Continued Fundraising

To those of you have shown your support through a donation or participation in the car wash, Thank You! You have helped us raise over $2,300. 65% of this will be donated to UNICEF to put towards their Water, Environment and Sanitation program, and the other 35% will be use to reduce the costs involved with the trip.

As many of you know we have not reached our $5,000 goal as of yet. We are currenlty at $2,300. We have decided to keep the fundraising open througout the trip as we plan on raising awareness in every town/city we stop at in an effort to hit our $5,000 goal!

With this in mind, if you have not already made a donation and would like to you can make an electronic donation on this site or contact Edmund Eilbacher at edmund.eilbacher@und.edu for a mailing address.

:::::: Paddle On :::::

Away We Go

At 5:00 am, May 22nd, we will be waking up and taking the three hour drive to our trips beginning at Lake Itasca, Minnesota. The weather is not supposed to be in our favor, rain in the morning and the forecast is rain for the next couple of days.

After we arrive at Itasca we plan on testing out the canoe once again, setting up the equipment and making sure everything feels right. Then we will make the Go-No-Go decision. Our time of shove off is expected to be between 9:00am and 10:00am.

Keep visiting the blog, we'll keep you updated on everything along the way!

Life is the experience, try something new...

Please feel free to post your comments on this site or send us emails, we would love to hear your thoughts about our plans. All feedback and information is welcomed!

Training

For the past couple weeks we have been taking the canoe out on test runs in the Red River and in Maple Lake, MN. Our intentions were to test the speed, maneuverability, and stability of our Mad River Canoe.

The canoe handled well on the fast flowing Red River. You'll notice in the following pictures we swamped the canoe with full equipment. Packs and all were dunked in the water to simulate the conditions we may run into on the Mississippi.

After realizing the canoe was not as boyant as we had anticipated we modified the canoe with foam blocks in the bow and the stern. This proved beneficial as we were able to get the canoe to float with the gunwales a few inches out of the water fully swamped.

Small Delay

We had to make a slight change in plans:

We will be shoving off on Tuesday, May 22nd instead of Sunday, May 20th. We are waiting for some equipment to come in, specifically the bug shirts. Once we have all of our equipment we will be on our way!

Wish us vigilance and strength!

-The Eel

Fundraising Event

Great Success!

The Car Wash Fundraiser was held on Wednesday, May 9th outside of the ACE Hardware in the Grand Cities Mall.

We would like to thank the following individuals for volunteering their time and effort to make the car-wash such a success ultimately raising over $150!

Megan Barry, Organizer/Coordinator
Amy Rye, Traffic Control
Brianna Burggraf, Sud Queen
Kayla Gallagher, Shammy Specialist
Savannah Arnold, Quality Control
Laura Kienzle, Water Distribution Consultant

Also, thank you to everyone who stopped by with a dirty car, we appreciate your support.

Media

The Grand Forks Herald picked up our story and wrote an article in this Sunday's Outdoor section. The article is titled "UND students plan Mississippi canoe adventure for a cause" and can be found at the following web address:

http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=35319&section=Columnists&columnist=Brad%20Dokken

or by visiting www.grandforksherald.com and going to the outdoors section and looking for the title.

Also, the Dakota Student, The University of North Dakota's student newspaper, just published an article on the event, read up using the following web address:

http://media.www.dakotastudent.com/media/storage/paper970/news/2007/04/24/News/Canoeing.The.Mississippi-2877166.shtml

While stopped in Baton Rouge, LA the crew was interviewed by a local news channel, Channel 2. The story aired at 5pm and again at 10pm.

While on the banks in New Orleans we were interviewed by The Times-Picayune, a Gretna based local newspaper:

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-12/1187854606119530.xml&coll=1#continue

Just recently Edmund's hometown newspaper, the Courier News, covered the story:

http://www.c-n.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070905/NEWS01/709050328/1006

The Grand Forks Herald did a follow-up article and can be found at:

http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=50476&section=Outdoors

Equipment Sponsors

The Original Bug Shirt Company makes shirts and pants that keep bugs from biting you. All along our trek we expect to have problems with mosquitoes and other pesky insects and are glad to have these shirts as a layer of protection. Learn more about the gear at www.bugshirt.com.





Along the way we will stay protected from the elements using Aloe Up products including sunscreen, lip balm, and moisturizers.

"Aloe Up Suncare Products are happy to donate products to your Paddling For a Purpose trip. We wish you the best of luck on your trip and look forward to reading about this journey through your website. On behalf of everyone here at Aloe Up, Good Luck!"

-Megan E. Braun

www.aloeup.com

We will be using Pres2Pure portable water filtration systems to filter our drinking water along the trip. Pres2Pure filtration systems are designed to clean 200 gallons of water, capable of up to 2 micron filtration eliminating organisms such as Giardia and Crytosporidium.