The Nitty Gritty with Nathan from A Little Paddle

Welcome back to Weatherproof, the podcast where we explore all things outdoor adventure and personal growth, hosted by Claudia and Hannah. 

In this episode, we're thrilled to have Nathan from A Little Paddle back on the show to dive into the details of his 140-day kayak trip from Victoria to Alaska. Nathan shares valuable insights on safety measures, gear planning, food packing, and managing electronics on their expedition. From discussing  weather challenges to gear failures and the nuances of food restocking, Nathan provides an in-depth look at the realities of long-distance kayaking trips. Join us as we unpack the practicalities and adventures of this remarkable journey and gain valuable tips for planning your own outdoor expeditions.

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Transcript

Claudia [00:00:00]:
Welcome to episode 36 of the Weatherproof podcast. We're so excited to welcome back Nathan from A Little Paddle to tell us a little bit more about the gear, food and the planning process that he and his buddy Sanish undertook when they decided to paddle a 140 days from Victoria to Alaska. Hannah had the privilege of sitting down with Nathan a second time to cover the nitty gritty of his most recent adventure. Join us as we talk about the raw, real, and relatable elements of outdoor adventure. Before we get into that, we are going to beg you to join our email list at weatherproofpodcast.com and to hit that follow button wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're watching us on YouTube, hit that like button and subscribe. We are recording on the unceded territory of the Squamish and Lil'wat Nations, and we acknowledge and honor the stewards of this land on which we live, work, and play.

Hannah [00:00:54]:
Today, we have Nathan from A Little Paddle back to talk about the gear, food, planning, and details behind his kayak trip from Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada up to Yakutat on the Gulf Gulf of Alaska. So welcome back, Nathan.

Nathan [00:01:11]:
Thanks. I'm excited to answer all these nitty gritty questions today.

Hannah [00:01:15]:
As I mentioned last time, it's like a huge life goal of mine to do the Inside Passage at some point. So this is, like, basically my selfish opportunity to, like, ask someone who's done more than the inside passage all the questions that I'd want answered.

Nathan [00:01:32]:
Perfect.

Hannah [00:01:33]:
So the first question is, how do you even start planning a trip of this magnitude?

Nathan [00:01:40]:
The expression we've been using a lot I've been using a lot, Sanish as well, is that you like, the question how do you eat an elephant, and the answer is one bite at a time. That's kind of the way we thought about it is that there just is kind of way too many pieces to actually think of the whole thing in one go. Like, the very base is the inspiration. Right? You have an idea. For us, the idea was how far can we get by starting at our homes and just paddling north? How far can we go in one good weather season? And then from there, we sort of figured out roughly how far we could get in a given day or a given set of days. We wanted to paddle about 20 miles, nautical miles, for 80% of days. So that worked out to 16 miles every day. So then from there, we sort of could say to ourselves, a kayak can hold roughly 20 days of food, and then 20 at 16 miles is somewhere in the range of 300 miles.

Nathan [00:02:39]:
My math is not great, but I think it's, like, 300 or 320 nautical miles. And so then that was the basis of, like, we had to find a town or a restock at those intervals. And then it sort of all became a bit easier because we could think about it as a series of smaller trips rather than one enormous thing.

Hannah [00:02:55]:
Yeah. What's the conversion of nautical miles to, like, kilometers?

Nathan [00:03:00]:
It's 1.812 whatever. 1.87. And with the reason we use those on the ocean is because one minute of latitude, so there's 60 minutes in a degree of latitude. One of those is equal to a nautical mile, which is actually the expression a mile a minute comes from. But anyway, that's why we use them because they're right there on our charts.

Hannah [00:03:21]:
Right. Okay. So, obviously, you had a bit of a leg up being a experienced kayak guide, but how would you advise a normal person approach this kind of trip? Like, I love the breakdown of, like, okay, you've got this 2 week section. How do you start planning for those sections?

Nathan [00:03:41]:
I think without, like, without experience on the coast or without experience in these waters, the best place to start would be, like, a guidebook or some kind of written account or, you know, video account of someone else who's done it. Just to get a sense of what the main challenge points are likely to be so you can kinda prepare from there. Going into it, for example, like, we knew that we'd be rounding Cape Caution and rounding a few of these exposed bits of coastline. And so from there, we decide that everyone on the trip should have their wilderness first aid certification and the assistant kayak guide certification, at least from the BCEC kayak guides alliance, which Sanish had to get because he didn't have those currently. And that would be my recommendation is that something along those lines would be an important set of certifications. But the way to know that, if you're not doing exactly the same trip as us, would be to start with a guide book and start with some kind of accounts of what you're gonna deal with along the way so you know where to focus your energy.

Hannah [00:04:38]:
And so how important do you think, like, formal training is before these kind of expeditions? Like, obviously, you already had everything and you got Sanesh to get his assistant guide cert and and first aid. As as a guide and, like, seeing people in these environments all the time in your professional capacity, what do you think of those kind of certifications as just like a basis for people to go on big expeditions?

Nathan [00:05:04]:
Yeah. I, in some ways, think of the certifications as almost like a common language that we can now speak. Like, if we're looking at the weather, we have a we have a similar understanding of what each thing means for our travel, for our comfort levels, for our safety, or even how to talk about it. As of, you know, the wind is fast or the wind is going at this speed or the wind is going from this direction. Like, there's this underlying understanding of how we're talking about it. Similarly, with first aid. Right? If, you know, even we consulted a lot with my parents who are actually doctors about first aid stuff along the way. But the way they think about that sort of equipment and training, even, you know, with their best efforts of knowing that it was backcountry, like, we ended up with an enormous first aid kit because they think about things Mhmm.

Nathan [00:05:51]:
Like, they prioritize things differently. So it's a it's a different kind of language. And those things are really valuable, but they also take a lot of time. And so if the idea is to be sort of quick efficient with your planning process, starting from everyone's done the same sets of trainings, then at least you can, like, mesh and communicate right away.

Hannah [00:06:06]:
Totally. We find that on patrol. In the wintertime, we have doctors on patrol on Whistler and yeah. Sometimes some of the doctors are really good and some of them kinda struggle outside of their, like, clinical environment where everything is a certain way, and then you're on the mountain and it, you know, you're on a snow patch and, like, you don't have access to all of your normal equipment, like, it is quite different.

Nathan [00:06:30]:
Yeah. Absolutely. The sort of on the cuff, on the flyness of all of our sort of repairs and first aid and decision making can be really difficult if you're used to sort of having a basis of, oh, I'll always have 5 of this or 10 of that or someone can come to me in an hour or whatever. Yeah.

Hannah [00:06:46]:
What what did you end up, like, taking in your 1st day kit? Or what did you end up kinda getting rid of because you realized that you don't need everything when you're out there?

Nathan [00:06:57]:
We sort of it ended up being, in some ways, really nice. We have an enormous sort of medical drug kit. That was what really came down to is we have antibiotics because we figured, especially in America where Tanish and I, you know, have insurance or we had traveler's insurance, but it seemed like it was not gonna be as straightforward as it is here. To be able to manage an infection in the field was gonna be pretty critical. And so we ended up with stuff to manage, like GI infections, skin infections, urinary tract infections, all sorts of different kinds of infections. Where maybe if we had a drug that was you know, there are some more broad spectrum things that are more of like, they're worse for your system, but they work for everything in the moment. And so then you get that is it as effective, but is it much smaller, and is it easier to use? You know what I mean? You know, rifle through to figure out which of the minocyclines or doxycyclines or whatever cycling you're trying to, like, put in your body at that moment while you're freaking out.

Hannah [00:07:47]:
That's a really good point of having, like, necessary antibiotics and stuff with you on those kind of trips so that if you get sick and don't have access to a doctor for the next 5 days, you can at least start some treatment and hopefully get better. And if not, you you'll get to a doctor soon.

Nathan [00:08:05]:
Yeah. We our 1st day care was quite big and extensive. And we've actually we we ended up as we created it, kinda we wrote about that process to try and track it down for ourselves. And we ended up essentially coming to the conclusion that out, especially on the Gulf Coast, we may be 3 days from rescue at any given time based on wind and weather patterns and whatever. Like, even if a helicopter could come to you in 30 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever, it still might be several days before they could actually physically fly through a storm or through the night or through the fog to actually get to you. And so that was where we sort of started from was if one of us breaks our leg or gets a serious infection, we have to have effectively, like, 3 days worth of stuff. And that's where it all started is from that basis.

Hannah [00:08:51]:
Yeah. So I have seen your food spreadsheet in that talk that you did at Valhalla in Squamish. Can you explain to our listeners a little bit about the spreadsheet and how you approached food?

Nathan [00:09:03]:
Yeah. Food is is a big one. It's in fact probably the big one because you have to eat 3 meals every day, which over a 140 days worked out, you know, as a 140 breakfast, lunches, and dinners. But then Sanish and I are 2 people, so it's actually 280 of all those things. Plus then, you know, protein bars, snacks, granola bars, desserts, all that sort of stuff. So it's a it's a just a huge quantity. And so basically, thing 1 that we did was break down, like I said before, like, that we could carry about 20 days of food in each section. And so we locked those dates down a little further.

Nathan [00:09:39]:
So some of them were at, like, 18. Some of them were 22. But that was kind of the range, and we had locked them down with locations. So we need to get food to Port Hardy. We need to get food to Bella Bella. We need to get food to, Prince Rupert and Juno, and that was it. I think, Yakutat maybe as well. And so we had 6 actual food sections, we called them.

Nathan [00:10:00]:
And then from there, it seemed like it was more digestible for me to look at a spreadsheet of 20 days as opposed to spreadsheet of a 140. And then the math right away is pretty easy. It's, you know, how many days in the section times how many, like, people are eating the food times the meal. So if a trip is 20 days long and there's 2 of us, we got 40 breakfasts, 40 lunches, 40 dinners, 40, like, rounds of snack, 40 rounds of dessert, all that kind of stuff. And then that's what sort of was captured in that spreadsheet. And that's, like, almost more nitty gritty because we had already done the backlog work of, you know, is Sanesh a bigger eater than me? Am I a bigger eater than him? Do we eat a lot in the mornings, in the afternoons? That sort of stuff.

Hannah [00:10:40]:
How did you figure that out? Was that from test trips that you did?

Nathan [00:10:44]:
Yeah. I knew a little bit from myself because I go on a lot of trips. But we did end up doing a test trip. A lot of what I realized is that I am not super fussy about whether or not meals are nutritious as long as they are, like, tasty and filling. And then I go for my nutrition from things that are, like, pre like, having a protein bar, a CLIF bar protein thingy, that's quite nutritionally dense. You know, it's 20 grams of protein. That's, you know, you eat 3 of those and you have your entire day for an average person. Like, though, that's kinda your macronutrient of protein and fats kinda settled.

Nathan [00:11:19]:
And then from there, it's like, you don't have to think too hard about it. You don't actually have to be at sort of comprehensive in your meal planning otherwise. That that's what works for me. It doesn't work for everyone. But because of that, it was like, if we're having pasta and spaghetti sauce for dinner and it has a little bit of, you know, TVP or some vegetable flakes and some chili flakes and it's delicious, that's kinda what's more important than it actually being, you know, high fiber and high whatever because I've sort of sorted those things elsewhere throughout the day. Yeah. That's kinda what we landed on. And Sanish, I think, had more snacks at the start because he was quite a he's quite a big eater.

Nathan [00:11:53]:
And so that way, he could fill the gaps in whatever meals were not as nutritious by having more snacks between meals. And then it gives us a bit you know, we're not actually on exactly the same meal plan all the time. So if I'm hungry or I just have an extra granola bar kind of thing.

Hannah [00:12:08]:
Did you notice a difference the times when you didn't get your shipments of food that you had, like, planned things out a little bit more meticulously, and then you were eating just whatever you could get from the shop at the town that you were at. Did you notice a difference in how you felt when you were eating your more planned out food versus whatever you found at the shop?

Nathan [00:12:30]:
Yeah. I think, I mean, right away, probably about 8 days into the trip, we had our kind of first food revelation, which is to sort of realize that rehydrating food that you've dehydrated, I don't really know how to describe it except to say that it feels almost like hollow. And what we decided or what we kinda discovered is that it's because it doesn't have oil in it or, like, fats. Because fat doesn't dehydrate. You're eating, like, a chili, but it's so lean that it feels like, I don't know, you know, like, weak or something. So that was, like, revelation number 1 is that when we got to Port Hardy, we just bought a bottle of canola oil, and we just started, like, pouring it into the food. And it was, like, a, you know, incredible improvement, like, double the amount of satisfaction from each meal. So that was thing 1.

Nathan [00:13:13]:
And it also gave us way more energy. Like, we would finish a meal and be like, oh, I'm kinda hungry. Like, that felt like we just had, like, a a soup. Like, it didn't have, like, a a meat to it or, you know, a meatiness. And then once we started adding fat, that was changed. But then again, yeah. I think this is a story I told on the last one. Right? About our food shipment not arriving in Juneau? Must

Hannah [00:13:31]:
be Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you had to run around Costco and like, you know, find whatever because you'd planned your what how many days would it have been at that point? Like 20 days of food that just didn't turn up?

Nathan [00:13:43]:
Yeah. It was it was the last 40 days. So I mean, I won't repeat myself so people can listen to that one. But effectively, a 20 day food shipment hadn't arrived and we had already kind of decided that it was such a hassle to ship food across the border that we were already not going to do the next one. So we were already thinking we'd buy 20 days of food in Juneau. But then we would supplement with the 20 days of like high nutrition stuff that had arrived for us in the mail. But then, you know, based on UPS's kind of, you know, poor management, shall we say. It was gone.

Nathan [00:14:14]:
And so all of a sudden we had to buy 40 days of food and we were starting from nothing. Or like from scratch as opposed to starting from, you know, half the meals being kinda ready. We just started bringing, like, blocks of hard cheese. Costco in America has these, like they look like bricks. They're like the size and shape of a house brick, but it's made of cheddar. And that's quite, you know, that's fatty, that's protein, that's Mhmm. You know, it's it's dairy. So it does some things to you if you haven't had a lot of dairy in a while.

Nathan [00:14:39]:
But it was it was truly quite different. Yeah. I don't know if we noticed right away. We started eating a lot of pancakes because we found just this enormous bag of pancake mix, and it was pretty unsatisfying. And so we started modifying it by adding oatmeal packets to it, and then it was like, that was quite good. And so once we made that shift, our mornings ended up being broadly the same as they were before in terms of satisfaction. Yeah. But I I'll say it was not as big of a change as I thought given how drastic the meal planning shifted.

Hannah [00:15:10]:
Yeah. You mentioned that once you hit the Alaskan border, there was kind of a town every few days that was big enough to have a supermarket that you could buy food from. If you did it again, would you dehydrate all your food and, like, put that much effort into planning all your meals out or would you just shop at whatever you could find along the way?

Nathan [00:15:30]:
Yeah. I'd probably shop along the way, I think. There's some stuff that is genuinely hard to get, you know, if you're interested in vegetable flakes or, you know, dehydrated chicken or whatever. Like, those things are not everywhere. And they're also quite light and packable. So even if you had almost like a pantry in your boat, like, you just carried, you know, blocks of veggie flake, you know, mix and all that sort of stuff and then just started supplementing. And at a certain point, we got quite efficient where we could walk into a grocery store needing, like, you know, 7 days worth of, like, proteins and sauces, let's say. And we had all of our carbs packed.

Nathan [00:16:06]:
And then all of a sudden, it was, like, 30 minutes later, we'd have done it. And so it sort of gets a bit intuitive of, like, oh, if I pick up this cheese block and it feels kinda like this in my hand, you know, it's about £2, like, that'll probably do me. You get this kind of almost embodied sense of how to do it. Sort of like grocery shopping in the city, where I don't really think about what I'm buying too much. I'm kinda like, oh, 3 onions, that's about a week. Sure. You know, a bunch of bananas, that's right. That kind of thing.

Nathan [00:16:29]:
Yeah.

Hannah [00:16:29]:
And so did you had you dehydrated all your own food or had you combined stuff that you'd bought? Like, how how would you actually made the food boxes that you sent to yourselves?

Nathan [00:16:40]:
We it's a bit of both. So, actually, sections 5 and 6, so the 2 sections that didn't arrive were the 2 sections that were almost entirely premade freeze dried meals. Because when you dehydrate stuff yourself, like, it it lasts a long time, but sort of technically, it's really only still food safe for, like, a month or 2. And we were gonna be pushing 4 months. And so already, we were kinda thinking that on the back end, we should eat, like, store bought stuff that has, you know, oxygen absorbers and is, like, fully dry dry.

Hannah [00:17:12]:
Mhmm.

Nathan [00:17:13]:
So that those two bins, the like the ones that never arrived were more prepackaged things. But basically everything up until that point had been either products that you could just find in a grocery store like, you can get, you know, like, those noodle sidekicks. I don't know who makes them, but they're, like, in a green packet, and they're kind of in every grocery store. But they're effectively a camping meal. They're just like a dried you know, put it in some boiling water kind of pasta dish. It was that kind of stuff mixed with, you know, premade chili that we had made and dehydrated and stews and things.

Hannah [00:17:42]:
The other question around food is water. Like, how are you finding water? Were you filtering stuff? Were you using tabs? Like, what was your approach to getting water?

Nathan [00:17:53]:
Tanisha and I each carried a 10 liter bag. They're called a dromedary bag. And it looks kinda like if you imagine like a baby seal sitting on a rock, like it's kinda floppy and has a little lid on the top. That's That's a really good visual. Yeah. Well, we call them baby seals in the industry because they look like baby seals. I didn't make that up. And they hold about 10 liters.

Nathan [00:18:15]:
Like, realistically, if unless you're filling it full full, it's more like 9 or so. But at the standard camping usage of 3 liters per person per day, that's 3 days of water. And then because we were covering about 20 miles every paddling day, that gave us, like, this 60 nautical mile budget of time to find a single creep, which is pretty easy because that's, like, a 100 kilometers. And the coast is pretty wet. And then we had aqua tabs which are just like these tablets. They have a 1 liter version and a 20 liter version. And so we were using the 20 liters and cutting them in half to make tens. It's really annoying if they don't have a 10.

Nathan [00:18:53]:
But popping 10 ones is really also not fun.

Hannah [00:18:56]:
Yeah.

Nathan [00:18:58]:
And so that was mostly what we did. We also had a gravity filter, so you'd, like, scoop up 10 liters of water, hang it from a tree, and let it drip. And it worked really well. However, that requires the river to be at your campsite or at your rest lunch site. And especially when we were in the Inside Passage, a lot of the rivers, because it's, like, this glacial valley, so sort of the inside passage between Bella Bella and Rupert, like prince of Wales? No. Princess Royal Island. It's these, like, really steep granite walls that go straight to the ocean. And so there's lots of waterfalls, like, lots of free flowing fresh water, but it just pours directly into the sea.

Nathan [00:19:35]:
And so what we would do is kind of paddle up to them, sort of straddle halfway up to the rock and just hold the baby seals little mouth hole, its little opening, and just fill it there. But then you've already put the contaminated potentially water into the bag and so filtering it doesn't really work. So you just have to chlorinate that bag now.

Hannah [00:19:54]:
Yeah.

Nathan [00:19:54]:
Because even if you did filter it, you haven't actually cleaned the bag that the water came from originally.

Hannah [00:19:58]:
Do you fall in at any point whilst trying to get this water?

Nathan [00:20:01]:
There's a lot of like, you know, half falls where you're kinda like one leg in, one leg out and it's where everything moves, you know, oh geez. And then you kinda, yeah. Certainly like, you know, waist deep falls a few times.

Hannah [00:20:11]:
Now gear, I imagine you would have had pretty much everything already from from your job. What did you buy? What did you replace? What did you wish you had? What did you realize that you didn't need and sent home or just didn't need the whole time?

Nathan [00:20:28]:
We actually probably got more new gear for the trip than we needed to, strictly speaking. But a lot of the stuff I had was sort of aging to the end of its life cycle because I bought it all when I did my training, which would have been 2015. So it was all getting to the point of being 8 to 9 years old. And certainly some of the soft goods don't like to last that long. You know, neoprene and dry suits and things. And so we did replace a lot of stuff, which is where, like, we started working with some sponsors. Notably, there's a company in Vancouver, Orange Canoe, that makes dry suits. And so they actually made myself and Sanish dry suits.

Nathan [00:21:09]:
They're a lovely couple. They're sort of starting up the business, and they're doing really amazing things. But that was amazing because we had basically new suits that we were pretty sure weren't gonna leak, were gonna be durable. They were custom made to our measurements, so they fit us really well. And a lot of kayak suits have, like, extra bits on them, and so we made these as, like, streamlined as we could. So there's not a lot of extra stuff, which was nice. But then as well, we worked with Valhalla Pure Outfitters, who gave us a lot of the camping side of things, which was really nice. We put a lot of wear and tear on our stuff.

Hannah [00:21:37]:
So you got a lot of new gear for the trip. Obviously, you need a tent and a sleeping pad and a sleeping bag and kind of your normal stuff. Outside of normal hiking gear and paddles and kayaks, obviously, what else did you need that was, like, particular to this kind of expedition?

Nathan [00:21:55]:
I mean, some of the things you just need more of because we were out for long stretches. And we had this sort of fear that didn't actually end up being true, but our fear was that finding fuel would be really complicated, like camp stove fuel, and so we opted for a stove called the MSR Dragonfly, which uses it prefers to use white gas, which is like a liquid. It's basically gasoline minus a few you know, processing steps. And it can also use gasoline or diesel if you really need to, but it prefers white gas. And so we actually bought I believe it's, like, 8 or 9 liters worth of, like, one litre canisters. And so I only had 1 because why would you ever need more than 1? But all of a sudden, like, we just had to get more of these things. And we had 2 Dragonfly stoves. We only really needed 1, but we figured this way we had a backup.

Nathan [00:22:44]:
We could use 2 if we really needed them. And they're the same stove, so parts can be shared back and forth. The pump is the same. The fuel is the same. So there is a bit of that kind of stuff where, like, we had duplicates of things where, like, no reasonable normal person would have 2 of the same thing. Yeah.

Hannah [00:22:59]:
And then what did you replace? Like were there things that just like didn't last? Because a 140 days is obviously a long time on some gear.

Nathan [00:23:07]:
Yeah. We had a a couple of sort of things like that right away. Sanish and I were using these 3 season inflatable sleeping mats. I won't name names, but they were not ideal, let's say. They and so within about I think it was, like, 2 weeks, not even mine had burst a hole in it, which was a bummer because I was in a hammock. So it wasn't even like I was on the ground poking into stuff. But it makes it really cold because if you don't have insulation underneath you in a hammock, there's not even the ground to insulate you. So it was pretty miserable and so we got new mats brought up to us in Bella Bella when a bunch of people were joining us anyway.

Nathan [00:23:42]:
And they also brought us a new pot set. Because the pot set that we had was like probably fine but it was designed for not a dragonfly stove. So the power of that jet of gas was basically, like, chipping away at the bottom and making it warp a little bit. And it was a product that was given to us so we could take photos and stuff. And we sort of had reached out saying, like, we'll keep using it. It's a it's working fine, but we can't take any photos because it's, like, taco shaped and it's peeling a little bit. And they said, well, we'd rather have some photos. So they gave us a different thing anyway.

Nathan [00:24:15]:
It wasn't like a thing that was actually broken broken, but it was a bit of a, you know, wasn't pretty for the photograph. Let's see. Yeah. And then as you do on that period of time, we wore through quite a few drysuit bits and pieces. Namely, the latex gaskets on, like, wrist and neck. They're kind of a consumable piece. Like, every time you stretch them, they get a little bit more worn out. And every time they see UV light from the sun, they get a little bit more brittle and cracky.

Nathan [00:24:44]:
Mhmm. And so we had to do a bit of replacing and, like, trimming and gluing on those. And then some of our seam tape just from sweating inside of the suit, 8 hours a day every day, started to peel. So we get to glue that on with Aquaseal. But that's a pretty intense piece of equipment just to try to keep you fully separate from the ocean, but also you're, like, exerting yourself inside of it all day every day. By the time Sanish actually gave his suit back to Orange Canoe for them to sort of do an autopsy effectively, and figure figure out what was wrong with it so they could, you know, make the next round better. The owner of the company or one of the co owner, Alex, was saying that, like, he'd never seen that much wear. Because it's sort of you're always rubbing it against the same spot of your PFD, and so you're making these really it just it looked yeah.

Nathan [00:25:27]:
It looked crazy. And the sun bleaching because of just constant sun exposure on your shoulders. Like this color of the shoulder was a totally different shade than the color of the legs, which never saw the sun. Because it's just such an intense bit of use. Yeah.

Hannah [00:25:39]:
Yeah. Totally. It's I mean, it's a good way to test something out if you're gonna make iterations on a product. Like, you really know you really know where where the max is at that point.

Nathan [00:25:50]:
Yeah. We also did a lot of sewing. We were wearing, like, merino leggings and just you wear through the crotch every week and you just resew your little stitch or whatever. Same with Sanish's spray skirt, like, the the neoprene skirt that wraps around the cockpit of his boat. He had sort of just got a little ripping in, so he sewed it and aqua sealed it. I sewed and aqua sealed my booties because I caught them on a rock. Just a lot of that kind of ongoing maintenance. We estimated that we probably put somewhere in the range of like 5 to 6 years worth of normal people use on some of these products.

Nathan [00:26:26]:
Because really, how often do people spend that many miles using their paddle or using their boat or using their whatever?

Hannah [00:26:32]:
Yeah. Totally. Like, even if you do a week long trip twice a year and then go out for a handful of weekends, like, it's not even coming close to a 140 days.

Nathan [00:26:44]:
Yeah. We we definitely put our repair kit through its paces. I would say that's totally a non optional thing, to bring as a repair kit. You gotta have one.

Hannah [00:26:53]:
What did you have in your repair? Obviously, like thread and needles and and AquaSeal.

Nathan [00:26:59]:
Yeah. It's a pretty extensive list. But broadly, it was like all the stuff needed to fix the kayaks. So nuts and bolts and bits of cable for rudders and things like that. Plus things to do just basic dirty fiberglass repairs. So stuff to fix your gel coat, stuff to fix a crack or a hole. And then it was stuff to fix the hard goods. So stoves and tent poles and buckles and clips and things like that.

Nathan [00:27:25]:
And then all the soft good stuff, so, you know, know, the glues and the sewing kits and the neoprene and all that sort of jazz. Those are the big categories. We end we ended up using quite a lot. Sanish also actually snapped a cable of his rudder. And so, really importantly, we had, you know, rudder cable crimps and pliers that could crimp that cable and all those kinds of specific stuff that really only apply to kayaking that are really important.

Hannah [00:27:47]:
So you wore merino leggings under your dry suit. What else did you wear?

Nathan [00:27:51]:
I had merino leggings under the dry suit and some merino socks, and then merino underwear and then a merino shirt, so it was mostly a sheep underneath and then if it was cold, I would wear a fleece over top of my merino base layer underneath the dry suit. But that was pretty rare just because you might start off cold, but as soon as you start moving, you'll warm up pretty quick. And if that fleece is underneath a dry suit, underneath the PFD, underneath your spray skirt, like, there's no taking that off till maybe lunchtime. And so you kinda pick your battles a little bit.

Hannah [00:28:24]:
The bald stock cold really applies strongly Absolutely.

Nathan [00:28:27]:
Yeah. In that situation. Yeah. There's a couple of things you can do. So we had pogies for our hands, which is kind of like it's like a glove, but it's a glove that actually wraps around the paddle and just has like these tubes that you put your hands in. They make your hands look a bit like like hammerhead shark heads, like they kind of have a funny shape. And then I had a neoprene hood, like the hood that you'd get when you're renting a wetsuit in like at the surf shop.

Hannah [00:28:52]:
Yeah.

Nathan [00:28:52]:
So it's just the hood of a wetsuit. And I could wear that on my head to keep me warm. And then we also had these things called storm kegs, which are like a really thin, lightweight rain jacket, but it instead of it having like a bottom of rain jacket, it's a spray skirt on the bottom. And it's huge. So you can put it over top of your PFD, over top of, like, your hat and your helmet and everything you're wearing, and just straight onto your cockpit combing. And it basically, like, puts you in an additional ziplock bag to keep you even warmer. We didn't use them very much, but that's like that's the way to warm up when you're cold out there.

Hannah [00:29:24]:
Like, obviously, you would have got all sorts of weather. How did you get things dry? Like, did you have sections where you had multiple days of rain paddling and at camp?

Nathan [00:29:35]:
Yeah. The that's kind of the one or not the one, but it's one of the unavoidable bits of doing a trip like this, in this environment. Is that even on warm days, it's coastal, so the humidity is quite near, like, 80, 90 percent all the time. And so drying things is a bit of a myth. You kind of, like, de damp them a little bit, but you don't really dry them. And we focus more in some ways on, like, airing stuff out so it wouldn't get, like, disgusting. But even, like, if you take off your drysuit and you hang it even, like, on the hammock string, so it's kind of, like, close to you and under your tarp, just the fog rolling through will keep it damp all night. Like it's never gonna actually dry.

Nathan [00:30:14]:
You can put it out on a log when it's sunny in the afternoon and dry it out, then you have to like roll it and crumple it up and put it in a dry bag, so it keeps that dryness intact, overnight. So mostly what we would do is sort of have our on water clothes that were like, warm when wet, kind of sacrificial not sacrificial, but like, you just knew what you were getting into when you put those on. And then you very purposely kept all your in camp dry stuff dry as best you could. Because as soon as you cross that threshold of like, Oh, I'm feeling lazy.

Hannah [00:30:52]:
Did you have any sections where you got so wet that your sleeping bags were getting, like, damp? Did you have anything where you really couldn't get stuff dried that needed to be dried?

Nathan [00:31:02]:
Not on this trip. So in Prince Rupert, I sent my hammock home and we brought a tent because we knew that there weren't very many trees in the North. So there wasn't much available for sort of hammock camping as we got further North. But that tent really didn't breathe. It was this super durable winter 4 seasons tent. And so I'd wake up damp a lot, but it was like kind of like you're in the steam room at the pool kind of damp. But that was about as bad as it got.

Hannah [00:31:28]:
That's amazing. What safety gear did you have with you for the trip?

Nathan [00:31:34]:
That's a yeah. It's a pretty, maybe, a big category because we had communication safety gear. So a VHF radio, which you can use to call coast guard, to get weather, to call boats, all that sort of stuff. Then cell phones when you had cell reception to call people and text and whatever. Sanish and I both had an a Garmin inReach device, which uses the Iridium satellite network to send text and SOS messages. And we each had one mostly because we didn't wanna get in each other's space of, like, oversharing one account to text our families and whatever. So it was mostly a convenience thing. And then good idea.

Nathan [00:32:09]:
Yeah. Sanish also carried a PLB, so a personal locator beacon Mhmm. Which to be totally honest, I don't I don't totally understand how it works, but it uses a different satellite network. So it's, like, not quite redundant with the inReach. Like, if an inReach doesn't work, the PLB can still work and vice versa.

Hannah [00:32:25]:
We have them they're really popular in New Zealand. Yeah. PLB is the kind of the thing. Obviously, Enrich is getting more popular now, but PLB used to be what everyone took packing.

Nathan [00:32:34]:
Yeah. And Sanish called it his oh crap button. Because, like, that's all it does is you turn it on, and then, like, someone's gonna come get you eventually. It doesn't really do anything else. But beyond sort of communication safety, there's a, like, a a whole different category of on water safety stuff. So, you know, broadly, the dry suit is immersion gear, which is like your number one line of safety. Because whether or not you're comfortable while paddling, if you end up in the water, you functionally have about 5 minutes to use your fingers before your hands start to stop working. And then you have about 10 minutes before you can't really use your arms.

Nathan [00:33:06]:
Like, you have this very short window to do stuff, and you can extend that a little bit by having immersion gear. You know, PFD flotation. So PFD is a personal flotation device, which is effectively just a life jacket, but life jackets are meant to keep you upright if you were unconscious, so they have like a neck thingy and more padding on the front, Whereas, the PFD just has padding on both sides to keep you in the water floating, but way more comfortable for paddling and way more, like, not necessarily useful, but you can move around better, like, if you ever worn a life jacket, you really can't do much in the water because you're stuck on your back. So Sash and I obviously each had immersion gear, each had a PFD. You know, spray skirts to keep the water out of your cockpit, of your kayak. Really important that we had good spray skirts that were really waterproof, so neoprene, and I had a, oh what was it called? I don't remember. Anyway, it was like this lighter rubberized fabric that was really stretchy and quite waterproof. It'll come to me and I'll shout it out at some point.

Nathan [00:33:59]:
But then we all had equipment to tow each other if one person was incapacitated. So a tow belt that was quick release. So if something goes wrong, I can remove myself from the system if I'm towing Sanish, and he could do the same to me. Yes. That's kinda the on the water stuff plus, I guess, the last bit of on water communication which I didn't really talk about before but we actually had flares as well. So we can do visual like line of sight. Someone's coming, but they don't know exactly where we are. We had the ability to shoot off class 2 flares, which are twin stars, so they shoot 2 shots, or a handheld flare, which you kinda it's like a road flare.

Nathan [00:34:32]:
So you hold it and it kind of shoots lava out the end, but it's really bright. And so that's the last bit of on water stuff. And then in land, you know, again, there's so many categories, but like being able to repair gear is safety, being able to make shelter is safety, being able to make fire is safety, being able to have first aid is safety. So, you know, depending on your definition, almost all of it was safety. But all those systems is what we put together to create our our safe trip or mitigate our risk as best we could.

Hannah [00:35:03]:
Totally. I'm curious if anything has changed in your approach to, like, gear planning, like, safety gear that you take from for your normal guiding or your personal trips now that you've done, like, this huge trip and had the extra gear and the extra stuff that you needed?

Nathan [00:35:20]:
Yeah. I think I'm more willing now than I was before to have multi purpose items. Like, it's was it was a hard I don't know why, but it was a hard sort of hill for me to get over the idea that, like, a sleeping bag that keeps me warm and is for sleeping is also a really good piece of a hypokit. So you don't need 2. You know, there's lots of things like that. You know? The thermos that I carry my soup in is also really good if, you know, you're hypothermic on the water and you need, like, some warmth and some calories or some sugar or whatever right away. So it serves that dual purpose of being, like, the thing I have my coffee in in the morning, but also a piece of safety equipment. And I think now I'm more willing to cross that threshold of, like, what is one thing, what is both, which piece of my repair kit is also a first aid thing, which piece of my first aid kit can also be used for repair.

Nathan [00:36:06]:
Namely, we had alcohol swabs that were in our first aid kit, but are really, really important for cleaning stuff if you ever wanna, like, do fiberglass repairs.

Hannah [00:36:14]:
Yeah. That's awesome. Back to, like, your trip planning planning out routes and that kind of thing, did you plan out you were going to camp, or was it just make it up as you go? And were there any times where you had planned to paddle, say, 18 nautical miles and you couldn't find anywhere to land and camp other than, obviously, the the Gulf of Alaska, which was a whole different beast?

Nathan [00:36:37]:
Yeah. In the BC coast, there's a quite an amazing resource. The BC Marine Trails Network has this map that has all of the campsites on the whole coast that they know of sort of linked. And it's on a map and you can click them and it gives you a bit of information about, you know, who to contact. Is it a paid site? Is it a boat launch? Is it an informal site? Whose territory is it in? All that sort of so we relied pretty heavily on that for the BC coast section. And then in Alaska, they have probably something similar, but we didn't know about it. We found a list of all of their Tongass National Forest cabins. So they have a cabin network.

Nathan [00:37:17]:
So we had that and basically we took all that data and just added it to our Navionics app, which is the app we use to navigate on the water. And so we would know sort of day by day what our options were. But we didn't know what we were actually going to get every day. Usually what we would do is, like if we were preparing for, you know, a 5 day stretch where it was a bit of a hard deadline, like we had to be here in about 5 days, we would sit down in the morning with our charts or our Navionics, or whatever we were using for that particular moment, and plot out what would work best, and what were some, you know, what would some backup options be. But we were doing that more on the fly. So on a sort of 5, 8, 10 day basis rather than ahead of time for a whole 140 days, if that kinda makes sense.

Hannah [00:38:02]:
Yeah. Totally. And with the like, you obviously had your general rough estimates of how long you were gonna paddle paddle each day. Like, I assume tides, weather, everything had a pretty big impact of on this. Did things go to plan in terms of your averages, or were you paddling, like, way more or way less than you thought you would be?

Nathan [00:38:26]:
Well, it didn't. It definitely didn't go to plan. So this the second day of the trip, we got stuck in a gale. So we were already one day behind schedule by day 2. But then, we had built in a couple of sections that were like optional. So there was these kind of like, we were trying to get actually up to Bella Coola and back from Bella Bella, which is like a 5 day detour up some inlets. But it was totally optional because you could just go across the front, like straight up the coast and avoid that, which we ended up doing. And that put us, you know, 5 days ahead of schedule.

Nathan [00:38:57]:
Like, just like that right away. Yeah. We also kinda fell into a routine where instead of paddling for 4 days, taking a rest day, then paddling for 4 days again, we ended up paddling straight whenever the weather was good And then taking a weather day when needed. Or spending that extra day in the town resupplying when we got there, which kind of ended up as our routine. So often, it was less of a stress than I thought it would be. Like we were often more ahead of schedule than behind it. And definitely in terms of our, like, amount of food we had in our boats at any given time, it was never we were never down to the last meals. We often arrived in towns with 2 or 3 extra days of stuff.

Hannah [00:39:37]:
That's a good feeling to not be stressing about that kind of thing on those trips. You talked briefly about navigation. And did you use digital navigation rather than paper charts or did you use both?

Nathan [00:39:49]:
We used a a combination of both mainly because if we had gone strictly with paper charts, we would have needed, like, a 100. Like, it was a pretty absurd number because for a chart to be useful for the kayaker's sort of scale of travel, it has to be about, like, 1 to 40000, 1 to 80000 maybe as this, like, scaling. But then to do that, the bottom of the chart to the top of the chart only covers, like, maybe 25 nautical miles, which is only a day and a half ish. And so you need all these different charts to get where you need to go. And so for some of the, like, the cruxes, the areas where we knew that would be really challenging, we did have charts. And then some of the charts I already had from other things, we brought along anyway. But for the most part, we used an app called Navionics, which is, I think, also a Garmin thing. And it's basically nautical charts on your phone.

Nathan [00:40:41]:
So they're pretty it's like a pretty one to one e equal. They don't have quite the same amount of information. And they're also, like, they have some weird user generated stuff. Like, I could add, This beach is really nice. And then if I make it public, everyone sees that. So there are sometimes you'd, like, pop up on a bit of information, like, we stopped here in 2014 and the waterfall was pretty, like, all this kind of random information. And you could download these maps offline. So that was really critical, as we could download the sections we needed for our trip.

Nathan [00:41:07]:
The downside being that we had to pull out our phones a lot during the day. We got used to it, but it's, like, not the least stressful thing if it's raining and you're in swell and you're pulling out your phone to check what's going on. And then there's an app called Topo Canada, which is basically Navionics, but for the land. And so it has topographic maps and just so happens to have lots of campsites built into it because it's kind of has hiking trails and roots and all that stuff. Only useful in Canada, as the name would imply. But it was really nice for that inside passage, for that Bella Bella through Prince Rupert section, because there was not a lot of actual great camping. It wasn't like, oh, there's a nice beach every, you know, 6 miles we take our pick. It was like, there might be no good beach for 15 miles.

Nathan [00:41:47]:
We have to sort of make it around this corner to find it. That sort of

Hannah [00:41:51]:
thing. How did you deal with bears and, like, wolves and all your wildlife when you're camping? Because you're pretty remote out there. I assume that wildlife is is pretty decent, like, the amount of wildlife would be pretty decent.

Nathan [00:42:06]:
Yeah. At the start of the trip, we had a bear canister. So I can't remember who made it, bear vault or something like that. So it was like this bluish tube that had a lid on one side and was, you know, capped on the bottom. And it wasn't enormous but it was big enough that it could fit all of our open food. So like, once we cracked something we put it in there to keep it sort of double safe. And the idea is that they're sort of bear proof, and so if need be, you take that out of your boat, just put it somewhere, and then if a bear comes and wants to play with it, they can smack it around, but they can't get in. And I say for the at the beginning, because we actually sent it back somewhere in Alaska.

Nathan [00:42:43]:
I believe cake, we sent it back with our friend Jordan. Because it it's kind of an awkward thing to put in your boat. And so it was hard to fit the amount of stuff required into Sanish's boat. So Sanish's boat was the only one that actually fit the canister anyway. And we figured we'd get more efficient use of his boat space if we got rid of it. And that ended up being sort of a non consequential decision. Because we had very little, like, in camp animal activity. And my guess is that, sort of, twofold, one is that, even after we started switching to the Costco food, we were mostly doing these kind of one and done packaged things.

Nathan [00:43:20]:
You know, you'd crack open a a pack of instant mashed potatoes, pour it into your pot, add water, put some cheese, put some, you know, bacon bits or whatever, call that dinner. But you weren't really creating a lot of smelly garbage. And so our actual like smellies were quite small and so we would keep them in the kayaks sealed up in dry bags with, you know, the neoprene hatch cover or the rubber gasket hatch cover on top. I mean, I'm not a bear. I don't know how good their sense of smell is compared to mine, but, like, it felt pretty difficult to actually, like, you'd I don't know. It doesn't seem like you'd get much sense that there was food in these boats. And we weren't doing stuff like, you know, cutting vegetables on our hatch cover fiberglass or, like, catching and gutting fish on the deck where you'd leave, you know, grease stains everywhere and all that sort of stuff. And so that was the main way we detracted animals.

Nathan [00:44:11]:
And then we also had sort of campfires near our boats in our camp that we would keep lit overnight. Because bears, yeah, bears specifically don't like fire. Wolves can kind of be attracted to the fire, but bears not so much. And so it's like, it's a it makes you it makes it more sort of known to to the beings around you when you're sleeping. They're like, there's people here, like, we've made a camp. There's fire. There's no obvious food or attractant and there's also like an obvious deterrent kind of going at all times. And that seemed to do pretty well for us.

Hannah [00:44:46]:
How did you keep the fire going overnight? Did one of you just keep getting up and putting wood on it?

Nathan [00:44:51]:
Yeah. We would sort of fill it like get it going as good as we could before bed. And then there was no specific there's no like real schedule. But if someone got up to pee, they'd add a couple things to it in the night. And often, they were kinda burnt out by the morning. But even the smoke wisping wisping up and all those kinds of smells are not attractants. That's kind of a deterrent kinda thing.

Hannah [00:45:13]:
And you weren't worried about bushfires, I guess, because because it's such a wet part of the part of the coast.

Nathan [00:45:19]:
Yeah. It's a really wet place. And also we're on the beach. So, unless, like there's a couple of beaches that had like tons and tons of firewood everywhere, like driftwood. And so those we were obviously much more careful about setting a perimeter. But for the yeah, we were, like some beaches, we were a 100 metres from the nearest grass or tree, just because they were so vast and expansive. So that's a long way for a spark to, kind of, travel in the night.

Hannah [00:45:43]:
Yeah. So you have captured a lot of footage of your trip. What is your plan for the footage?

Nathan [00:45:52]:
That's a good question. It turns out making a video is really hard. I knew that going in. I knew that sort of deep in my soul. But I sort of pretended it wasn't gonna be hard. I was like, well, we'll capture it and we'll, you know, we'll make sure to get some context. So, like, you know, it's not just a video of the trees. It's like or the waves or whatever.

Nathan [00:46:11]:
It's kind of like you try to get some emotional context. Like, how am I feeling about this? Or, like, what am I seeing, and what is it making me think? Where are we going from here today? Why are we making these decisions? Like, you know, both for the editing process to know what you're looking at, but also to give a story line, like, it's raining, and it's making me feel upset or whatever. Like, something to give a little bit of context. But since then, we haven't done anything with it. And we have a lot of it. There's, like, I don't know. It's gotta be 100 of hours. We submitted, like, a grant proposal to the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.

Nathan [00:46:42]:
It's one of their grants. I can't remember exactly what it's called. But we had partnered with one of Sanish's friends who happens to be a video editor. And so if we get this grant, then he'll have basically a little bit of funding to putting something together. But otherwise, we'll reassess just because it's gonna be at least the fall before I have time to take a crack at it again. And I would really like to because there's a lot of, I think, good insight in there. Yeah. Maybe disappointing answer, but nothing is the we've done nothing with it.

Hannah [00:47:09]:
That's fair. How did you balance, like, being present in moments versus trying to capture things?

Nathan [00:47:16]:
Yeah. We we didn't make a point of trying to capture everything, especially because in a lot of cases, we were filming things with our phones. So it's like you open your life jacket, you pull it out, you turn it on, you hold it up. Like, that's quite a lot of steps. And so if you're trying capture a whale, it's gonna be gone by the time you pull your phone on anyway. But we sort of treated it a bit like a journal where, you know, if I'm having a thought or feeling a feeling or seeing something that I really, you know, is making me, you know, feel something, you kind of pull it out and you sort of, you know, you'd journal to it a little bit. And that was kind of the same process that I already do at night with a regular journal. And so that made it feel less intrusive, like it made it feel more natural to me.

Hannah [00:47:57]:
And how did you charge, like, you were only filming with your phones not anything else, but how did how did you charge everything?

Nathan [00:48:05]:
We had more than phones actually. So Sanish has a 3 60 camera, so one of those, like, sticks with the 2 eyes on both sides, and that's a nightmare. Like, it's beautiful and it's so efficient, but now that I'm trying to look at the footage, like, the footage is a is a sphere. Like, it's an anyway, it's a totally separate camera. But anyway, I had a GoPro as well. So I had a also fish eye but one direction. And then we both had our phones and then I had the drone that I put in the sky to film. So keeping it all charged was a challenge.

Nathan [00:48:35]:
We had brought, we brought battery packs. So the 20,000 milliamp hour battery packs, they're fairly common. That seems to be like the the most efficient way to buy a battery. Like it's cost and size and whatever, like, is to get 20,000. And so I had 4, so I have 80,000 milliamp hours. And Sanish also had 4, but then a week in, one of them like, one of the cases flooded, and so it broke. So we had 3. So he had 60 and I had 80, which is enough to charge a lot of stuff.

Nathan [00:49:04]:
So 20,000 milliamp hours will charge your phone about 6 times. That's kind of the the broad conversion.

Hannah [00:49:11]:
Okay.

Nathan [00:49:11]:
And so it can charge like a GoPro about 10 times. Annoyingly, the drone takes a lot of battery. So 20,000 milliamp hours is equivalent to 1 drone battery. So about 30 minutes of flying the drone. But I had 3 batteries. So as long as we left town with all 3 drone batteries full, you'd get an hour and a half of drone flying ability before the next town. Yeah. Which was basically enough all the time.

Nathan [00:49:37]:
Like, I I can't remember if there was even a single time where he tried to charge a drone battery on trip with the battery packs. He didn't really need to. I also had 3 GoPro batteries, and Sanish had 2 or 3 Insta 360 batteries. And so as long as we left town with all those things charged, our battery packs ended up mostly for like phones and inReach and stuff. Because you can only have 1 battery in your phone. And then we had this crazy gizmo that had like one plug to plug into a wall and then 6 USB plugs so you could charge everything all at once. And the actual specific one we got was kind of crappy and broke, Like it ended up only 3 of the plugs would work at any given time, which is kind of annoying, but I think the concept is solid. So if I find one that is really good, I'll try again.

Nathan [00:50:23]:
Because the idea that you could, you know, fast charge with, you know, several 100 Watts of power, all of your stuff in one night means that all you need is to find 1 night with an electrical outlet per 20 days of travel or 10 days of travel to be sort of set.

Hannah [00:50:36]:
Yeah. And how did you back up? Like, did you have an SD card reader that you were backing stuff up to your phone? Like, what did you do?

Nathan [00:50:44]:
Yeah. I had, I think, like, 2 terabytes worth of those little micro SD cards. You know, the teeny tiny ones that are, you know, 200 gigs each or whatever. And then Sanish had about the same. And so I think I used, like, 3 of those cards in the GoPro and 3 of them in the drone over the course of the trip, and Sanish about the same. But then we we didn't back those up. So once we had them, I had this, like, special waterproof case that I put them in very gingerly and closed it. And then that was that.

Nathan [00:51:11]:
Because they are known to not be the most robust things. And then, in some ways, the most annoying is the phone because it's so convenient and easy to take videos with your phone. But once you reach the 120 gigs or whatever is on the phone, you're sort of screwed. And it starts either uploading them to the cloud or that's it. But if you're in the middle of nowhere and you don't have cell service, that's not an anyway. That was more of the challenges because we got pretty close to using up all the space on our phones. And then we have to get to town and, like, just get on WiFi and, like, go upload and just hope that you know, enough gigabytes of stuff would enter the cloud that we could start over.

Hannah [00:51:48]:
Oh, god. Yeah. Obviously, the biggest cost to any expedition is always the time off work in a lot of ways. Other than that, do you know what the trip cost you?

Nathan [00:52:00]:
Well, kind of yes and no. So I have this excel spreadsheet that I keep a lot of my, you know, guiding and outdoor related expenses in. And so I I know the number of how much I spent last year on stuff. But some of that is things that Sanish bought and some of it is things that are not related to the trip. But my broad guess is it's somewhere in the range of, like, $22,000 all in. You? Well, on that spreadsheet. So

Hannah [00:52:26]:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Nathan [00:52:27]:
Yeah. And that number is gonna it sounds a bit crazy but then I also bought the kayak itself which was close to $10,000. So you can, you know, and I'm not gonna I'm gonna use that again. It's not just for this trip.

Hannah [00:52:39]:
Yeah. Totally. Well, just gear is expensive, like, and the amount that you need if you're buying multiple things of the same thing, like, that adds up quickly.

Nathan [00:52:49]:
Yeah. And you sort of feel like, oh, if there was ever a time to get a new rain jacket, it's now. And so there's a lot of stuff that I didn't really, like, not I didn't need, but it was sort of like, it might have happened a year or 2 later on down the line, but I expedited that replacement process. Yeah. We did spend a lot on food. Like if anything It was sort of food and then the kayaks. Because I think Sanish's boat was used but he also spent somewhere in the range of $4,000 on his boat. So yeah, that was a big expense.

Nathan [00:53:19]:
And then especially with the food that didn't show up and the rebuying of food, food, there was probably an additional close to $1500 of cost just for that pickup.

Hannah [00:53:28]:
Well, I can't think of how much I spend on groceries in a week, and you're, you know, buying 4 and a half months worth of food in one go. It's yeah. That's a lot.

Nathan [00:53:36]:
Yeah. Crazy.

Hannah [00:53:37]:
So my last question is what was, like, the best section of the trip? Now this is a completely selfish question because, hypothetically, you know, if some random person was going to take 4 or 5 weeks, where would you where were the parts that you would be, like, I 100% wanna go back there? Whether it's all in one section or, like, multiple different sections, where would you go?

Nathan [00:54:00]:
I think right off the bat, I underestimated how useful the Alaska State Ferry Service is. And so I would like to actually do this for myself even. But to try and do a ferry assisted trip. Because once you get on the ferry starting in Bellingham and going up it stops in all the major towns. So Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau, Scegway, Sitka, something like that. Then there's a different ferry that also goes to Gustavus and to Caic. So there's all these towns that are easily accessible within about a week. So you could do these sort of, week long trips.

Nathan [00:54:40]:
And as long as you were, sort of, timing it right, you could kind of, like, you could go sort of Ketchikan to Wrangle. And then you'd be about in time to get the ferry that would just take you to Juno. Then you get on, you pedal Juno to Gustavus, and then you could do this sort of longish route, which I think would be amazing. Because certain things are quite awesome, like the, the La Conte Glacier, so the, the glacier that is just north of the Statekeen River, right by Wrangel, Alaska, is pretty extraordinary. And quite, in some ways, accessible, because it was, I think, 2 days travel away from Wrangell, which means that if you had landed there by ferry and had 5 days even, you could go up and come back and then get that ferry to go somewhere else. Similarly, Glacier Bay National Park was just, like, a phenomenal place to be. And also pretty straightforward. Like it's I think because it's so remote, or like remote as in far away from the average person, they don't have the same kind of permitting process that a lot of our national parks do.

Nathan [00:55:36]:
You know, if you want to hike the West Coast Trail, you have to get a permit, like, the day it opens in January or whatever. And this, you just sort of show up, and as long as you're by human power, they're basically like, Yep. Go on, go in, and go for it. So that would be a super huge recommendation, and there is a ferry to the town of Gustavus, which is, like, right there. And there's also boat rental. There's a lot of kayak rental places in that town because it's so close to the National Park. And you could very easily spend 12, 15 days in there. They do have a water taxi ish service too, so you could get dropped off at the far end and make your way back, or go out and get the water taxi back.

Nathan [00:56:12]:
Those are all options. But those would be the 2 because they're, they're sort of, they're spectacular but they're also not incredibly like, they don't require a huge amount of previous knowledge and skill and training. Like, there's no huge cruxes in either of those places. There's no, like, giant headlands you have to make your way across or things like that. It's sort of more protected.

Hannah [00:56:33]:
Yeah. So is there anything you would like

Nathan [00:56:38]:
to add? I think I'd love to just make sure that people know that even though something like this is crazy, potentially, and it was out there and it took a lot of my time and energy, you don't have to go this extreme to have an adventure. And you don't have to be sort of paralyzed by the amount of decisions that are required to have an adventure. There's something I've been thinking about a lot recently is this idea that camping and backcountry travel have a lot of have a lot of myths around them and a lot of sort of things that people think are required or, you know, things that people think are necessary, whether that be training or whether that be dehydrated food or whether that be pristine, you know, new equipment or whether that be remoteness or whatever all these things are. And I think sort of picking 1 or 2 of those aspects to focus on is totally fine. You know, if you have a lot of certification but really crappy equipment, you can still go to some pretty gnarly places. If you have really cool equipment and really awesome food, but not a lot of training, there's a lot of, like, long remote trips that don't have a lot of exposure in them. And so picking which of those things you wanna do and sort of bringing it to a level that doesn't seem ludicrous to start. Because the only way that you really know what you like and know what you can do is to just start doing things.

Hannah [00:57:56]:
I think that is fantastic advice. And one of the whole purposes of us really starting starting Weatherproof and having this podcast is to encourage people to get outside. And, yeah, you can go on a wild adventure like paddling in the remote parts of the world a 140 days up the coast, or you can do something that's a little bit less exposure, a little bit easier in a lot of ways like the PCT, which is still a 140 days, but you don't need quite as much experience and certification and and just planning and all that stuff. Or you can do an overnight hike in your backyard, and and that's great too. Just, like, start wherever wherever works for you.

Nathan [00:58:38]:
Yeah. And I mean, back to the very first thing that you sort of talked about is, you know, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Like you just kinda have to have a crazy idea and just start chugging along as opposed to thinking about the whole thing all at once.

Hannah [00:58:52]:
Because you started planning this trip in was it 2019? You went in 2023?

Nathan [00:58:59]:
Yeah. Something along those lines. It was this sort of the idea was 2019 and I was like, oh, I'm gonna do this at some point. And then it sort of changed and grew and the very the vast majority of the work was like the 6 weeks before we left. Everything else was kind of not necessarily theoretical but like how do we want the vibe to be? Like who do we want to sponsor us? Do we wanna take videos? There's a lot of the sort of philosophical questions, but a lot of the work work was very much, you know, in the 6, 8 weeks before we left.

Hannah [00:59:27]:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of the approaches and bits and pieces and gear and all of that to to do a trip like this. I think there's so much in this for everybody to learn from, whether it's just approaching an overnight or starting to think about some of that bigger expedition type stuff, but lots to learn. And thank you for sharing.

Nathan [00:59:50]:
Awesome. Thank you very much for having me.

Claudia [00:59:52]:
And on that note, thank you for listening. We hope it was time well spent. We would love to hear your thoughts on today's episode. Message us at weatherproofpodcast with questions, comments, or anecdotes from your favorite adventures. If you loved today's episode, please share it with a friend and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts. As always, happy adventuring.