​Blown away

[Guest]

Withstanding a windstorm... just don't leave the tent to pee. On the Green people left their tent to hike. From the summit view the five of them all using solo tents counted four tents

One had left on a solo tent trip down Cataract Canyon. With the sleeping bag, mattress and clothes inside.

That lost gear tale from yellowcanoe got me thinking.

I’ve lost my sanity when it blew like stink and kept blowing for days. Constant unrelenting wind eventually wears me out, but I have gotten better at creating personal wind protection (wind chair).

I’ve had some wind aided swims, but those were my lackadaisical inattention, and even then the floating yardsale was fully collected.

I’ve had a couple of boats blow off the roof racks when I couldn’t restrain them solo, but have learned some quick lash (or simply reorient the vehicle stupid) tricks there, and watched an 18lb pack canoe blow end over end down a sandy beach (spiral sand stake if nothing else).

Seen a carbon Prospector, tied off upside down via the bow line mysteriously leap a row of five other canoes, ending up on the far side of the row from where it started, right side up and straining at its leash. I now springline the bow and stern painters pulling in opposite directions. Even if there is but a lone tree I can tie the bow and stern pulling towards each other, the painters are there, I might as well use both.

Surprising few if any hats. Not sure why, I detest using a chin strap. Chased down a few errant sil-nylon stuff bags in camp, but I think I’ve caught them all.

Haven’t had anything blown out of the canoe (credit spray covers, thwart bungees and good housekeeping). Maybe I’ve been lucky.

Have you lost anything to the wind?

 

[jcavenagh]

Nothing more than a hat or two.
I have seen a canoe airborne but still tied to a tree at one end.
That was scary!

 

[memaquay]

Countless hats. Lost a hunter orange one a couple of weeks ago in 50 k winds. Could have retrieved it, but was too dang tired to bother.

 

[yellowcanoe]

No but have been witness to several chases.. One at Henderson Pond in the Dacks many years ago.. Freestanding tents still require stakes.. So a couple found out.. He had to sprint and swim.

Another show tent at Mountain Man .. A Vermont Canoe Tent took off like a copter and cleared all the Wenonah boats before landing by a Mad River..

I lost my favorite hat of the time on the Missinaibi River. Blasted river was blowing up river and we had to paddle hard to get through the rapids.. No extra hand.

Our Odyssey took off on the Buffalo and blew upslope...over our tent..
Our Grumman in 1973 took off in a BWCA squall. Matters not it was 70 lbs. Hurricane force winds blew it into the lake where it floated down lake.. Good the lake was not too big

 

[Alan Gage]

Nothing much lost here other than like you said, sanity. Nothing more aggravating to me than strong wind. There's no peace to be had and it can frazzle my nerves in a hurry.

Only thing I can recall was my waterproof brimmed hat that blew out the back of my canoe unobserved on my last trip just when the weather was getting ready to turn cold, wet, and windy for the next 1 1/2 weeks. I hated to lose it's warmth and dryness and I hated to think of leaving "garbage" in the lake. There was about 5 miles between where I last knew I had it and where I realized I lost it. I was tempted to wake up the next morning and go looking for it but the weather said otherwise.

Alan

 

[dave0]

Years ago on the Merrimack River Hal and I setup my 4 man Timberline tent. Had pretty steady winds all day. Since was getting dark I thought I'd be smart and put a candle lantern (remember those?) in it, had a line strung for it. Well, we're sitting there around the fire and a huge gust of wind hit. That poor tent got lifted up, flew through the air doing a spin and then landed half way in the river. The messed up thing is during the spin we could see the candle lantern flopping all over the place and then goes out. We ran down and retrieved the tent out of the water and set it up again higher up the shoreline and more out of the wind, the poles had all held. I go in with a flash light and man oh man, there is wax everywhere! It took a long time to get that all off!

dougd

 

[sweeper]

I've never 'lost' anything, chased a few things. I lost a trap that were shredded in the wind. And I've been thrown around by the wind when I was caught above the timberline on Mt Washington with gusts at +100mph.

 

[Grandpa Paddler]

Lost my favorite hat in a head wind on the Allegheny. We stopped at a small riverside village for lunch and I bought a new hat and had lunch. About an hour back on the river and the guys in the other canoe found my hat floating down the river. BLESS THEM!!!

 

[frozentripper]

Indirectly... temporary loss of a canoe from winds blowing the previous day. The very first time canoeing on Georgian Bay we were unaware that the water level can rise and fall due to wind piling up water on the west side of Lake Huron. Later, when the wind subsides, the water sloshes back and forth across the lake for a while... sloshing back to rise on the east side, then the west side, back to the east side, then the west side, several times. Aka the Great Lakes seiche.

Anyhoo, being totally clueless as young canoeists often are we left the canoe loose and untied on sloping rock about a foot above that evening's water level. Then had a jolly time goofing off melting down glass bottles the previous campers had left, in an extremely hot fire.

The next morning there was the canoe, gone. But visible some distance offshore... lucky there was no wind that morning and a long swim got the canoe back (again lucky that it was summer and Georgian Bay is warm water unlike freezing-cold Lake Superior... if there had been a dog available, maybe the dog could have swum out to get the canoe, good retriever).

Old saying in the stock market and maybe the farming community...

During strong winds, even turkeys fly.

Here's the documentation on the latest hat loss... several days ago I was at the Toronto waterfront doing the normally ridiculous things needed to get photographs and got this one at the exact moment the wind blew my hat off. That wave in the foreground doesn't look like much but it splashed hard, splashing the camera and myself so when I turned to avoid the water, off went the hat in the wind... a frustrating obscenely long time too, finding it again in the twilight. Still, thankful for waterproof cameras... sooo, ah... hats off... to Olympus.

 

[lowangle al]

Nothing pisses me off more than my hat blowin off, I take it personal.

 

[Odyssey]

Adverse weather can be an adventure; snow, rain, heat and cold. A test of your abilities and fortitude; something to appreciate and endure. Wind on the other hand is nature's way of mess'n with ya. Tugging at your tarp, your clothes, your course across open water, it's a challenge to your patience and perseverance. It can be deadly of course, but mostly I consider it extremely annoying. When it blows I hunker down and wait it out. Set up a wind break and shut out the banshee wails echoing through the forest. When the wind merely gusts playfully we can travel, but somehow the headwinds always seem to follow me place to place. Must be the big brother of the subtle drift of the smokey fire, always following you around and around no matter where you sit.

 

[dogbrain]

My town is one of the windiest places around. Katabatic Brewing is just down the street, that should tell you something. Anything here not nailed or tied down becomes someone elses property pretty quickly: canoes, lumber, lawn furniture etc.. I can tell when the gusts here get above 30mph because I can hear the garbage cans blowing down the alley, when they reach 60, the entire house starts to shudder. All the old plaster and lathe houses around here have cracks running every which way. My neighbor somehow manages to loses large swaths of shingles every year. He just puts them back up in big sheets. If you build your fences strategically then you never have to rake leaves. I hate raking leaves. The good thing is that when we leave town it's always less windy.

Mark

 

[Marten]

Lost my canoe and pride with a breeze on Royd Lake in WCPP. I had passed through Royd so much over the years that I came to know the fellas that had a cabin on a leased island. They showed up while I was camped one year so I paddled my kevlar Prism over to say hello. A dead calm morning and I pulled it up on a rock. They looked at me as this seasoned canoe adventurer that braved the elements for a month at a time. We visited and they plyed me with a lot of fresh food they knew I would rerlish. Someone then asked if that was my canoe floating out in the lake about a half mile away. They fetched it and asked what I would have done if alone. I assured them I could have made the swim as the redness of my face faded.

 

[lowangle al]

Lost my canoe and pride with a breeze on Royd Lake in WCPP. I had passed through Royd so much over the years that I came to know the fellas that had a cabin on a leased island. They showed up while I was camped one year so I paddled my kevlar Prism over to say hello. A dead calm morning and I pulled it up on a rock. They looked at me as this seasoned canoe adventurer that braved the elements for a month at a time. We visited and they plyed me with a lot of fresh food they knew I would rerlish. Someone then asked if that was my canoe floating out in the lake about a half mile away. They fetched it and asked what I would have done if alone. I assured them I could have made the swim as the redness of my face faded.

I would have said that I never leave my boat untied unless there is a rescue available.

 

[Glenn MacGrady]

I'm not sure this counts, but I once lost my favorite hat to the wind when sitting on the open bed of a logging truck shuttle in Maine.

One of my scariest times on flat water was when I was on a long Maine lake with a highly rockered whitewater canoe. I couldn't control the canoe at all, so I just gave up and let the wind take me where it wanted while I concentrated on preventing a flip.

I haven't seen any wind since the OP encouraged me to buy a sail three or four years ago.

 

[Guest]

I have oddly never lost a hat that I remember. A warm knit cap is an acceptable chapeau, but I don’t like wearing hats for sun or rain protection unless really needed. I also detest chin straps, so most of my hats can be pulled down so snug that it takes gale force winds to dislodge them. If it starts getting to that point I take them off and stuff them under a thwart bungee.

I did find one of our canoes floating in a lake before I even knew it was missing. A couple of us were coming back to camp from a day paddle on Little Tupper and spotted a solo canoe beached one of Tupper’s least attractive campsites a half mile away. We paddled over to say hello and let them know of better empty sites nearby.

It looked like a pretty cool little canoe, and I didn’t recognize it as my son’s Dagger Tupeolo until I got up close. It had been pulled up in camp onto a flat shelf 20 yards from the water, but left upright and not tied to anything. It somehow threaded its way through the woods before leaping off the embankment without anyone in camp noticing.

Lightweight canoes have a penchant for wandering off on their own.

 

[Steve in Idaho]

I lost several kites forever to the wind when I was a kid.

Lived and worked in Wyoming a couple of summers. One early spring day near Elk Mountain, a crosswind blew my 4x4 pickup straight sideways off the highway into a snowdrift at the bottom of a cut. State cop told me they usually pulled a rig back up from there two or three times a week. I saw overturned semi trucks from same near there more than once, and had to watch while others threatened to do the same while waiting for it to clear. Everyone who spends much time there has seen this...

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f7/ea/ea/f7eaea72a7b14570c35f3c73b321ec39.jpg

Medicine Bow Wyoming (locals in Laramie at the time referred to it as "Mexican Blow") is known as one of the windiest places in the west. While I was there, they were building three experimental wind powered generators (1985-ish?). The first one was up, but not operational yet. Not long after I left IIRC, That rig ended up looking like this...

http://i.imgur.com/uz2NR8e.jpg

Just a little too much wind there. They must have figured out what the weakness was, because that place is covered with 'em now.

Guess my time there has accustomed me to wind. We saw hardhats flying away several times there (including mine). I haven't lost anything that I can think of to it since then (I do use the chin strap), although it did almost roll me in the Prospector one day on the Snake. Up-canyon gust hit me so hard it turned me sideways against the current and I shipped about a quarter boatload of water before I got the rail back up.

A few summers ago, I was sitting in dead-calm in my sailing dinghy when a whirlwind gust came out of no where and slapped me on one side and then the other (Jack was sitting there stupidly waiting for the slightest breeze with full sail up) and rolled me right over. That lead to something that I should mention in Alan's hypothermia thread.

This afternoon, the wind is my friend. I have a tree to fall, and the wind will be blowing hard enough in the right direction to help ensure that it will miss the house.

 

[Chip]

I was standing around waiting for Henrik's Rap trip to get started. All of a sudden Hendrik was screaming at me to get in my boat, and I just kind of stood there staring and wondering WTF is wrong with him, but as he kept yelling at me I sauntered over and got in my boat hoping to make the noise stop. No sooner was I in my boat than Henrik ran up and shoved the boat off the rocks and to my shock he hopped in with me and started yelling at me to paddle. By this time, I was thinking Hendrik, the trip leader, had a screw loose or something, because we were leaving behind another half dozen paddlers who were also loitering around the put in, and it was still about 15 minutes before the announced start time. You clever readers have probably figured out what was up: his boat had blown off the rocks and was floating away down the river. Once we were underway, Hendrik calmed down and explained it to me and we caught up to his boat a quarter mile later, just before the first set of riffles. We reunited Hendrik with his boat and the rest of the trip went off well.

But the strangest lost-hat-in-the-wind story came on a Green River trip, and the hat never even got lost. Said hat belonged to Hap, a diminutive character you may have run into at Blue Mountain Outfitters. We'd arrived at a wide sandy campsite and the group of us were socializing near the river, and I don't even recall it being particularly windy. Hap was the smallest among the seven of our group, but he had the biggest hat, a straw sombrero-style job that must have spanned two feet across the brim. Suddenly there was a gust and we saw what I call a whirlygig, a little tornado-like spiral of wind coming towards us across the sand. It was picking up enough sand, leaves and detritus that we could clearly see it advance and engulf Hap, lifting the hat cleanly off Hap's head and carrying it skyward. Up and up it went as the whirlygig continued its path towards the river. About ten seconds later the hat achieved an altitude of about 50 feet and had moved well out over the river. It was spring, the river was high and moving along at 1-2 mph. The boats were pulled up, unloading was in progress, and none of us were in position to launch quickly, so we all thought that hat was a goner. But the whirlygig dissipated, releasing the hat, which began to tumble end over end and came back to the beach at almost the exact spot where it had departed Hap's head. Strange but true. Hap either lives right or had an inate sense of the aerodynamic characteristics of sombreros, or maybe both.

 

[Guest]

You clever readers have probably figured out what was up: his boat had blown off the rocks and was floating away down the river.

I rescued a box of gear from Black Canyon just below Hoover Dam. The road down was washed out so we had to carry boats and gear down the long, steep hill. Several trips down and back. Ugh.

There was another canoe launching at the same time, and on one trip down the hill I noticed a large plastic gear tub floating away; the dam release had increased, raising the water level rather quickly.

The folks whose box it was seemed rather clueless, even after I shouted to them that their box had started without them, and made no move to try to retrieve it. I dropped our gear, ran down the hill and paddled after it.

When I caught it the box was a beast. I wondered how it even floated and it was a huge PITA to get into my canoe without capsizing. I almost gave up and finally got it into my boat on what I had sworn would be the last ry.

I was a good way downstream by then, and when I got it back to them, after paddling upstream against the current, they unstrapped the lid and showed me the contents.

It was their bar, full of good beer and top shelf liquors.

Yeah, the though crossed my mind that if I had let it go we might have recovered it in an eddy downstream somewhere and been long set for libations.

Rising tide or water levels can be similar to wind in lost gear hazard.

 

[Quinn]

While not due to wind, I do have a good story about run away gear.

We were paddling the upper Otoskwin river north of Pickle Lake. We came to the last large set of rapids before Otoskwin lake. After prolonged scouting (in the time it took it would have been much faster to just portage) and a bit of disagreeing, we lined our way down the top and ran a sneak route at the bottom. On the left side of the river we notice a fantastic looking campsite. We ferried over to look it over. I tied the canoe (you can probably guess where this is going!) to a large downed tree, and set about looking for a tent pad. We inspected to site, and then stood on a high rock looking upstream at the rapids. When I glanced downstream again, our boat was making a run for it. I barreled down the rocks shedding boots and clothing, put on my PFD and swam for it. I had never realized how slow of a swimmer I was until then. We had not unloaded the canoe, so all of our gear, food, and SAT phone where floating away. I swam for what seemed like a very long time, put was probably only a matter of seconds. I reached the canoe just as it drifted up to shore. My paddling partner had run along the shore and reached the boat at the exact same time as me. I paddled the boat back, wet and feeling pretty dumb.

So what happened? My knot was intact. I think the boat got caught in the upstream current of the eddy at the bottom of the rapids and moved upstream a good ways. The loop then worked itself over the top of the downed tree. I was only thinking of downstream movement when I tied it off. Lucky we were at the very bottom of the rapids, in a pool with a tight turn in the river. Otherwise we'd probably still be out there.

I swore to myself I would never tell anyone of this event, to preserve my good name, but have since mentioned it a nearly every opportunity. It is significantly more amusing to me now than when it was happening.