‘I think those people did an incredible thing’ Three people were rescued from Chadburn Lake’s frigid waters last Saturday night. By Rhiannon Russell on May 19, 2015

Three people were rescued from Chadburn Lake’s frigid waters last Saturday night.

Linda Bonnefoy, a longtime Whitehorse resident, was canoeing with two friends at about 10:30 p.m. when their canoe suddenly capsized.

“The water was so cold, we were all instantly frozen,” Bonnefoy told the Star this morning.

“There was absolutely no way we could’ve swam to shore.”

It was several hundred metres away. All three were wearing life jackets, and they tried to start swimming but the cold water quickly made movement difficult.

Fortunately, a couple was out on the otherwise-deserted lake training for the Yukon River Quest.

Karen Mann heard a splash, and she and partner Jake Paleczny looked over to see Bonnefoy and her friends in the water.

They quickly paddled over.

Paleczny is a former canoeing instructor, and the couple just practised rescues during a white-water course they took, so they knew what to do. They also rescued some canoeists last summer in Miles Canyon.

“We approached them and made sure they were OK and basically started telling them what was going to happen,” Paleczny said in an interview.

“When you’re in water that that’s cold and especially if you’re not familiar with how canoe rescues work, your decision-making isn’t fantastic at that point. It’s hard to think clearly when you’re that cold.”

There was candle ice on the lake as recently as last Friday, he said.

Paleczny and Mann instructed one person to hold each end of their canoe, and the third person to bring the nose of the overturned canoe into the middle of the upright one, to make a T-shape.

Paleczny moved back to the middle of his boat and pulled the end of the other canoe onto the edge of theirs to drain out the water.

Then he pulled the upside-down boat over top of his and Mann’s canoe to make a cross.

“It’s kind of like a tightrope walker who’s got the balance pole,” he said. “The boat becomes more stable once the canoe is on top of ours. It’s a lot of weight, though.”

He and Mann rolled the canoe over and slid it back into the water.

They put the two boats side by side, then one by one, pulled Bonnefoy and her friends back into their canoe.

That was a struggle, Paleczny said. They’d been in the water for about five minutes at this point, and were quickly losing strength.

He and Mann retrieved Bonnefoy and her friends’ paddles, and instructed them to head to shore.

Then they paddled too back, drove Bonnefoy’s truck closer to the water and got the heat blasting.

Bonnefoy was so cold when she got out of the boat that she couldn’t drive, so Paleczny drove her home.

She and her friends were shaking uncontrollably, he said.

Once they got home, they took hot baths and turned up the heat inside the home. It took three hours for them to stop shivering, Bonnefoy said.

“These people saved our lives,” she said. “Well, I believe God saved our lives, but He sent them!”

She expressed her gratitude today for Mann’s and Paleczny’s quick action.

“I think those people did an incredible thing,” she said. “It was really a critical situation.”

It could have ended badly, Bonnefoy and Paleczny agree.

Even if the three friends had been able to reach shore, they didn’t have fire-starting equipment or a change of clothes.

“It’s a very sobering thing,” Paleczny said.

“It feels good to get somebody back in one piece. We’re glad we were there instead of reading about it the next day. There was nobody else out there.”

He and Mann had trouble going to sleep when they got home that night, he said. They debriefed about the incident.

The couple always paddles with a dry bag full of warm clothes, a cell phone or SPOT device and equipment to start a fire – just in case.

“Without those, it suddenly gets really dangerous,” Paleczny said.