There are many words that can be found before 'touring' in a google search: Bike, car, even camel. I mention this because usually when I want to try something that I've never done I turn to google to offer me some advice on how such a thing might best be accomplished. Unfortunately Google seems to have fallen short when it comes to adding 'swim' to 'touring' or in fact any permutation of phrases related to traveling long distances in water with gear. If google has never heard of it I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that what you are about to read about is an activity so revolutionary even the internet has not yet heard of it! 'Swim touring' can be thought of as the love child of canoe touring and distance swimming. The principle is simple: select a suitable loop involving land and water, throw on wetsuits and fins, strap your gear to a floatation device, and get paddling...
Preparation
Going on the hunch that canoe tourers had some pretty good ideas regarding water loops we hunted around the local area to find a suitable location for our inaugural foray into the sport (Activity?). Sure enough we soon came upon a number of older posts on a route known as The Nitinat triangle which sounded ideal for out purposes. Hunting through what information we could distill from various blogs and forums we plotted out what we felt was a suitable route that was short enough to swim, but long enough to get a quality adventure in. Our proposed route would take us from the Knob point campsite down Nitinate 'lake' about 4km where we could cross over land ~1km into Hobiton lake which we could then swim down to find the trail up to Hitchie lake to camp.
There are several unique challenges to swim touring some of which we guessed at prior to departure: keeping gear dry and afloat, towing something while swimming, and keeping relatively warm. Most of the critical gear (Sleeping bags, stove, food etc.) we managed to cram into my 30L SealLine bag. The remaining two backpacks were double packed into rather flimsy garbage bags with the hope that most of the water would be too lazy to penetrate through to our gear. Lacking an appropriately streamlined craft and wanting to ensure that our gear stayed as high and dry as possible we lashed our bags to the top of an inner tube. This was not the ideal solution as our gear developed a nasty habit of trying to abandon ship if we hit a particularly vertical patch of water, but it worked.
Keeping warm when your planning on jumping into a freezing cold lake is significantly more of a challenge; in the end we settled on a pair of shorty wetsuits that were flexible enough to hike & swim in while providing a measure of protection against the water. The idea being that once we had reached our destination we could strip down and huddle inside warm dry sleeping bags. Matching swim caps also prevented excessive thermal loss from our scalps while providing an incredibly streamlined profile in the water.
Not surprisingly there is very little information available on how to tow a tube through the water without having to hold onto it, consequently much of our preparation time was spend designing and then constructing swim harnesses. After a number of sketches and string based mockups we came up with a set of belts that could be easily removed in the event of a seal attack and that fastened together onto the inner tube (the emergency whistle was integral!)
Feeling very proud of our handy work we hitched up the tube and trotted around the lawn in a land based simulation. Whether due to the initial perfection of the design or the dissimilarities between grass and water we struggled to find anything wrong with our creation in the land trials.
Collecting together most of our gear we tossed everything into the tiny back yard pool for some 'sea' trials. It didn't take long to find an appropriate length for the tow rope connecting us and to discover that at the speed we were moving the tube offered surprisingly little resistance. So far the plan was coming along swimmingly! It could be argued that the three strokes across the pool were as effective as the BC ferries sea cat trials, though again they failed to identify any major flaw in our plan. Feeling very proud of ourselves we crammed all of our gear into the car and drifted off to sleep content in the knowledge that we were completely and undeniably prepared for the days ahead!
Next installment; The Adventure...
