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Prince Edward Is - Politician & son dies in canoeing accident

mick_allen

mick_allen

Paddler & Moderator
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May 15, 2005
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A P.E.I. Green party candidate Josh Underhay and his 6 yr old son died in a canoeing accident Friday.
The solo canoe capsized on the Hillsborough River, they were both wearing floatation devices of some manner and were found near their overturned canoe.

The Hillsborough River is really a long inlet that divides PEI in two and in this Charlottetown location is flat, wide and [obviously - they were found close to the canoe] slow moving with lots of estuary like landscape on the margins. It's well known for casual canoeing, etc. It's main danger is breakup uncertain ice conditions however with the ice newly off, it is bound to still be very very cold water. The genesis of the incident has not been discerned yet, but the culmination is likely thermally related.

HillsboroughRvr-AcadianDr.jpg


It looks like a nice relaxing area, so hopefully some beauty was experienced early on. and here were two who obviously cared about our environment and were in it . . . but let's all be careful and have backups, eh? Crap, if only . . . reading between the lines I almost feel worse about the kid.

Condolences to all affected.

https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/...nd-his-son-dead-after-tragic-accident-303797/
 
Damn! Those are my home waters; I was born in Nova Scotia, but lived in Charlottetown from age 6 'til I left home. We powerboated a lot on the Hillsborough, though I never paddled it. At about age 15, I did do an epic (and in retrospect, foolish) overnight solo trip on the Hillsborough's "sister", the West River, where my step-mom dropped me at its origin, where it was just a shallow creek, and I paddled all the way back to the Charlottetown yacht club, which included an open saltwater crossing of more than a mile. I was in a River Runner R5, a hybrid river/flat water kayak with no bulkheads, plus I had no pump, no paddlefloat (I doubt they even existed as a commercial product in the 1970s), no bracing skills, no roll and no capsize recovery training. Had I gone over, I would today be a vague memory for my classmates when they happened to flip through their school yearbooks...
http://playak.com/buyers-guide/boats-boards/dimension-kayak-r5-river-runner
 
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