Announcing Two New Sponsors

With only 42 days before I embark on the World's Toughest Boat Race, I am proud to announce that Spirit West Outdoor And Adventure Store has agreed to become an official sponsor of Team Chinook. Spirit West is a store specializing in outdoor adventure and are one of the largest carriers of Mammut and Navarro in Calgary as well as in-store outdoor books and maps. Spirit West will be contributing specifically designed and measured dry-bags that will be function as a back-pack. Having looked at the prototype, these bags will be fast to put on and fast to take off and will benefit in long portages by removing weight from the canoe. The padded straps and adjustible hip belt will provide stability when running with a canoe overhead. Created from a lighter-weight rugged vinyl, these dry-bags will be able to withstand scraping, pulling, and tugging that foliage of rough portages can provide.

They will also be providing lightweight, gusseted, fast drying white leggings that we will wear during the race. These leggings will be made of a high-performance microfibre-polyester material and will prevent sun-burns. The colour will provide a cooling effect as light will be reflected as opposed to absorbed by the fabric and the fast dry-ing action/fast wicking, will ensure that we remain comfortable. The gusset will provide a more natural fit and will help increase mobility when we are on land.

Spirit West is responsible for presenting the Calgary Outdoor Festival as well as providing an online community for adventurers and outdoor enthusiasts. Although mainly local to Calgary and Southern Alberta, Outdoorspirit.ca site provides blogs, forums, user-entered trail reports as well as an online gear swap.

I am also pleased to announce that Out There has agreed to help Team Chinook. They have donated two Thermarest Neo-Air sleeping pads to minimize weight and bulk during the race. The Neo-Air is the world's lightest sleeping pad available (weighing just 14 oz while being 2.5 in thick). The patent-pending internal triangular core matrix creates an internal truss system that produces the most stable inflatable mattress allowing you to sleep on uneven terrain and not be kept awake by twigs and little stones. When we are done our few short naps, the Neo-Air will pack down to the size of a 1L (1 quart) water bottle an be virtually invisible while canoeing.

Started by Jamie Clarke (Professional Adventurer and Everest Summiter) Out There has grown to have the largest selection of the premier outdoor brands such as Arc'Teryx, North Face and Mountain Hardwear in Calgary. It is also the home of liveoutthere.com, a growing online community of avid adventurers from around the world providing live updates, stories, photo albums and videos of their travels via integrated twitter, facebook and login features as well as soon to come gear reviews and contests.

I would ask everybody to check out the two communities that these companies offer and if you are ever in Calgary and need gear. These two stores come highly recommended from me for their levels of professionalism and quality of gear.

42 days until the start of the 2010 Texas Water Safari.

A Tale Of Two Practices

The past two practices were met with varying degrees of success. Our April 11th training run was supposed to take us 40 km (25 mi) from Ghost Dam to Bowness Park in Calgary. This is a fast moving river with currents in some places as fast as 4kph (2.5 mph) and involves a few ripples, a small step and a fun small class II wavetrain. In fact it is this little class II that made us decide to run this section - we plan to run the slipway at the Rio Vista dam along the race. Its a place where a vast majority of boats that attmpt to run, flip.

The day started off as any early April day in Southern Alberta would. A nippy -5C (23F) morning greeted us. By the time we reached Cochrane the temp had warmed up to a balmy -2C (28.5F). Donning an extra layer of leggings and a chillguard we portaged the canoe down the old washed out road, dropping about 35m (115 ft) over a distance of about 500m (1650 ft). When we put the canoe in the little bay beside the dams outlet, there was still ice on the surface of the water (due to it being standing water) and the water temperature being a fraction of a degree above freezing. As we pushed out - breaking ice like an arctic icebreaker) the sun decided to pay us a visit, and soon we reached the high of 4C (39.2F) that was being called for. Unfortunately this didn't last long. Within 8km (5mi) the temperature dropped back below freezing, the sun disappeared and the winds from the rockies was beginning to bear down on usm magnified by the river valley.

Having run every wave train, both Tyler and I were soaked. Within 5km (3.1mi) from Cochrane (the half-way point) headwinds were in around the 30kph (18.5 mph) and the temperature without windchill had dipped to -9C (15.8F), wind generated whitecaps all around us. When using a windchill calculator those conditions equate to a temperature of -19C (-2F) - severe hypothermia conditions. We decided with reason this time and pulled out in Cochrane, cold, wet without a ride and still 22km (13.5mi) short of our original goal of Calgary. Suffice it to say, we didn't finish this leg, we chalked it up to resostence training in the wind and the asked ourselves this one question: We have to go to Texas and race in there hot conditions..but how would a Texan or Belizan coming to Canada deal with our paddling conditions for a race? That's some food for thought.

Now fast forward to this past weekend. Having been shut-down early the previous run, Tyler and I decided to make this practice count. we had only done 45km (28 mi) in the previous two runs combined and we knew we were nearly 2 months behind on other teams, so we decided to make a run from Content Bridge to Drumheller - a total distance of 122km (76mi). Having never run this section of the river and having temperatures predicted to be in the 20C (68F) range, we allotted ourselves 17 hours to finish, meaning we would have to travel an average of 7.2 kph (4.4 mph), something that should be attainable on a river flowing about 1.7kph (1 mph).

Again as we woke up, had breakfast and took the 40 minute drive to the put-in we were greeted with a brisk -1C (35F), but with no cloud in the sky and no frontal movement, we knew it was going to get much warmer. Into the water at 8:30 and we were on our way, along a route that would take us from the aspen forests to the heart of the Canadian Badlands. This trip also provided us an opportunity to try out or TWS diet: Boost Meal Replacements, Nuun Electrolyte Tablets and misc. bars and jerky, the Nuun tablets proved to be key to replenish and keep us hydrated. The Red Deer River here is fairly wide, shallow and slow moving, except in a few places where the gradient steepens and the one short class II, from what I understand its similar to the Guadelupe (minus the shallowness). As we entered the Badlands we felt compelled to pull out and have a snack amongst the coulees, hoodoos and other badland terrain, and under the early spring desert sun. We also decided to rig up or lighting system for the night part of the paddle, which consisted of two 6-volt I-Beams...which without going into too much detail, failed about 4 hours after being turned on. So our night navigation was put to use - back to the drawing board on that configuration. The night wnet fairly uneventful, we paddled 95km (60km) before nightfall then another 27km (16 mi) at night. We ended up pulling into Drumheller 16 hours and 16 minutes of paddling time after we started.

Being the first long run of the season and equal to 2/7ths (28%) the Texas Water Safari, we were happy with our finishing time, but we also both recognized that we could probably shave an hour off that time with slightly more efficiency, but that is what practicing is about. I ended up sleeping about 2 hours after getting out of the boat and going to bed at 10:00PM Sunday.

Stay tuned as this is going to be a busy week, I'll not be practicing this weekend as its my Anniversary, but the weekend following we are planning a 200km (125mi) trial run.

GO TEAM CHINOOK!!!

Official Team Chinook Home

As of today this blog is temporarily turning into the official home of Team Chinook on the internet, this doesn't mean there will be won't be more updates on facebook, on the contrary, facebook will still play an important role for keeping people updated. This blog will link all three forms of our media together (facebook, twitter and blog). It will form the backbone of our attempt to finish the "World's Toughest Boat Race" providing a singular place to follow real time updates during the race from the water and from the shore, follow our practices and learn more about the team, our preparation and our fundraising attempts. You'll also find a new twitter update on our right hand menu. This will keep you abreast of small updates, mostly sent remote from the field or just Out There.

In recent team news, we unveiled our team t-shirts yesterday. These shirts are available for anybody that wants to purchase them, the proceeds for these shirts go to help us cover some of the costs of getting to Texas and purchasing some new gear that is needed to participate. The shirts are pre-shrunk cotton and are available for $20 each. They are available in sizes S-XL. To the right is a view of the shirt displaying our logo and the following below the logo. HONORARY MEMBER 2010 texas water safari. If interested in buying one please e-mail cfac2010@yahoo.ca

Keep visiting for updates and sending e-mails with questions, this site is about to get much more active as training becomes more intense and frequent.

Dry Training Coming To An End

With scrambling and mountaineering shelved until early July, today marked the true end of the dry-land training. Tyler and I went out for a short 16-mile (27 kilometre) jaunt on the Red Deer River. Our put-in was Three Mile Bend in Red Deer and out pull-out was at Canyon Ski Hill. The day was spent basically just getting the arms, back and core into shape and provided a good opportunity for a portage practice. So we hit the river at 9:00 AM with our 17" Prospector with a 38" beam...a barge! But to our surprise, the river was in good shape, some ice shelves stil existed on the river left bank and water temperature was about 5C (41F), and eventhough it was quite shallow and slow in some locations, we did also experience class I rapids in a few locations..

The forecast for today was calling for a partly cloudy and a high of 8C (47F), a mere 32C (61F) cooler that we are expecting to experience in Texas. However, the gods smiled upon us, it ended up being mainly sunny and a high of 10C (50F). That's right, the tempertaure hit the double digits. In fact, it was so sunny that both Tyler and I ended up getting a bit too much sun, the first sunburn of the year. This really wasn't smart of us and reminded us, if 3.25 hours on the river with a UV Index of a moderate 4 can cause a minor burn what will 4-5 days on the river in Texas with a UV Index of 11 do to our face? Let me use this as a time to remind everybody...wear sunscreen. I am personally a fan of Ombrelle, arguably the best on the market using both chemical and physical blockers. I know I have decided to use Zinc Oxide on my nose for the Texas Water Safari as it won't sweat off and will provide a full protective barrier.

Anyway, back to the run. Today's run was 27km in length (16 mi) and took us just over 3 hours. Our speed ranged from 6.1 kph (3.7 mph) to 13.4 kph (8.3 mph) with an average speed of 8.3kph (5.2 mph). The current of the river averaged 2.1 kph (1.3 mph) where we decided to measure it. This means that our average speed over the 3 hours and 15 minutes was 6.2 kph (3.85 mph). This is very similar to our run that took place last October where we averaged (minus the flow) 6.4 kph (3.97 mph) over a time of 10 hours and a distance of 82 km (51 miles). For a little fun we extruded those times at zero fatigue and concluded that we will finish the TWS in a mere 66.9 hours. A whole day and a half before the finish. We also know that zero fatigue is impossible, but we can pretend.

Next week we'll be looking forward to a 95km (60mi) run from Ghost Dam to Calgary, which will provide a 200m (220 yd) portage around Bear's Paw Dam.

An update on Team Sponsor's, we have asked several corporations and local businesses to become offical team sponsors. There have been a few good responses, but no concrete answers as of yet. I will update these as soon as possible. I will also give a shout out to my Live Out There network and thanks for your moral support in training for such an adventure, and good luck to Jamie on your Everest attempt.

See you all soon and GO TEAM CHINOOK!