August 25

25C and sunny

Nice warm day yesterday, stayed warm through thge night.

Today is the final day of the Co-op tournament. Sidney is leading. The afternoon heat certainly takes a toll on some.

The four stayed with the two fires throughout the night.

  By the time they had finished filling us in, the rest of the search party had arrived.  I left the Constable to divide them into one small group and one larger group, I took a quick turn out into the bush to check how much snow was under the trees. For the most part there was none to very little so the chances for tracking were almost negligible, besides any tracks that may have been there initially were already obliterated from the search attempt of the day before.

  The smaller group I assigned to the area between the river and the road, explaining that we had no way of knowing if our man had stayed on his assigned side. They were to make their way south spread out at a distance of about thirty feet apart.  One man was appointed as the point man and assigned a radio.

  I asked the hunters if they could put in more time and after receiving an affirmative, I had them drive down the road about a mile then using their vehicle to drop one man off every three miles and then to patrol that twelve mile stretch; they were assigned two radios, one for either end of the twelve miles.

  Leaving Constable Sweeney with his patrol car and one of our radios, I gathered the rest of the men on a road that angled away from the river in a north westerly direction. I explained that we would space out some forty or fifty feet apart and on my signal we would start a sweep south in a swath about five hundred feet across.  All understood as this was a standard search technique, the only question was ‘why start from that road, why not from here’?  I explained that it would be more difficult getting our spacing accurate and we had no guarantee that our man hadn’t gone north after leaving his companions.

  By the time we were organized and ready to move out it was just after six am and dawn was beginning to break.  The two men with radios on the road were assigned Road 1 and Road 2 as call signs, the small party between the road and the river was River portable, Constable Sweeney was Police portable, I assigned a radio to one of the middle men in my line and another to the man closest to the road and I carried one; I called myself West 1 and the other two West 2 and West 3.

  Each crew moved out to start their assignment.

  The large crew would be the most difficult to maintain and I reminded them that the key would be a slow pace and to keep talking to one another.  Luckily several of them had compasses and this helped with maintaining our direction.

  I kept my pace slow, trying to achieve a speed of roughly a mile per hour.  I called a halt several times and checked along the line for both stragglers and speedsters. On the third check we had achieved a fairly uniform line, no easy task as each man would be encountering different obstacles and being challenged to keep a slow pace where it was easy going.