Canoe rescue combines tragedy with survival

A sad discovery

On Tuesday, Ted Naber and three others took a float plane to the remote area of Kinosaskaw Lake north of Pinehouse, Sask. for a fishing trip.

The group usually starts their day off fishing near the rapids leading from Churchill River to the lake.

On Tuesday, they saw an overturned canoe in that area.

When they flipped it upright saw a bunch of camping gear, which made Naber wonder if there had been an accident.

They didn’t wonder for long because “when we started pulling the canoe to the shore we saw the body laying there,” Naber said.

“Nobody was expecting that. When you go up for a day of R & R and you find something like that, it wasn’t too great.”

The group alerted the RCMP to what they found, with Naber saying “we played a really small role when it comes down to it.”

However, that call led to hasty action that saved Enid from the wilderness.

Naber added that no one else was on the lake that day and it’s possible that within a few days someone else would be out fishing.

The RCMP sought help from the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association (CASARA), a volunteer group whose provincial dispatcher is based in La Ronge, Sask.

Call for help

Vaughn Skogstad is in charge of contacting volunteers to contribute their planes and navigation skills for air searches.

Paul Ricklefs, a pilot with CASARA for two years and volunteered with the group for more than six years, lent his airplane to the cause after he got a call from Skogstad.

Within two hours, Ricklefs, Cliff Fitzpatrick, Roland Corrigal, and Lindsay Blair were in the air searching for Enid.

Based on the flow of the river and location of the rapids they decided Enid may be upstream.

Within two minutes of the start of their air search in the area “and we basically flew right to her,” Ricklefs said. They saw a woman waving an orange garbage bag with a fire lit nearby.

She was along the shoreline of a densely treed area.

“It was trees right up to the shore. If she hadn’t been flagging us down I’m not sure how easy it would have been to see her. It’s very rugged there,” he said.

They weren’t able to land to rescue her, and had to call in a float plane.

Overall, Skogstad spent over four hours communicating between the crew, contacting an airline company to charter a float plane, and transmitting location to the RCMP.

“There were just a million things going on at the same time,” he said.

During the two hour wait for the float plane to arrive, Ricklefs and his crew circled above the woman. They didn’t actually know if it was Enid since they couldn’t get close enough to communicate.

Ricklefs said his crew heaved a big sigh of relief when the float plane crew confirmed it was the woman they’d been searching for.

“There’s always that anxiety that ‘this isn’t her,’ but … it was pretty obvious that this was someone that needed help.”

Ricklefs did not communicate with Enid in person that day, nor was he aware until the story hit the media that she had been out there for more than eight days.

He said many cases of missing people are unsuccessful, but for Enid it was in large part to her doing exactly what you should when you’re lost in the wild.

“She stayed put. A lot of people will get desperate and once desperation sets in and they’ll try to travel and we’ll never find you, or it’s very hard to find you … what she did was by the book, you know, make a fire. She must have seen us coming because it was a huge fire when we got there. And she had a fluorescent, what I now know is an orange garbage bag, which I found out later. She was waving that thing at us like crazy.”

When it comes to what she may have eaten during that time, Naber mentioned the area is rich with berries and the nearby river provides the necessary water. From his plane, Ricklef only saw a fire and sleeping bag.

Recognizing a family’s loss

“We’re glad she’s okay, relatively speaking, healthwise anyway. Hopefully the family can be grateful for that at least,” Ricklefs said.

Even with the success of the rescue mission, there is an underlying tone of sadness.

The loss of a family member is something Naber is familiar with. He lost his niece Johanna in an Arizona plane crash just over a month ago.

“Our families went through a tragedy of our own in the last month here and we know what it’s like to lose a loved one. Our condolences to the family and if there’s anything we could do to help them, we’d sure do that,” Naber said.

Skogstad is also dealing with emotions from this rescue.

“We lost a person and we saved a person. So that makes it kind of bittersweet. But it was one of our more trying searches that we’ve done in a while.”

Despite this loss, on Thursday morning Skogstad received a phone call from Enid’s son to thank CASARA for its efforts.

“These people are in the grieving period right now and planning a funeral and they take the time out to do that, that totally blew us away,” he said.

“That was pretty special. I just can’t believe that they would have the time right now to even think about something like that with what they’re going through .That was quite amazing.”

claskowski@panow.com

On Twitter: @chelsealaskowsk

by Chelsea Laskowski

Canoe rescue combines tragedy with survival

paNOW Staff

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