The storm was raging all night and most of the day. Imre and Peter stayed in their sleeping bags to keep warm. This island is very safe, they will only leave it is they feel confident that they can continue paddling for a good while. Looking at the forecast, they plan to start around 9 pm tonight.
If you have been a fairly active reader of this blog, please skip the next paragraph. For those new to Imre’s adventures, we will repeat a few thoughts from a recent post.
“Two years ago Imre attempted to kayak the Yukon River all by himself. He started in Whitehorse. He was right at this point, in Grayling (pop. 174) where (after battling with storms for several days) he spent two days having nothing else to do than keep checking the weather forecast and visit with the locals. As the storm did not seem to stop, he decided to give up and fly home. He gifted some of his gear to them and in return they took him to the local airport, then back to the village when it turned out that the plane could not take off in the storm. They gave him accommodation for a night.”
A few days before that life-threatening storm Imre had another very dangerous encounter: a charging grizzly. He had to gather all his strength and more to paddle faster than the bear could swim.
It is sort of funny, how stories go from mouth to mouth, village to village by the locals. In two years the facts have changed quite a bit: In a village Imre has never been before, from a person he never met before, he heard the story of “the white man who was attacked by a grizzly and got so scared that he had sold all his stuff in Grayling and flew back home”. Not exactly how it happened… But the story shows how the locals think that all these white outsiders are just … losers.
Yukon Gold 