Page 146 - AGC-Journal-2016

AGC JOURNAL 2016

Exercise

Odin’s Paddle 2016

By Lieutenant Colonel Alex Fryatt

A week on the water, canoeing
in Sweden with the Royal Air

Force. Out of the office and off
the grid.

Grasp Opportunities Alex Fryatt on the water

Being on an RAF base means that we
have access to their excellent sporting
facilities and also can apply to take part surroundings for yourself, as the water was a breath-taking 4 degrees, so
in their many Adventurous Training expedition was filmed for the new requests to ‘fall in again’ were not very
opportunities. It was a cold, wet morning RAF recruitment advert. popular.
in January when I first saw the advert for
Exercise Odin’s Paddle and I was instantly Filming the Life
transported. Through wet and windy weeks Wilderness Cooking
of winter I was dreaming of sunshine and
the outdoor life in pine forests, catching The film company spent four days The high water level meant that the
fish for dinner. The reality was actually following us with every type of camera, only fish we caught was the predatory
better than I had imagined. from underwater shots, close-up lenses to pike - a green and yellow spotted
drones. They focussed mainly on the 20 prehensile-looking razor toothed beast.
year old girl, the beefy firefighter and the
Living the dream ethnic minority; so you are unlikely to It tasted as mean as it looked. Cooking
have to see me in an advert for the RAF, on a large steel disk over the campfire
is a Scandinavian tradition and we
Fourteen of us enjoyed a week of but I am there in the background. We felt developed our Viking cooking skills
canoeing and wilderness camping like we had walked onto the most beautiful over the week, including foraging for
across central Sweden in glorious film set by mistake and the cameras were woodland herbs. Pine needle tea takes
weather and high water. The river ten minutes to boil, just the green tips
Harkan starts across the border in of the pine needles mind you, and it is a
the mountains of Norway and winds sour tasteless waste of effort. Our bread
its way through Swedish forests to experiments on the other hand were
the Baltic. We took seven days to go very popular; obviously flour, water and
120 kms downstream and enjoyed baking powder but try adding fruit and
the Swedish ‘Everyman’s Right’ of
access, including camping wherever being a film nut muesli for a great meal, hot or cold.
we chose to stop. In my imagination
we would sleep under the stars, but star is not all
the reality was that we made forest
shelters every day and lay down in glamour...
daylight under the midnight sun.
With dusk and dawn about half
an hour apart it was hard to tell
what time of day or night it was.
The wind and the water calmed still rolling. I can tell you that being a film
around midnight and by five in star is not all glamour. The downside is
the morning our campsite on a that we were asked to light a fire five times
peninsula would be surrounded by over or rescue a capsized canoeist – “but
a perfect mirror of still water. You this time from the other side”. The air
will probably soon see the beautiful temperature was lovely 26 degrees, but the

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