The first weekend of December 2018 saw the British Universities Kayak Expedition Team (BUKE) selection. BUKE is a bi-annual team selection that brings the best White-water Kayakers from different Universities across the UK together to form a team who then goes on to plan and undertake an expedition to a destination of their choosing.
Since that weekend, the team of seven have been planning their up and coming trip to the Russian Far East. The team will be together from the 23rd June through till the 2nd August, they hope to paddle some of the Classics around the Lake Baikal Area but also do some more exploratory paddlingacross the Khamar Daban, and Eastern Sayan mountain ranges.
Location
Each applicant, of which their were 20, at the selection weekend presented a destination that they thought would be a good place for a kayaking expedition to take place. They must consider cost, river difficulty, access and logistics just to name a few things. Once the team have been selected they then choose from the list of destinations where they would like to go. Previous teams have chosen destinations such as the Philippines, Venezuela and Madagascar, I’d like to think that as a team we all agreed that we wanted to go somewhere equally as remote and adventurous as previous years, therefore we decided to go with, team member, Adam Francis’ idea of exploring the Russian Far East. Unknown to most, the Far East of Russia holds mountainous terrain and remoteness like nowhere we could think of, as well as hundreds of kilometres of river and a season suiting the summer months. So with the destination decided we set it upon ourselves to begin to organise logistics for the trip.
The original destination set out was the Sikhote-AlinMountains - as far East you can get in Russia, however after gaining inside knowledge from a few locals we realised that the scope for paddling that far east wasn’t quite worth an expedition. We decided to just visit our second intended location of Lake Baikal and the surrounding mountains. We knew that this area is slightly more explored and if our worse nightmares came true we would still be able to paddle on some of the classics. Despite this area having some more known rivers, there is still scope for exploration and possible first descents given the right conditions.
Logistics
The team decided that the ‘Scots’ would look in to the logistics together, under this umbrella of logistics came; transport, accommodation, language barriers and most importantly river selection!
Luckily we managed to get in contact with a few local Russian paddlers who pushed in the right direction and we now have a Russian guide named Evgeny Dyachev who has been incredibly helpful and will be meeting us when we arrive out there. Evgeny isn’t a kayaker so wont be joining us on the river but has many local kayaking contacts. We cant thank him enough already for helping out. From the messages between the team and Evgeny it looks like transport should be widely available, we have the opportunity to use trucks, Aero Boats and tanks to get us to the locations we need to be at.
Flights have been booked with S7 airlines, which we have on good authority take boats with minimal hassle. Due to time constraints on various team members flights were booked on a variety of dates via either Dusseldorf or Dublin as there were limited options for flying with boats direct from the UK
Support and Sponsors.
While the Scots were on logistics it left the others looking into sponsors, grants and other support that we could get. One thing to remember is that all team members are students and we all know that students don’t tend to have much money so we needed to gain as much funding as possible.
Fortunately we have been graced by Palm Equipment who have sorted us out with the best gear to get us through the expedition, along side Palm, Dewerstone are suppling us with trip t-shirts and Life Shorts 2.0 so we can keep cool while looking cool on those
long hike ins or portages that may need to take place. We also cant thank Radical Rider and Waka Kayaks enough for sorting us out with new boats for the trip, I’m sure I can say on behalf of the whole team we are grateful we have such good kit and boats to help us when we’re going to be paddling some stout waters.
River Legacy have kindly given us the use of three Delorme inReach GPS Devices that hopefully we don’t have to use much but will be a massive help if anything does go wrong and we are in the middle of nowhere!
We are also fortunate that the Lord Mayor’s grant has given us £1000 to aid towards team supplies and we want to say a huge thank you to all those that supported us through our Just Giving page.
We have gained some individual supporters; Harry would like to thank Redpoint Climbing Centre Worcester who has supported him and the University of Worcester who have kindly paid for his flights to Russia. Elliot would like to thank Christians in Sport who are supporting him on his expeditionand Bangor University. Cara thanks her University, Queens Belfast alumni fund, Bala Rotary club, Rotronic, Ben Ross LTD, Lets go hydro, for supporting her and TJ Composites for providing her with a shiny new paddle. Joe would like to thank Queens College Taunton for their finical support.
Preparations
To physically prepare for the expedition the team underwent “rigorous training” from gallivanting around the UK when it was wet, hiking boats across the cairngorms and possibly one or two flat water sessions.
To keep up to date with our trip, follow us on:
Instagram: @buke_2019
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