Basically, that was pretty much it. The author had been trying to contact the survivors and the parents of the boys who went on the expedition; he finally got in touch with the boy who had dropped out at the last minute only a few weeks before the book went to press, called him, and interviewed him over the phone. So he didn't get the father's side of the story, only the son's; and of course the son was recalling something that had happened over a quarter of a century earlier, and his recollection may have been influenced by the events of the next day. What the son did say was that his father, for over a month prior to the expedition, had been having vivid nightmares about his son's death. I don't believe in psychic premonitions, so I personally would conclude that the father had noted, either consciously or not, several warning signs that made him uneasy about the upcoming expedition.

I looked on both amazon.com and Indigo.ca for the book but was unable to find a listing. However, it's a recent book - I don't have it with me but I'll post the author's name and ISBN # tonight when I'm home.

To summarize, the school in question (which closed for good about 10 years later) was a private school run by devout Anglicans, based on the British boarding school concept. They bragged about their safety record – they hadn’t had a fatality in 25 years of operation, but in hindsight they were fooling themselves. They routinely had canoes overturning on canoeing expeditions, and it wasn’t strictly true they’d never had a fatality – one student had died during a snowshoeing race about 10 years previously.

One rule of thumb I would glean from this book is that anyone who brags about “no fatalities” should immediately be questioned about whether there have been any “near misses”. It seems clear in hindsight that this particular school was running on borrowed time, and were long overdue for a serious mishap, in spite of their “perfect record”.
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