Fort Simpson (Feb 20/04) - With a booming voice and an active index finger, Barry Church helped raise more than $2,100 last Thursday for Bompas Elementary's School's annual grade six trip.

Church emceed a loonie auction featuring a host of prizes from a scenic plane ride over the Nahanni River to a set of decorative light fixtures. All of the prizes were donated by local companies to help fund this year's trip to Alberta, scheduled for June.

The nine-day voyage will include stops in Edmonton, Calgary and Drumheller and will cost upward of $30,000, said Terry Jaffray, Bompas' principal.

"We're really appreciative of all the support from the local businesses," she said. "They were great."

The loonie auction also proved to be an extremely popular way of generating funds. Auction goers paid a dollar for each numbered ticket associated with a particular prize.

For example, the trip over the Nahanni River was assigned a box with the numbers 1 to 444. After the auction, the winning number was drawn from the box. The more numbers you owned, the better chance you had of winning.

The plane trip, with a value of $650 was one of the most popular items up for grabs. All 444 tickets were sold and the eventual winner was Jordan McMillan-Wood, a 14-year-old from B.C.

Organizers couldn't have picked a better night for the auction as well, with more than 200 people in town for a conference on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

"It was a lot of fun," said Church, who might have a second career waiting for him at Christie's or Sotherby's.

"I was glad to help," he said.

The grade six class is about halfway towards reaching its fundraising goal, said Jaffray. Plans are also in place for more events before the school year is out.