Day 1 on trail:6/30
We woke up around 7:30 am, and got things packed up quickly to get to AirTindi early for Craig and Katie's groups. We stayed around the airbase and said our goodbyes and helped them to load gear. Said goodbyes again and then Mike drove us about 110k to Rae (Bichoko) a first nation village west of Yellowknife. We went to the tribal government office and met with a guy named John who showed us somethings on maps he had, and gave us information on the route we were taking and were certain portages were and how high the water was etc. After that we went to the bridge in town that crosses a tiny part of Marion Lake, and unloaded our stuff, and got ready to head out. Once we got all of our stuff out and loaded up the canoes we ate some lunch and took some pictures (which are hopefully going to be on the Menogyn website)and saud goodbye to Mike, and got ready to go. As we paddled beneath the bridge we realized that the wind was crazy strong and as Mike left to return to Yellowknife, we started to paddle. Got a little over ½ of a kilometer out past the bridge and stopped at an island about 100m from land, right outside Rae. The wind was crazy with 4-5 foot waves on the main part of the lake, so we felt it would be safer to stop and wait out the wind. We set up the tents and I slept for maybe an hour and then we discussed what we should do next. And unfortunately we realized that we were actually wind-bound on the first day on trail, which was really discouraging. We got out of the tent around 9pm, having left Mike at 3pm, and decided to make some dinner, as we did the wind seemed to die down, so we decided to paddle a little further outside town, at least so we couldn't see it anymore. We packed up and started to paddle around 11:15pm, into a semi-sunset. We got about 1.5 miles away from Rae and crashed a campsite , set up tents and and got our stuff ready for sleeping. We eventually got into our tents at about 1:15am. And it was still quite light outside.
Day 2: 7/1
We woke up today around 10am, broke camp down and had eggs and tortillas for breakfast, and spent another hour getting loaded and ready to go for a paddling day (finally!) And left to paddle the lake (a 19 mile long lake) We ended up paddling about 17 into a headwind and stopped right outside the mouth of the Marion River, we stopped so as to avoid setting a bad tone to the trip, with a “paddle late, wake up late” mentality. We made chili for dinner and and made a cake in the outback oven (an amazing item) we went to bed a little later than we had hoped but we are planning a 7am wake up.
