Saturday, September 24, 2016

21 August, 2016 (Joel Davis)

Well, I slept in past my alarm again today. Fortunately when I woke up at 7 Cody came and told us that we were meeting at 9:30 instead of 8:30. After waking up and getting out of the tent, Emily, Mariah, and I started to make a some oatmeal and coffee for breakfast. I forgot to put extra flavoring in mine so it was really bland. I definitely won’t be making that mistake again! After finishing breakfast and cleaning everything up, we did a little bit of camp clean up, since we didn’t know for sure yet if we would be leaving today or not. Upon meeting in the group tarp and discussing the plan to do lessons for the day, I realized that we wouldn’t be leaving for the next camp site today. Tommy and Ryan rejoined the group after staging the van with the canoe trailer up in Mattice for our river exit. We started our group time off with Emily reading her journal entry. Ryan followed this up with a hygiene announcement where he basically told everyone to not be nasty and wash ourselves. He also demonstrated the proper way to brush our teeth and “broadcast” while in the back country. After that I had the opportunity, I guess you could call it, to start off the day’s lessons by doing my “open canoes over open water scenario. I was followed by Tyler going over his scenario, “drowning in forest pools.” After these two scenarios, we got to break away from the mental and have Cody teach us his first knot, the fisherman’s knot. This was followed by more mental exercise with Nick doing his scenario, “black bear problem.” After this we broke for lunch. I had pepperoni and cheese and a snickers. I think that’s my favorite quick lunch. After lunch we got some lessons on feedback and how to do tent mate critiques from Jeff and Ryan. After that we learned the Ashley’s oyster stopper knot from Cody, finishing up his knots. After everyone had figured out how to tie this knot, we moved into feedback for everyone who had done a lesson for today. They were kind of lacking in feedback from people, but this may have been due to the time that had elapsed between the lessons and the feedback session. After feedback, we conducted a debrief for the day and finished up at around 5-ish. After that, Mariah and I made coffee while Emily was out getting water with Tommy. She got back just in time for the three of us to start cooking dinner together. We made spaghetti with peas, mushrooms, and onions in it for veggies and my home-made seasoning mix with crushed red peppers added for flavor. I didn’t want a repeat of breakfast after all. After dinner we took it easy and progressively started to pack up our excess gear so that we could get ready to leave quicker tomorrow. It was a good learning day and we even got about 4-5 hours of sunlight, a great relief after two days of rain.

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