High Falls on the Namekagon
- a destroyed canoe and lessons learned
by Bryan Whitehead

How had they even found us? I mean we were absolutely in the middle of nowhere and these guys checking our permits and fishing licenses were in full uniforms! (Talk about way too much government!)

However, they were nice enough, and Bob regaled them with the stories about when he was on this same river back in the 1940s encountering and trading with Indian villagers for food. Bob apparently traded fish hooks and line for whatever fish and berries the Indians had to exchange.

Our permits and licenses passed muster and the officials returned to their canoes. (Not a word was mentioned about the American canoe submerged in a Provincial river a few miles hence.)

Soon we loaded up the remaining canoes and added a full sized chain saw. Steve had actually brought along a large bar chain saw in one of the heavy Duluth packs. No wonder it was painfully heavy!

We retraced our path of the day before and soon were facing the sunken Grumman again. Steve headed up stream and soon we heard the chainsaw roaring and a 35' pine toppled into the forest. Working quickly he stripped off the branches. We then rolled the trunk down into the river. Four of the fathers walked and floated this tall pine down to the canoe. I submerged the butt end of the tree under the canoe and we let it slide a couple of feet under the keel. Standing waist deep in the rushing water - it was noticeably deeper than the day before - we tried to get firm footing as we hoisted the end of the trunk up and up, shifting our collective footing to increase the leverage.

We succeeded in seriously actually bending this tree trunk as we applied more and more force. Finally I looked at my friends and shouted "If any one of us slips right now, he will go under this canoe and stay there. All we'll be able to tell the RCMP is where the body is!"

We lowered the tree trunk and let it float over the canoe and into the pool below.

We sat in the sun drying off despondently. "Steve, the only thing to do is to go out, scrape off the registration stickers and leave it here" I said. "To continue this madness is to get someone killed."

Steve thought this over... probably not the first time- and rejected the notion. "With my luck they'll trace me through the serial number and I'll get an invoice for $15,000 to have it flown out by helicopter."

We thought further and resifted our options. Finally I told Steve that the only tool I know of that would absolutely work would be a heavy duty ratcheting "come-along". (I was reasonably sure he didn't have one of these in another Duluth Pack, but I wasn't positive.)

Steve confirmed that this was one item he hadn't brought. We calculated that a round trip from our base camp to Ft. Francis to buy or rent such a device would be a 6-8 hour trek. Steve agreed to be the guy to make that trip, so we returned to camp and more great fishing, leaving the canoe precisely where it had been for the last 48 hours.