ourselves into our dry clothes and then we're gonna set off on this river for another great day. As soon as we pushed offshore the weather shifted and we had ourselves a beautiful day. Yeah the next set looks juicy. The river was dropping fast and there was approximately 60 kilometers of river that we were excited to see but also gave us a healthy dose of fear. The fear we had was not only based on getting down this river safely but also on getting through this section with enough time to complete the final stretch across the coast of James Bay to Moosonee. Good? Nice. How's left looking? All right let's do that. Down for chill. Yeah. This is beautiful look at all these rocks on the right. I know. It's really hard to see because of the shadows but this looks chill. It does look chill. Okay well let's back paddle a little bit then. We're gonna go nice and slow. Yeah. You know what to do to keep us in between those. Nice. Yep. Nice bro. All right let's do this. So I think we want to eddy out behind this rock on our right right here. Okay. Just back paddle back carry into it. I got it. Yeah you got it. How's that line looking? We might not be able to back paddle into that. I eddied out behind that rock at the top. I was like yo there's a lot going on down there. Yeah. All right so we got to another set of rapids here that is looking a little too juicy for us. Essentially we just walked the river right shore and it's like so thick in there but it looks like there's an eddy up at the very top over there that if we hug that left shore we can probably pop into that eddy and then we just have this nice rocky portage behind us which would be amazing. So in a second evaluation of the forest here we found a nice way to kind of like sneak down. I'm about to go here. Forward forward forward. Turn us around and then and then we'll probably be quick to the left and then we have to cross our way in. Yeah. Okay. This is a perfect example of a situation where our communication broke down and almost got us into some trouble. Tell me what? Back paddle. We lost the uh the left tilt. Our whole right side went under. It did? All the water was pouring in here. What the? So we can't really see too much on this side for the other side of the river. So there's a much easier portage on this side right along these open rocks and we have an awesome lunch spot for today. Our classic meat cheese and wraps with mustard lunch. Too good to be true. We tried some casts after lunch but still had no luck. The fishing was frustrating but we didn't really have too much time for it today anyways. Good thing we filled up on sopressata. Yo we're also gonna have to be careful with these waves on the right of us. Don't push us into that rock on the left. Yeah. A bit more left. Yep. All right so we have been very slowly making our way down this river. We're in another very tough section where it's just massive set after massive set. A lot of waterfalls and just a lot of really really rocky big rapids that we just can't hit. So we're slowly portaging around each one but it's been a grind today for sure. Good. Is there anywhere we can like get out here? So yo should we get out at that rock straight ahead? Right there? Yeah. Let's do that. Let's do that. Yo we can't miss this. I know. Wow this area looks so nice. Yeah I know. You guys know how the old uh the old adage goes. Another hundred meters. Another portage. Another beefy set of rapids. This river is dropping. Welcome to the catawagami. Currently portaging another massive set. It'll really knock you out. This is my absolute favorite part of this portage. The rocky flats. Pretty easy to walk along. No alders. No waiting. Just a couple slippy streams you got to be careful of. Absolutely beautiful. This is definitely one of the deeper sections we've had to wade. Drops off again somewhere around here. There it is. Does it get a little deeper again? I think it might. Oh no we're chill. Oh baby baby. Holy smokes. It's around seven o'clock. We need to find camp for the night. I think Eric spotted a nice looking campsite just at the bottom of this set of rapids that we might might just want to camp at. And it's on the eastern shore which gives the sun a little longer tonight. Not so bad. Today was an absolute grind. We probably didn't get to camp till about 7 30 tonight. We went through some beautiful areas but it to get around most of the stuff that we had to get around was a lot of work. So it was a bit of a scramble around camp tonight to get a tent set up and get the fire going. Get a water hang going. Hang our clothes to dry. Swim. And go for a quick swim to clean ourselves off. And uh now all that's done. We're making some dinner. We feel refreshed. We did around four kilometers today. Four kilometers maybe 700 meters to 1.2 kilometers of that was paddling. The rest is portaging but we did hit probably one of my favorite sets of the trip. Great whitewater set we hit and uh I'm still loving it. I'm having a lot of fun. So with not many trees around we definitely had to make a bit of an alternative set up to hang our smelly clothes. We still have not gotten to camp early enough to actually be able to wash our stuff so we just put it out at night and jump into it again the next day. I can imagine what that smells like at this point. Ciao! Benvenuti a tutti to Trattoria di Alex and Eric Katawagumi River. On tonight's menu we have beef and rice. Dehydrated beef and rice that we're bringing back to life. Yo as you're like stand-in Italian teacher should you not be saying beef and noodles in the first part of the sentence? I don't know how to say beef. Eric's been learning Italian and this two weeks off of his Italian lessons is gonna really set him back. Big time step back right now man. When I'm in the Hudson Bay lowlands. Yeah. So there you go. Okay this looks actually really good. Yeah that is looking good. It kind of looks like Italian wedding soup actually. Yeah it definitely does. Is that other pot for hot chocolate? Oh my god. I forgot we brought hot chocolate bro. Yes the other pots were hot chocolate. I feel like I could definitely go for a hot chocolate today. Dude you just pumped me up so much right there. We haven't touched our tea or hot chocolate stack. I'm so excited for hot chocolate dessert. Yeah. Dessert. I'm pumped. Nice. We are ending our day with some hot chocolate by the fire since tonight's definitely gonna be the coldest night I think we've had out here. Grab your mug bro. Dude I am so stoked. The verdict on the hot chocolate is that it is probably coming on every trip from now on. It's like a dessert but drink format and it's warm on cold night. Just doesn't get better. Definitely after I finish this I'm going to bed. Same. It's one of those days where I could go to bed right now. It is the morning of day eight right now and it's a frosty one this morning. Gotta say it's probably somewhere around like 10 degrees. The sun's out it's gonna be a nice day but it's just starting off a little cold. We were a little cold in the in the tent last night but we got a fire going. We got coffee and oatmeal on the go and we're fueling up to be on the water early this morning. Hopefully by about 7 30. So it's gonna be another good day. Probably grind again but we're excited to see what the river has for us. Starting to see some ice on the river. Look at that. Iceberg. That's where we need the tent. Another beautiful day to get caught. All right do you see the rip like take a look behind us do you see the ripples we need to have our nose in? Yeah yeah we're like we're now we're directly ahead of it. We're a little too far. It's okay turn. We'll be able to get back over. See that white froth? Yeah I see it to the right. Yeah so we're not going to hit that yet but that's basically where we're heading. Yeah. The river is going to take us nicely to the left of that right now. All right nice bro. Just a little eye chew for breakfast. Yeah baby. That was sick. We're gonna hug this this current is going to take us around the corner if we hit the foam stuff on the left. We want to hit this. The right side of it. Okay. Like we want to kiss it and then we're going to be basically already pointing to that eddy we want to hit. Okay. So make sure we just sneak in here. Yep. Nice. Watch this. Now return. Back to the edge bro. Paddle forward. All right now we're going to ferry across this. Left tilt. There you go bro. Good draw. Another one. There we go. Nice dude. Some campsite up here. Right at this island and there's this beautiful like rock little section. The river has been dropping a bunch but provides us with like a lot of beautiful places to look at. Some of them we can hit. Some of them we can't hit. There's so little flat water in between each section of rapids. It's almost like just one massive rapid. Like you're paddling 100 meters at most before you're getting ready to set up for the next one. It's just like a massive outflow of waterfalls and rapids. Right here is going to be strong so we need to kind of be braced for that you know. All right so after making it through a huge section of rapids we finally made it to a lake. We think we've got a little bit of flat water ahead of us. It's not even really a lake it's just like a swell in the river but uh pretty cool looking area here. You guys might be asking what this is. This is greek olive hummus with trisket crackers aka good. Yeah it's really good. It's really good. It's actually really good. I feel like i'm in Greece. On the islands of Greece. Sun's out. I'm about to take my top off. It's about to get good. It's just straight filling up like so greedy not leaving any for anyone else. Brutal. It's too greedy. I had to feed him a lesson. This whole area is amazing. That could be the falls. Yeah this looks better. It is we have to go left of that. Left? Left of the rock but then right everywhere else. These rocky shorelines have really been helping us out today. Crushing out. Good portage eh? That's me too much hummus. That was beautiful. It's so nice out here. I'm actually like really really excited about how much distance we've covered. The river's changed so much eh? Yeah. It's gonna be interesting to see what comes after this eh? Very interesting. We're just lazily floating down this river right now. Yeah. Trying to decide where we want to camp tonight. I smell something juicy coming up here. I don't know about you. Yeah it looks like it eh? Yeah. It was getting late in the day and we were really tired. We decided to complete this one last portage before finding a place to call home for the night. You want help here? No no it's okay. All right so I haven't been able to do an update yet because this site is probably our favorite site of the trip. Too awesome. We actually crushed distance today. We made it about eight kilometers. Shorelines were favorable. We were able to run some good lines. There's a lot that was just like working in our favor. Weather, beautiful. Again something else that would definitely slow us down if it was raining or something. So we are camping in a series of islands right now with water flowing through all of them. It is absolutely stunning. We got here we probably around 6 30 ish and did laundry. We had some clothes that definitely needed to be cleaned and then we went for a swim and we've set up camp but I haven't been able to update yet so this is the tour of our campsite. Go show you upstairs. It's a two bedroom. It's actually not. It's probably like a 20 bedroom. Here's all the clothes we washed. Our fly is still wet from this morning so that's out drying. Again beautiful sunset. It's the last rapid there. Then we're coming into the good stuff. While I was swimming Eric cut all this wood but that's not all he did. Through the trees over there we have a tent set up. It's a bedroom man. It's private. Come on. The bedroom. Yo don't show people that. So yeah we we have it pretty say made in the shade but it's pretty much made in the sun right now so absolutely beautiful night as a capper for the end of day eight on the Kattawagami. It is impossible after all the hard work we put in to not be thankful for moments like these. At the same time without the hard work these moments just wouldn't be the same. Like we're halfway. I'm sad for this part to end. Yeah but also like so thick. I feel like coming into this I was so nervous. Yeah. Not knowing what any of this is going to be like. Oh my god. Yeah. Yo I feel like this does smell like fish but not as bad. I feel like there's a bread bread scent there you know. Getting eight kilometers done today definitely put us in a good place and made us feel good about our overall progress. We are just over halfway through the section of whitewater that we were most concerned about which felt good but at this point the fun isn't over just yet.