00:00:02
Speaker 1: If we don’t get picked up by this helicopter, we probably will hit the other shoreline either at or shortly after dark. And then my concern is, am I even gonna be able to walk around to get firewood? Are my fingers gonna work for me to light that fire?
00:00:19
Speaker 2: This is the story of a near death experience of a game warden in northern Canada. It’s kind of weird to me how humans are so attracted to these near death stories. I know that, I sure am, and I think it’s a primitive built into our DNA thing because these stories are loaded with payoff, they teach us how to survive, and are simply entertaining stories, and both of these things are connected. On this episode, you’re gonna learn a new way to die, which also might teach you a new way to survive. Cold water is a deadly killer. I really doubt that you’re gonna want to miss this one. And hey, don’t forget about our new Bear Grease YouTube channel and Instagram page Bear John and I’ve got videos coming out every Wednesday.
00:01:08
Speaker 3: Thank you for the support.
00:01:17
Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukeom and this is the Bear Grease Podcast where we’ll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we’ll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Brought to you by to Covi’s Boots. I’m a cowboy boot man and I’ve been wearing to Covis for years. They’re the most comfortable boot I’ve ever put on. Good boots for good times.
00:01:52
Speaker 1: We’re making our way up through the river. Eventually we get to the lake right around It was in the evening, around six o’clock, and you sort of play it that way, thinking that, Okay, if guys are going to be, you know, coming up to the camp throughout the day, they’ll probably, you know, either like a lot of guys. I should also say, like the ice has only been off the lake for I think two or three days at this point, this is late May. We get out of the lake. We don’t hear anything, we don’t see anything. We kind of putter down to one end of the lake. We can’t see, you know, anybody in the camps. It just looks like it’s it’s empty. There’s nobody around. So we get out, grab a snack, stretch our legs a little bit, get back in the boat, start puttering our way back and it wasn’t windy, but there was, you know, a bit of a wind, I will say. And we’re driving along and I don’t really I don’t think either of us really know what happens or what happened. But I was peeling a banana in the front of the boat.
00:02:46
Speaker 3: That’s why I remember.
00:02:47
Speaker 1: I’m peeling the banana, and the next thing I know, I just feel the boat. It kind of you know, like if you’re going along to have a small wave kind of hit you sideways, you just kind of roll over that almost ladder, if that makes sense. So we feel that that wind, that little wave, it just kind of rocks the boat one way, and then the next thing you know, we’re upside down.
00:03:10
Speaker 2: The table for crisis has been set, icy water and a flipped boat in a remote location. We’ll start to move backwards from here.
00:03:20
Speaker 3: My name is Rob Argue.
00:03:21
Speaker 1: I’m a retired conservation officer from the Province of Ontario in Canada, and I’m now the owner and operator of Eastern Canadian Outfitters, where we have three hunting and fishing lodges in Ontario and Quebec.
00:03:34
Speaker 2: In twenty seventeen, a hunted bear with Rob at his place in Quebec, and I’ve never forgotten a story that he told me. I think I remember it because it touches on one of my core fears, big water. You may have heard me talk about it, but my only legit near death experience that I’ve had thus far in my life was a close call in fast water in wash it Tall Mountain Stream when I was nineteen. Rob has a story about not just water, but cold water, icy water, which is as deadly as any bullet bomb or disease. Our bodies just starting equipped to take much of it. Rob was a conservation officer, or what we’d call down here a game warden, and he was stationed in a remote community in northern Ontario called Cappus Casing. I wanted to ask him how he got into being a game.
00:04:25
Speaker 1: Warden basically, I mean, I started out being a conservation officer a game warden in the late nineties. That’s when I got on full time, was January of ninety nine. But yeah, as a young officer in a northern community like that, I mean it was it was kind of neat. I equate it to being like a you know, the sheriff of a small town. Everybody knew, you know, who you were. It was neat and that you made contacts and relationships with sort of key people in the community and it was nice to you know, you’d start to build trust with those people and then they would give you in for me, which made your job easier just of you know where to look and who you were sort of keeping an eye on and what was going on. So it was a great, great place to start being. You know, I wouldn’t say a city kid, but I mean I was born and raised in Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, so I was in a very suburban environment growing up. Then in high school we moved about forty five minutes out of the city, so it was in a small town carl Carlton Place, and it was like going back in time. Basically everybody hunted and fished there. The high school. You know, there would never be a test during the first two weeks of November because i was the deer season and there were just no boys in school during those those two weeks of November. So it was a bit of a culture shock going from the city out to the country. But that’s where you know, the hunting and fishing bug kind of really bit.
00:05:48
Speaker 2: Rob’s story of deer days in school makes me see that rural North America, even if it’s in Canada, isn’t much different anywhere. We’re kind of all the same. The context of Rob’s story happens while he was a game warden, but the second part of the context was that it took place in deep Canadian wilderness, which is no joke. When I first started traveling in Canada, I quickly realized the vast amount of uninhabited wild places that they have as far superior in terms of absence of people in roads than anything that we.
00:06:24
Speaker 3: Have in the lower forty eight.
00:06:26
Speaker 2: A good place to start this story is to try to get a grasp of Canadian wilderness.
00:06:32
Speaker 1: So to give you an idea of the expanse of sort of, I’ll say northern Canada, and it doesn’t even have to be that far north. But basically, you know where I live in Ottawa. It’s the capital city of Canada. There’s a million people here, which is not a big city. But if you drive say forty five minutes to an hour outside of the city, you have Deer, Moose Bear, you have some small towns, but you’re kind of in the on the border, the middle of nowhere, and even beyond that, Like if you think of the province of Quebec, for example, the northern.
00:07:05
Speaker 3: Tip of Quebec is the Arctic.
00:07:07
Speaker 1: There’s polar bears, there’s walrus, there’s you know, seals, there’s caribou. The eastern corner of the same province in Quebec is the ocean, so you have you.
00:07:16
Speaker 3: Know, the.
00:07:17
Speaker 1: Saint Lawrence River, the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River where you have whales and you know seafood, so you have that maritime environment. If you look at the reflection of the wildlife that’s present and the different species, it just gives you an idea of the different environments and how much that one province, you know, spreads from one corner, which is the Atlantic Ocean basically to the Arctic Ocean, and then in the southwest you know the Great Lakes region.
00:07:42
Speaker 3: So these are big, big areas.
00:07:44
Speaker 1: Canada’s population, i think right now is around forty million, so it’s about a tenth of what it is in the States. So we have just massive, massive tracts of land that there’s nobody around.
00:07:57
Speaker 2: Roughly one point five million square miles of Canada. Nearly forty percent of the country’s land mass is considered largely wild and remote, characterized by minimal human impact and sparse infrastructure in low road density. Much of this is boreal forest and Arctic tundra. Over eighty percent of Canada’s land masks is public land or what they call crown land, while roughly twenty eight percent of America’s land mass is publicly owned. But it’s kind of deceptive because a large percentage of that roadless big public land is in Alaska. About sixty five percent of Canada exists in large roadless tracts, reflecting its vast, sparsely penetrated interior. Point being, Canada has some seriously wild places. Big backcountry is the context of Rob’s story, and it involves some walleye poachers or potential walleye poachers. Let’s get into the story and if why Canadians call the backcountry or backwoods the bush?
00:09:01
Speaker 1: So? I mean, one of the first things I should say is when I was in Kappuskasing, I started with another new officers name was Greg Clark, super guy. He was a couple of years older than me, had a you know, he started at the same time as I did as a conservation officer full time, but he had been a deputy a little bit longer than me. He was from northwestern Ontario, you know, born and raised in the bush. Great with everything, snow machines, boating, you know, he was just he was a bush guy. So it was again just what a great way to start my career with this other guy. And we got along anyway. It was just a fantastic relationship and a great partner. So as I mentioned, you know earlier, is you know, we had heard that there were people that were always fishing every year the day before the walleye season opened on a certain lake in the southern end of our district. So this was a remote lake, hard to get into, and cap Skasing is a pretty it’s kind of a swampy area, so a lot of guys up there had argos.
00:09:57
Speaker 3: You’d have you know, ATVs with big mud tires.
00:09:59
Speaker 1: But our goo were pretty popular at the time, just because it was so wet. So a lot of these lakes, you know, you might be in your argo for an hour or two hours from where you park your vehicle to get back into your camp that’s on a certain lake, so so we were trying to figure out of you know, the big problem with a lot of these spots is you just you can’t get in there without everybody else knowing that you’re either coming or that you’re in or whatever. So there was a river that flowed in from another you know, remote location, so we had to It was a lot of work to get into where we were, so we’re kind of limited in what we could take. So we basically brought a square stern canoe and there were a couple of sets of rapids that we knew we had to get through to get up into the lake. So we ended up I chucked because we put like a fifteen horse outboard motor on this canoe. You know, that’s basically what we needed to get up. But at the same time, safety wise, you know, maybe that was a touch over powered for the canoe kind of thing, but whatever. So I always always, and I still to this day, you know, a pack with me that has a first aid kid survival kit, especially in those northern environments, right because if something goes wrong, you may be there for a day or at least overnight before somebody can get to you. So the M and R provided M and R Ministry and not resources. They provide us each with a personal locator beacon and then we kind of made our own survival kits. You know, I had my backpack.
00:11:23
Speaker 3: With my gear. We loaded the canoe.
00:11:26
Speaker 1: We were doing what was called plane clothes patrol, so that meant that, you know, we were dressed. We weren’t in uniform, but we still had our gun belts on. We sort of had all of our tools with us, our ticket books, you know, binoculars, cameras, all that kind of stuff. So we loaded up the canoe and I don’t remember how long, but it was certainly, you know, it was a couple of hours. I can say probably about two hours to kind of because again you couldn’t go too fast up this this river. It was again there was good current and everything else, so we kind of just putted our way up the river.
00:11:56
Speaker 3: It was beautiful.
00:11:57
Speaker 1: All I could think about, you know, being sort of this new Hunters, like I’m want to come back here in Mussan because it just it looked like I was, you know, on a TV show in the Yukon or something like that. It was gorgeous area and again nobody else around. So we’re making our way up through up through the river. Eventually we get to the lake right around It was in the evening, around six o’clock, and we’d sort of planned it that way, thinking that, Okay, if guys are going to be, you know, coming up to the camp throughout the day, they’ll probably you know, eater like.
00:12:24
Speaker 3: A lot of guys.
00:12:25
Speaker 1: I should also say, like, the ice has only been off the lake for I think two or three days at this point.
00:12:30
Speaker 3: This is late.
00:12:31
Speaker 1: May, so depending on the year, sometimes sometimes walleye season opened up there and there was still ice on the lake, normally not enough to ice fish. But anyway, it was right around that time when the lakes were thawing that the walleye season would open. So we get onto the lake. We don’t hear anything, we don’t see anything. We kind of putter down to one end of the lake. We can’t see, you know, anybody in the camps. It just looks like it’s it’s empty. There’s nobody around.
00:12:56
Speaker 3: So we turn the boat around.
00:12:58
Speaker 1: I think we got out at one point actually because we switched spots where I had driven up and Greg was going to drive us out, and so we get out, grab a snack, stretch our legs a little bit, get back in the boat, start puttering our way back. And it wasn’t windy, but there was, you know, a bit of a wind, I will say. And we’re driving along and I don’t really I don’t think either of us really know what happens or what happened. But I was peeling a banana in the front of the boat. That’s where I remember. I’m peeling the banana and the next thing I know, I just feel the boat. It kind of you know, like if you’re going along you have a small wave kind of hits you sideways, you just kind of roll over that almost laterally, if that makes sense. So we feel that that wind, that little wave, it just kind of rocks the boat one way, and then the next thing, you know, we’re upside down. So yeah, I’m peeling this banana one second and then I just just like this little swoop and then I’m underwater.
00:14:00
Speaker 2: Everything is perfect until it’s not. This is usually the context for bad things happening. And don’t forget about that banana, because I garand dog te you we will be back for that. But usually disaster is quick and unexpected. However, they were on a remote ice cold leg, so they knew there was just a razor thin layer between them and extreme danger. But let’s dwell on that thin edge for just a minute. I think about that thin edge when I ride a mule. Things can go wrong like so quick. I think about it. When I drive a car, things can go wrong quick. And you should think about this when you’re in cold water. These guys all of a sudden found themselves in a life threatening situation. But no, biggie, right, I mean, they’ve got a lot of options, or do they?
00:14:53
Speaker 1: So? As I mentioned, you know, we’re still wearing our I call them duty boots or whatever, but you know they’re like fairly black hea boots were wearing a gun belt back in the day. Of course, everybody, that’s cool. You’re not wearing a life jacket. You’re sitting on it because it’s a seat. So neither of us were wearing life jackets, which was really dumb. And it’s funny because underwater, it’s it’s amazing what sort of comes to you and how quickly things come to you. When I was a kid, before I knew what a conservation officer was, I always wanted to be a fighter pilot, So you know, I knew everything about we had f eighteens up here cfaighteens. I knew all the stats on cfaighteens. I was watching videos all the time as a young guy, and one of the videos I remember seeing was it was a US Navy video where you would see the pilot in like a fake cockpit coming down into a pool. So I think it was for like whatever fourteens or something, but it was a training video of what you do if you hit the water and you’re kind of you know, you’d lose your whereabouts. And what I remember is you blow a bubble. So when you blow a bubble, automatically, the bubble goes up, and that tells you which way to swim because you’re upside down or twisted around and you start swimming. You may be swimming down, you may be swimming sideways. You don’t know. So that that came to me in my head. So I blow the little bubble. I see which way is up. So I and then again in my head, I’m like, oh my god, I’m gonna sink like a rock wearing you know, the gun belt and everything else. So I just start swimming up. And you know, I wasn’t that deep. I was probably only a couple feet under the water, but you don’t realize it at the time. So I actually came up underneath the canoe, and so I sort of put my hands on the canoe, you know, take a breath, and that’s when it hits you of how cold that stupid water is. Like I say, I think the ice had been off the lake for two maybe three days. So then the next thought is, okay, where’s Greg. So you know, I kind of pull the canoe over my head or I get out from under the canoe.
00:16:45
Speaker 3: I look around. I see Greg’s you know.
00:16:47
Speaker 1: Off whatever I’m gonna say, five yards maybe off the back of the boat. And of course, like you’re hearing different videos or whatever, he had hit his head as part of his kind of process going down, so you know he was. He was okay, but still a little I don’t want to say groggy, I think just disoriented, maybe like you don’t both wear in the water.
00:17:09
Speaker 3: But yeah, anyway, we you know, I get him to the boat.
00:17:13
Speaker 1: We kind of take a second to take it all in, just realize the situation we’re in, which isn’t good.
00:17:22
Speaker 3: You know, it’s cold water, the boat’s flipped over.
00:17:24
Speaker 2: How far are you from the bank?
00:17:26
Speaker 3: Exactly, great question, Not that far.
00:17:30
Speaker 1: I would say we were probably, oh, one hundred yards at the most. Probably like eighty yards would be my guess.
00:17:39
Speaker 2: So, Robin Gregg, are less than one hundred yards from the bank. That doesn’t seem like very far. If someone put a gun to your head right now and asks you if you believe that you could swim to the shore with a life jacket on in thirty five degree water, what would you say? If you’re with somebody right now riding the in a truck, or with your why or your kids, ask them if they think that they could do it, say yes or no. When in cold water, though, you typically have about ten minutes of fairly normal mobility before you start to seize up.
00:18:13
Speaker 3: The tick and clock has started for Rob.
00:18:16
Speaker 2: Let’s see what Rob says.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: The first thing we’re doing is we’re going, okay, well, let’s try to, you know, get the boat flipped over and we’ll see if we can get back in the boat. And as we’re doing this, you know I talked earlier about having a backpack with different equipment. Some of the equipment then starts kind of popping up from underneath I see my backpack pop up. So I think the first thing I did was I went back underneath the boat because I wanted to try to find life jackets. Right our two life jackets. So I found one life jacket. I put that on. Then I swam again, not far a couple feet to grab that backpack. And then we tried correcting the a couple of times, and we we just we couldn’t do it. I mean a it was a combination of the cold water. It’s amazing how fast you just you can’t move. It’s like your muscle sees up you’re breathing, really constricts on you. So then my next thought is, okay, I have this life jacket on. You know, Greg’s holding on.
00:19:16
Speaker 3: To the back of the boat.
00:19:17
Speaker 1: You know, the whole key in cold waters just get as much of your body up out of the water as possible. So at that point, you know, Greg was pretty much I would say, other than maybe his legs in the water, like his chest and upper body was up over the back of the canoe, you know. And I I was a very strong swimmer. I used to love swimming all that good stuff. I said, Okay, well, I have my life jacket on, I’m going to swim to the shore because there were camps right across from where we were, So I’m gonna swim to the shore. I’m gonna grab you know, another boat. If I have to break in somewhere, I’ll break into a shed or grab a canoe, whatever, and then I’ll come back out and pick them up.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: Okay, good plan.
00:19:52
Speaker 1: So I start swimming to shore, and like I say, at that point, I you know, when I say eighty yards, As I’m thinking back, I don’t even think it was that far. Like I think it was more like, you know, fifty yards. But I start swimming and I’m kind of on my back just trying to sort of, I don’t know, kick and push water. But because I didn’t want to expend a whole lot of energy. It’s not like I was going to do a breaststroke or overhead or whatever. But every sort of every time I would exhale, I could inhale less. And it was just it was like a ball constructor on my chest. And it didn’t take me very long at all. I went maybe ten yards and I’m like, man, I can’t do this now. Whether I could have kept going or whether that was more of a mental panic thing. I don’t know, wow, but I was just like, yeah, I’m not going to be able to breathe soon. So anyway, I went back to the boat. I’m like, you know, I don’t know what to tell you, but we’re kind of stuck here.
00:20:46
Speaker 2: I want to talk about, like how close you were to the shore. I think most people, including me, who wouldn’t have the experience of being plunged into water that is just above freezing.
00:21:02
Speaker 3: Just how difficult it would be.
00:21:03
Speaker 2: You would think that, oh, he’s eighty yards from shore, this young fit guy, he’s gonna easily swim to the shore. And then you’re just contending against he’s he’s also now you know, cold and wet, but he’s on shore. He could build a fire.
00:21:20
Speaker 3: He’ll be able to walk.
00:21:21
Speaker 2: And move and and and and you know, save himself from hypothermia. But I mean, you’re telling me that the water is just crippling when it’s that cold it is and you just can’t you just can’t navigate through it.
00:21:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you’re one hundred percent rate in that. A lot of this was it was just it was a super emotional roller coaster because you know, you’re.
00:21:47
Speaker 3: Right when I when I.
00:21:49
Speaker 1: Did the first attempt to swim to shore, you know, when I left that boat, I’m like, yeah, okay, well that’s that’s just what I’m going to do. I mean, again, I was a super sman, strong swimmer. I was in good shape. I was even wearing a life jacket. I’m like, you know, even if I have to stop and take a break, okay, I’ll take a break.
00:22:06
Speaker 3: But I had.
00:22:08
Speaker 1: No idea, or I would never have thought that I wouldn’t be able to swim that distance to get to shore. And at that point, you know, I wasn’t so concerned with mobility once I hit shore, I think because it was still you know, it was very early on. We’d probably only been in the water, like i’m gonna say, maybe five to ten minutes at that point. Like that was that was the first thing that came to mind. That was the easy answers. Okay, it’s it’s right there, the cabins are right there. I’m just gonna swim there. So I wasn’t even thinking of you know, plan B, C or D down the road. That was that was just what I was going to do, and that’s how we were going to get out.
00:22:44
Speaker 3: But yeah, it’s the it how fast like it was.
00:22:49
Speaker 1: Literally I’m gonna say, you know, five strokes away from the boat, maybe five you know yards from the boat, and that’s where I’m like, I can’t do this.
00:22:58
Speaker 3: There’s there’s no way I’m going to be able to get over.
00:23:00
Speaker 2: I appreciate Rob’s honesty about not being able to swim the shore, it just seems so close. But if he couldn’t do it, I have no reason to think that I could have done it. I didn’t grow up boating on big cold water, but have spent some time in my adult life in some big cold Canadian and Alaskan water. Once, while I was with Steve Ranella up in Alaska, we were less than a half mile off the shore in probably forty degree water, forty degree air temperature, something like that, and I asked him, I said, Steve, if we sank this boat right now, could we swim to shore? And he casually and without hesitation, said no. And I said, so we just die. If this boat sinks, we die, and he was just like, yep. And it was then that had occurred to me just how risky it is to be on a boat in cold water. Juju Newcomb should have warned me about this.
00:23:57
Speaker 1: So then the next step, and it’s in a way part of I think is maybe a bit of an embarrassment factor, or maybe it’s you know, you’re just trying to grapple with the reality of the situation you’re in. So I had that personal locator beacon in my backpack that came up. Another thing that was in that backpack that we’ll come back to later that was super important is I had an airhorn. So I got the PLB, I turned it on and so what that does is that sends a signal to a satellite and then the satellite relays it back to I believe in Ontario, I think it’s the opp Ontario Provincial Police, so it’d be like our state troopers kind of thing. And I think they’re responsible for like search and rescue activities in the province.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: And we were.
00:24:41
Speaker 1: You know, I keep thinking of things in the term of like helicopter distances, right, and we had a big forest fire fighting center in the city of Timmins, and Timmins would be helicopter flight wise probably about forty five minutes from the lake where we were, So you know, I kept thinking, Okay, this is cool. We just got to hang on for about you know, forty five minutes and we’ll hear a helicopter come in and they’ll scoop us up and we’ll be all good. As I mentioned before, this was around six six thirty at night in late May, so I think it gets dark. I don’t know, a thirty maybe nine at the latest kind of thing. Probably that’s probably about probably about nine o’clock at night. So you know, we just decided, okay, we’re just going to have to sit it out, and we’re waiting for for a helicopter to come that I’m thinking shouldn’t take very long. So at this point, you know, Greg’s kind of the same thing. On the back, I actually get up to the front of the boat, the bow of the canoe, and I’m straddling it, so I’m sitting on it like I’m riding a horse. And what I’m doing is that with you know, with my legs, I’m trying to keep it. It’s still a very tippy canoe, so I’m trying to kind of keep the canoe balanced and stable so that both myself and Greg are you know, up out of the water as much as possible. But every once in a while, we’d get just a little gust of wind or a wave or whatever, and you know, boom, we both go back in. And it was so frustrating because you know, you you’d feel your the basically your skin temperature warming up after you’re up out of the water for a little while, and then you get dunked in and you just feel that cold water, you know, wash away all the warmth and then you’re back down to freezing cold again. So sort of just frustrating is the wind is then slowly blowing us away from that shore across the lake and it’s not a huge lake, but you just feel really helpless. You’re like, you know, you’re just in a waiting game, right, So we just you know, we’re talking to each other kind of trying to keep spirits up, keep optimists, you know, yeah, optimistic that either the helicopter is gonna come. And then you know, in the back of my mind or our mind, we’re both you know, realizing that it is still the day before fishing season, and if we’ve had these complaints of guys coming in the day before, there should be people coming in, you know, to these camps the night before in order to be there for the following day.
00:26:57
Speaker 2: Let me ask you this, what was the confirmation that you’re beaking had sent the distress message. I mean, this is not a text message machine. No, obviously that you could like tell them exactly what was going on. Yeah, Like, is it just assumed that if you hit that button, they’re coming for you?
00:27:13
Speaker 1: All your right, all your faith is in a little red flashing light. It’s like, you know, you know that it’s on and it’s sending a signal, but that’s all, you know. I when I really started getting worried was after that forty five minute, one hour, hour and a half market. I hadn’t heard that helicopter. I’m like, what is going on? Like, it shouldn’t be taking this long.
00:27:33
Speaker 2: That’s got to be a spooky, lonely feeling when no one comes, especially when you know that your life has a time stamp on it that’s not years or days, but is hours and minutes long. And that brings up a great question, how long can these guys last? That’s a good question to ask yourself right now. How long do you think a human would last in these conditions? Within assumed air temperature in the forties and we know there’s a little bit of win. Make your guess how long could they last? What was your understanding of hypothermia at that time? I mean, obviously, I know you would have known that’s what you were fighting against, But did you know the signs of hypothermia? Was that something that you were fighting against? I mean, like thinking about.
00:28:26
Speaker 1: Yes, I think most people have a basic understanding of hypothermia, you know.
00:28:31
Speaker 3: How you get it, how to treat it.
00:28:33
Speaker 1: But that was absolutely our number one challenge that we knew we were going to have to sort of deal with. And like I say, goes back to sort of that the mental game of you know, frustration, trying to stay positive because every time that you know, we’ve rolled off that boat, you know, you know in your mind what that’s doing.
00:28:53
Speaker 3: To you physically, and it’s it’s not good.
00:28:55
Speaker 1: It’s not what you want, right, Yeah, And you know, I mean I think there was, Yeah, there were things that we were lucky, you know, the weather, and again there’s lots of things you’ll never forget.
00:29:05
Speaker 3: Like, you know, it was a beautiful day.
00:29:07
Speaker 1: It was a beautiful, blue skied, gorgeous day out in the woods, and I remember sitting on top of that boat and especially you know, the farther we drifted across. You’re just watching the shoreline, and the cottages get farther and farther away, and you’re like, oh man, so then you know then it’s it’s not I wouldn’t say it’s starting to get dark, but you know it’s it’s definitely coming soon.
00:29:28
Speaker 3: And you know that.
00:29:30
Speaker 1: The next plan was it’s like, okay, well, the way the wind’s going, if we don’t get picked up by this helicopter, we probably will hit the other shoreline, you know, either at or shortly after dark. Okay, And then my concern is it’s exactly what you said. Am I even going to be able to walk around to get firewood? Are my fingers gonna work for me to, you know, light that fire.
00:29:54
Speaker 2: Think of hapithermia as your body’s battery saber mode gone haywire. It’s a progressive slowing down that often robs you of the wits that you need to save yourself. It usually begins with stumbling, mumbling, and fumbling as your motor skills and personality start to fray.
00:30:10
Speaker 3: At the edges.
00:30:11
Speaker 2: You’ll transition from violent, uncontrollable shivering, which is your body’s last ditch effort to friction heat itself to this deceptive eerie stillness as your core temperature drops below ninety degrees fahrenheit and the shivering stops entirely. This is the danger zone where victims may become confused, lethargic, or even experience paradoxical undressing, a phenomenon where the brain in a state of terminal haywire suddenly fells scorching hot and prompts the person to strip off their clothes and freeze and tempts. This is also where people experience terminal burrowing, where you feel the need to dig a hole and climb in it. If you are cold and you feel that sensation, you gotta know you’re in bad trouble and you better do something different. But after that, finally the heart rate starts to slow, the skin becomes blue and cold to the touch, and the person may even appear dead even while they’re alive. Here’s some key stages to watch for in hypothermia. Mild hypothermia is shivering like having goosebumps and numb hands. The brain is still sharp, but the body is signaling for help. Moderate hypothermia is the shivering becomes violent. Coordination fails like you can’t zip a jacket, you have slurred speech and kind of get this glassed overlook. Severe hypothermia is when the shivering stops. The person may become non responsive, irrational, they may pass out. The pulse becomes weak and irregular. Here’s more from Rob.
00:31:50
Speaker 1: We, like I say, we went in. I think it was shortly after six, and then I want to say, it gets dark around nine. I’m gonna see I think it was around eight or eight thirty that in the distance we hear a couple of ATVs coming. So I had said earlier that, you know, we we were hoping that maybe somebody would come into their camp, and sure enough they did. So we heard the ATVs. And I mentioned again earlier that in my pack with the survival kid all that stuff, I had the PLB that was up and running, and I also had an air horn. So a couple of times earlier, I think twice earlier, i’d kind of done the like the SOS signal on the air horn. No answer anyway, So we heard these ATVs, you know, really clearly came into one of the camps that were on the north side of the lake, which was the you know, the decide that we’re now drifting away from where we initially went in, sort of pretty close to there. Yeah, it was I mean, you know, when you hear the ATVs, it’s just, you.
00:32:47
Speaker 3: Know, literally it’s like, thank god.
00:32:49
Speaker 1: We you know, we were you’re hoping that someone’s going to come into their camp. We we knew that historically people were coming into their camps the night before, so you know, we had just there were a couple of you know, we had a couple of hopes the first and it was it was also one of my real frustrations after it all.
00:33:08
Speaker 3: I really really thought that we.
00:33:09
Speaker 1: Were gonna have an minar helicopter show up about forty five minutes, you know after we went in, and I’m like, I just couldn’t understand why that wasn’t happening. But then, yeah, when we did hear the ATVs, it’s like, you know, A, it’s thank goodness. B it’s you know, please let them hear this air horn. You know, they’re not gonna hear it while the ATV’s are running, and if you know, if they go from a running ATV directly into their camp, they’re maybe not going to hear anything. Is there even enough air still in the air horn to signal that they’re gonna hear. So, yeah, it’s it’s emotionally so it’s it’s exciting, it’s rewarding. At the same time, there’s just a lot of anxiety of you know, am I even going to be able to signal these people in a way that they’re gonna be able to hear us? Are they even equipped to come out and get us? You know, I mean this was the first trip in to a lot of these camps. The guys are in the spring, so that means they have to you know, take a boat out of storage, a motor out of storage. Yeah, whatever, So there’s there’s time involved even if they do here s right to get to us.
00:34:06
Speaker 2: They’ve now been in and out of the water for over two hours, but people on the shore have heard them.
00:34:12
Speaker 1: So yeah, I just you know, I remember seeing the boat come out.
00:34:16
Speaker 3: It was two guys.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: They were basically you know, I don’t think we had to say a whole lot. I think what they would have seen would have been pretty self explanatory. Yeah, it’s almost like, you know what, I don’t remember the boat ride from like our canoe back to their their dock or their camp.
00:34:36
Speaker 3: I really don’t, but yeah, so it was.
00:34:39
Speaker 1: You know, and then and then I think there’s also both physically and mentally, you know when you see that. I don’t know if it’s an adrenaline dump or what, but you just again you kind of feel your energy just drain out of you, like I think, you know, your body and with hypothermia, like we absolutely had hypothermia. You know, we had had severe shivers and then stopped and then back, you know, shivering on and off at different levels.
00:35:03
Speaker 2: How long were you out there? How long were you in the water wet?
00:35:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, we were in the water wet for I think it was close to two and a half hours, which, like I say, knowing the water temperature, you know, that’s a long time.
00:35:18
Speaker 3: It was not fun for sure.
00:35:20
Speaker 2: How long would you have lasted, do you know?
00:35:23
Speaker 1: I mean, if we could have stayed out of there’s a lot of a lot of unknowns.
00:35:29
Speaker 3: I don’t know is the answer.
00:35:31
Speaker 1: I mean, I think if we could have stayed out of the water, like the air temperature was above freezing, and you know, when we were up on the boat out of the water, we were Okay.
00:35:42
Speaker 2: There’s no way to know exactly how long these guys would have lasted because the variables are just so many. But after some research on hypothermia, these guys could have lost consciousness in as little as two hours, but they most certainly wouldn’t have lasted more than six hours. Them spending two and a half hours, and these conditions bordered on tragedy, but they had just been rescued. Do you remember what they said to you, what happened when you got back to that cabin?
00:36:17
Speaker 1: You know what, I can’t say enough. They were just fantastic people. And it’s to be honest, it’s a reflection I think of people that live in those northern communities or you know, to even go broader like I think, not to say urban people don’t help each other. They do all the time, of course, but in a situation like that, you know, these were local people born and raised in Kappascasing northern community. Everybody just lives in that environment, and accidents happened in those environments, and.
00:36:49
Speaker 3: I think they knew what to do.
00:36:53
Speaker 1: They were incredibly you know, caring, compassionate, They were just they were all about taking care of us, which yeah, and it really wasn’t long.
00:37:03
Speaker 3: I mean, I think we were only in.
00:37:06
Speaker 1: Their cabin I’m guessing here, but I’m going to say it was under half an hour, like maybe fifteen minutes. And then you hear the helicopter coming. So again mixed emotions of of like, okay, well this.
00:37:18
Speaker 3: Is great, but I’m like, where have you been for the last two and a half hours? Okay, So yeah, it was kind of you know, it was cool.
00:37:27
Speaker 1: We had the helicopters showed up and it basically there wasn’t much of a land well there really wasn’t a landing area for it in front of this cab, and so it was kind of hovering in front, and then inside the helicopter was one of our one of our partners, so it was another conservation officer and part of the reason the helicopter took so long. When the helicopter was initially dispatched to come get us, there was I guess some concern that, you know, when our personal locator beacon goes off, nobody knows why that is, right, right, So they’re like, well, if these guys are in a gunfight, we don’t want to send a helicopter into, you know, a situation that would be dangerous for them. Long story short, they had they decided they wanted to get another armed conservation officer to go in the helicopter with them in case, you know whatever, who knows. So one of our partners gets out of the helicopter. At that point, I think we they had brought. It was kind of funny. We looked really really sad. We looked like prisoners. But we had our forest firefighters up here where like one piece bright orange jumpsuits.
00:38:34
Speaker 3: That’s that’s the outfit they were to fight fires.
00:38:37
Speaker 1: So we put those on in order to leave the clothes that you know, the people that rescued us gave us. And like I say, I don’t even think we were wearing close to be honest, I think we were just wrapped up in a blank yeah, yeah, but yeah.
00:38:48
Speaker 3: So we put on.
00:38:49
Speaker 1: These orange, orange jumpsuits. You know, you feel like you’re this and I’m sure we looked like these pale, white.
00:38:56
Speaker 3: Drowned rats.
00:38:57
Speaker 1: Anyway, So we get up into the helicopter were then flown out to a town called Hurst, where we went to the hospital and we were treated just for basically a couple hours.
00:39:06
Speaker 3: We stayed in the hospital.
00:39:07
Speaker 2: It’s surprising, but these guys made it out without any serious injuries, just a traumatic event.
00:39:15
Speaker 1: The funniest part is, you know, there’s a couple of things that stick out with me. One is how, you know, it would have been very, very different if a few things didn’t happen. If if you know, if I didn’t find the life jacket that I wasn’t wearing to put it on, and I had tried to swim to shore, I think that would have been a very different and bad story. I don’t think I would have made it, you know, if I didn’t have if my backpack with my safety stuff didn’t pop up, and I didn’t have access to that personal locator beacon or the airhorn, again, could have been a very different story. And if I didn’t even bring those things with me in the first place and didn’t have them in the backpack, again, could have been very different. So you know, I’m super thankful, and I guess I’m not proud of our training, but you know, I’m thankful that our training and the things that we’re told to bring that you know, it’s kind of instilling that, yeah, you just don’t leave without those things, which I didn’t. The other thing that was strange is, you know, having never been in a situation like that, just that you know, you’re sitting on top of the canoe wondering, you know’s what’s going to happen. You start thinking about, huh, I wonder you know, who’s going to come to my funeral and what’s that going to look like? And the biggest thing was it was just such a beautiful day you never think of maybe not making it tomorrow when the sky is you know, this beautiful blue, and the trees are nice, and you’re out where you love to be.
00:40:38
Speaker 2: So I think there’s something that Rob has seriously overlooked. I don’t hesitate to bring it up. I think we’ve all been thinking it since the beginning. Well, Rob, I hate to be an armchair quarterback. But part of your story when you told it to me, I saw ride off where you made your mistake, and it was that you have had a banana in your boat.
00:41:02
Speaker 3: That’s true.
00:41:03
Speaker 2: Do they not talk in Canada about how you should never breathe a banana in a boat?
00:41:09
Speaker 1: I think even pirates maybe knew about that, didn’t they.
00:41:13
Speaker 3: That should absolutely be part of what training.
00:41:16
Speaker 1: You are right, You are absolutely right, and I have thought of it until you just mentioned it now. But that is funny and the whole time, I’ve been blaming mother nature. It’s not mother nature. It was the banana. Uh. Next time, I’m changing my story. I’m gonna say it was an orange.
00:41:31
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you should change that. You’re gonna get a lot of criticism for this.
00:41:36
Speaker 3: There we go.
00:41:39
Speaker 2: I can’t thank you enough for listening to bear Grease. Thankfully Rob and Greg survived. These stories are so powerful because they give us insight for how to survive. And I hope that none of us ever get in a situation like that, but if we do, maybe some of the stuff you learned here today will help you survive. Thank you so much for listening to bear Grease and supporting this channel and supporting Old Brent Reeves in this country life an old lake Pickle with the Backwoods University means the world to us. Please check out our the Bear Grease YouTube channel and Instagram, and until next time, if you have a choice, keep the wild places wild, because that’s where the bears live.
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