Steve woke up feeling weak and sore from yesterday’s adventure but felt progressively better as the day wore on; I woke up feeling a little queasy and felt progressively worse.
There’s nothing quite like pooping liquid into a thigh-deep posthole and then collapsing into the tent only to find that the smell of your partner’s mashed potatoes makes you so nauseous you openly weep while scrambling to get your head out of the tent. And then barfing while hanging the bear bag. I feel like absolute shit; the small saving grace is that it probably isn’t giardia because we’ve both been drinking the same heavily-filtered water.
The only thing we can think of to do moving-wise is load the boat, get on the water, and try to get as far as we can. Steve’s confident that if we rig to flip and can navigate from eddy to eddy, we ought to be able to find a line and make it through. We have intel from our pre-trip research saying that the paddling’s easy from the confluence with the Daaquam on (in normal weather, anyways, according to a guy who’s paddled it many times… in summer) so we’re just trying to reach that point. We also know there’s a road that crosses the river there, so if we had to we could pull out to portage.
We’re really hit the perfect storm of shitty weather, shitty snow, shitty river, and literal shit. Our bar for misery is at an entirely new level, and this is turning out to be the longest 14 miles of our lives. Both of us are oddly resigned to it; as much as this sucks, freaking out won’t do us any good and we’re sure as shit not quitting.