Even something as mundane as a commute to work can offer a world of adventure, according to outdoor educator, kayaker and filmmaker Beau Miles.
Miles’ new film, The Commute: A four day paddle to work, details his 116-kilometer adventure paddling, dragging, portaging and pontificating from his rural homestead to his job at Monash University in Melbourne by way of two rivers, a canal, the sea and a creek. What usually takes him 75 minutes by car took four full days by kayak, burning more than 18,000 calories.
“I’m reinventing my idea of adventure,” says Miles. “I no longer feel the need to paddle great distances down a continent’s shore or go to the highest peaks. Your carbon footprint goes through the roof, just so you can go and find yourself somewhere else. I want to do these things in my backyard now.”
“This genuine, gut busting, horrible, beautiful paddle and drag to work was the most insightful four days of travel I’ve ever done,” says Miles who slept by the river, under a train line and next to a boat ramp during the journey.
Initiatives like Diversify Whitewater help make the river a more inclusive place, one new boater at a time. | Photo: Matthew James Berrafato
Last June, protests broke out worldwide. It started in the United States and spread to nearly every continent. Marchers rallied for social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC).
Later the same month, I woke up to a notification about a post from Immersion Research, titled “A Letter To Our Customers Regarding The BLM Movement,” stating its support for the Black Lives Matter movement and commitment to “helping diversify outdoor recreation.” As a Black presenting, multicultural person of color, I had been wrestling with what I could do to move the needle in a positive direction. Because when there is a lack of equity and inclusion for anyone, it impacts everyone—including BIPOC, stigmatized veterans, people with differing abilities, LGBTQ+ and low-income white folks.
IR’s blog post hit home. I felt convicted of not having done enough. I vowed to use my platform as a speaker, writer and video producer to normalize outdoor adventure for people of color. Even though I’ve been an avid kayaker for seven years, I’d only met five paddlers of color on the water.
Following a seven-month research project investigating the lack of diversity in whitewater, I’ve found these are the top challenges facing our sport, industry and community—and what to do about them.
[ Paddling Trip Guide: Find instructional and skills clinics near you and learn how to paddle ]
Economics of diversity
Diversity will be the difference between a future spent surviving or thriving for the adventure sports industry. According to the Outdoor Industry Association’s Special Report On Paddlesports, while 22.9 million Americans participated in at least one paddling activity in 2018, more than three-quarters of participants were white. Recreational canoeing and kayaking participation, the two paddling disciplines with the most participants, reported 80 to 83 percent white participants.
The biggest threat to the adventure sports industry is businesses may become irrelevant if they do not evolve to attract a changing population. The Outdoor Foundation’s 2019 outdoor participation report shows only 73 percent of white Americans participated in outdoor sports that year, down from 82.8 percent the decade before. This decline is likely due to an aging population, less youth participation and normal attrition.
Meanwhile, U.S. census data tells us population growth is faster among minority communities. Today, about 50 percent of U.S. children under 18 are members of ethnic minority groups. And according to global consulting firm Accenture, 47 percent of all millennial Americans—aged 23 to 38—are multicultural, and together they wield more than a trillion dollars in spending power right now. Diversifying isn’t just the right thing to do—it makes economic sense to make outdoor adventure relevant to a growing and significant population. If the paddling industry does not reach out to these potential new customers, it misses a crucial growth opportunity.
You can be like Kodak, which developed a digital camera in 1975, saw the future coming and ignored it, and almost didn’t survive—or you can do a little more to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in paddlesports.
Initiatives like Diversify Whitewater help make the river a more inclusive place, one new boater at a time. | Photo: Matthew James Berrafato
White fragility
Trying to start a conversation about the lack of diversity within the paddling community is sometimes met with dismissal, offense or microaggressions—instances of indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group.
White fragility shows up as discomfort and defensiveness from white folks when confronted by information about racial inequality and justice. It makes it challenging to have conversations about the lack of diversity in our boating communities. White fragility might sound like this: “I come to the river to forget about that stuff. I don’t want to hear about that diversity stuff on the river.”
I can’t shed my brown skin and drop out of the conversation about diversity when I feel like it because someone will eventually remind me that I’m different—not white. I haven’t experienced racism or misogyny in adventure sports, but others have. I have experienced it elsewhere: When I left my office back when I was a tech firm CEO, the security guard and a sales associate at a high-end department store promptly asked me if I could afford to shop there.
In another example, during an immigration raid outside of a Hispanic grocery store in Raleigh, North Carolina, I joked in Spanish with another customer as I exited the store. An I.C.E. agent seized my arm and shoved me against the building and asked for my identification. When I produced a driver’s license with a U.S. Army veteran emblem, he said I needed to carry my passport because I “don’t look American.” I was born and raised in the U.S., but as a person of color, I’m expected to carry a passport to prove I belong in my country.
Willingness to listen to everyone’s perspectives and experiences in our paddling community is an essential step toward making it more welcoming for everyone.
Marketing to everyone
Twenty-first century consumers want value-aligned brands. Calls for diversity, equity and inclusion mean companies must evolve their marketing practices. It’s not going to be easy for the outdoor industry, whose leaders are mostly white, to market to a non-homogenous group it does not understand. Adventure sports marketing needs to include people of color, while also removing biases like colorism and texurism, which refers to preferring models with lighter skin and straighter hair. It’s also important to avoid turning “Black lives matter into Black lives marketing,” as Black Enterprise magazine stated.
It’s not going to be easy for the outdoor industry to market to a non-homogenous group it does not understand.
Brands will best succeed when diversifying their staff and representatives—including ambassadors, paddling team members, sponsored athletes and marketing outlets, and giving their diversity experts veto power.
Organizations can also support BIPOC-led initiatives with donations of funds, time, gear or expertise. Liquidlogic, Kokatat, Paddling Magazine, Watershed, Immersion Research and many local partners supported an initiative I co-founded this past summer called Diversify Whitewater. Our nonprofit welcomed more than 100 new paddlers of color onto the water for the first time through free skill clinics.
Antoinette Lee Toscano – Team River Runner (TRR)
Overcoming limiting beliefs
The BIPOC community needs to tear down its own cultural barriers and limiting beliefs:
These examples of BIPOC-on-BIPOC microaggressions will stop some people from participating in paddlesports and other activities not traditionally enjoyed by their cultural community. Race shaming from my family, friends and community prevented me from taking up an adventure sport for 10 years. This is a barrier that unbiased marketing, inclusivity initiatives and affordable access alone cannot solve, but knowing those cultural barriers and limiting beliefs exist is critical to overcoming them.
The most significant opportunity for the paddlesports and adventure sports industry is recognizing people of color love the outdoors in the same way white participants do. Growing the paddling community means more partners and advocates for building whitewater parks and protecting wild and scenic places and waterways. Best of all—by diversifying whitewater, you’ll meet people you might not have met otherwise, and the community and industry will be richer for it.
This article was first published in Paddling Magazine Issue 63. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions here, or browse the digital archives here.
Antoinette Lee Toscano, MBA, is a former IT executive, public speaker, contributing writer at Culturs magazine, producer of WhitewaterTV, and co-founder of Diversify Whitewater. Find her online at antoinettetoscano.com.
Initiatives like Diversify Whitewater help make the river a more inclusive place, one new boater at a time. | Photo: Matthew James Berrafato
Dane Jackson is undisputedly one of the world’s greatest kayakers. On June 17-19, at the 2021 North Fork Championship, he proved to us once more why he’s widely considered best in class.
Jackson laid down the fastest time in the Qualifier Race, The Boater Cross and, most importantly, the elite Jacob’s Ladder Race. Every year at the Idaho event, the “Jakes” race attracts a handful of the best whitewater kayakers from all corners of the world to battle it out for the winning time and a sizeable cash cheque ($5000 USD).
The rapid itself is an extremely pushy, class V+ section of whitewater that requires expert skill to navigate.
Jackson had extremely hot competition this year from the likes of Alec Vorhees (2nd place) and Jeremy Nash (3rd place), but still managed to snag the top spot on the podium with a final time of 1 minute and 52 seconds. See the full event results here and watch Dane’s winning run in the video above.
The women’s category had an impressive turnout too; the qualifying round saw 28 female athletes compete and 5 finalists battling down Jacob’s Ladder. Sage Donnely took home first place, followed by Natalie Anderson (2nd place) and Darby McAdams (3rd place). See the full results here.
We’d love you to join us online, Monday, June 28, 2021 for Yoga and Beers with Benny Marr.
In this free online event, we will host one of the world’s best kayakers—Benny Marr—in a virtual 30-minute yoga class, tailored specifically to paddlers’ needs.
No experience is required, but do come prepared with a yoga mat, a good attitude and a cold beverage of your choice—we recommend the frothy kind.
What to expect
* 30-minute yoga flow session
* Beers and an attendee Q&A with Benny
Event Details
Yoga with Benny Marr (FREE)
An online, live Zoom event
Monday, June 28, 2021
7:30 p.m. EST / 4:30 p.m. PST
Ellen “Magellan” Falterman has her sights next set on a 40,000-mile, round-the-world rowing journey that will span six years. | Photo: Cindy Falterman
In September, Ellen Falterman paddled, or rather rowed, her 18-foot Grumman canoe to her family home on the Trinity River in East Texas, completing a full descent of the Mississippi River, and then some. The journey was the latest in a trio of expeditions on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers for the 25-year-old flight instructor turned river-runner, who has designs on much bigger adventures.
More about that in a moment, but first we go to Brazil, where Ellen’s love of adventure, if not of rivers, was sparked on a three-month trek with her older brother Patrick. When he was 19 and Ellen 12, Patrick stuck out his thumb and started south. By the time she visited him in Brazil six years later, he was exploring the Amazon basin in a 400-pound wooden boat she rather generously describes as a canoe. Starting on the Amazon’s biggest tributary, the Rio Negro, they paddled upstream for weeks, living on cassava flour, fish and monkeys they shot and salted.
Wait, monkeys?
[ Find your epic adventure in the Paddling Trip Guide ]
“It’s not like I grew up in Houston,” she explains. “I grew up in rural east Texas in the piney woods, and I was with my older brother. I trusted him completely.”
Their objective was a jungle Shangri-La called the Serra do Aracá, a mythic plateau veiled in waterfalls, dense foliage, and tales of hidden treasure. To get there, they worked their way up progressively smaller tributaries until, near the foot of the Serra, the stream was barely wider than their boat was long.
“I asked him, ‘Does it float?’and he said, ‘Well, it’s got water in it.’”
That morning the river rose from knee-deep to chest-high in the time it took to wash the breakfast dishes. They put on anyway and the canoe went sideways, then under a log. Patrick was pulled under, and the bowline wrapped so tightly around his middle that he carried a scar for the rest of his life. Ellen came ashore with little more than her passport and a deck of cards, and the siblings played Gin Rummy for hours until the water receded enough to free the canoe. Their paddles and supplies gone, they cut poles and floated four hungry days to the nearest outpost.
Home in Texas two years later, Patrick crashed his small plane into the Trinity River. The Faltermans are a family of aviators. Ellen makes her living as a flight instructor, which meant that she had to get back in an airplane and fly after Patrick’s death. Rivers took a bit longer.
Ellen “Magellan” Falterman has her sights NEXT set on a 40,000-mile, round-the-world rowing journey that will span six years. | Photo: Cindy Falterman
She’d avoided water ever since their Brazilian misadventure, but Ellen couldn’t bear the thought of being at home on the anniversary of Patrick’s death. So in 2017 she paddled the Missouri River in his memory, 2,300 miles in a borrowed sea kayak. When she reached the confluence with the Mississippi in St. Louis, she knew she’d paddle that river too. Just not yet.
“I’d been talking to the Missouri for so long that the Mississippi was like a brand new person,” she says. “It didn’t feel right continuing down to the Gulf because there was all this water upstream that didn’t know me.”
She came back to the Mississippi in 2019, trading the kayak for an old aluminum canoe, also borrowed, this time from her uncle’s chicken coop. “I asked him, ‘Does it float?’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s got water in it,’” she recalls. Figuring that if the water couldn’t get out, it couldn’t get in either, she dragged the canoe out of the henhouse and mounted a sliding-seat rowing station amidships. She named it Edna, after the grandmother who brought it into the family decades ago, and started down the Mississippi.
Ellen planned to run Big Muddy all in one go, but when her other grandmother, Eve, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, Ellen left the river to be with her before she passed. She picked up the thread again in 2020, rowing from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico, then west along the Intracoastal Waterway, and up the Trinity River to the place her brother Patrick’s plane came to rest in 2016. There she placed a cross on an oak tree, though the journey was the true memorial: a 2,700-mile moving celebration of her brother’s life and way of seeing the world.
“What is the point of doing anything,” she says, “if you can’t find the joie de vivre?”
She did it the way he would have, eschewing high-tech navigational aids and recording her progress on paper maps. “My whole journal is on the maps,” she says. “Any time I had a thought, I’d just write it down on the map where I was.” She marked each campsite with a tiny Maltese cross.
Once, when darkness overtook Ellen in a marsh, she spread her sleeping bag on the tall wet grass and dozed. The tide came in at about 2 a.m. and she broke her flooded camp in the dark, spending the rest of the night tied up to a channel marker. Curiously, she says, there were no mosquitoes. The observation gets to the core of her adventuring philosophy, to shrug off the hardships and embrace the moment. “What is the point of doing anything,” she says, “if you can’t find the joie de vivre?”
She kept no strict itinerary, camping free on islands and cow pastures and half-sunken barges, and resupplying at grocery stores along the way. She spent about $300 a month on the river but still managed to end up broke, having poured her life savings into a down payment on an ocean-going rowboat. She named it Eve, after her grandmother, and plans to row it around the world.
This article was first published in Paddling Magazine Issue 63. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions here, or browse the digital archives here.
Ellen “Magellan” Falterman has her sights next set on a 40,000-mile, round-the-world rowing journey that will span six years. | Photo: Cindy Falterman
TORONTO, June 24, 2021 /CNW/ – VerticalScope Holdings Inc. (“VerticalScope“) (TSX: FORA) announced today that it completed the acquisition of Paddling.com. Paddling.com is a leading paddlesports enthusiast community which provides comprehensive resources for all types of paddling information used each month by hundreds of thousands of kayakers, canoeists, and paddle boarders.
Founder and CEO of Paddling.com Brian Van Drie said: “We have spent the past 20 years building Paddling.com to be one of the best destinations for paddlesport enthusiasts with the goal of providing fun and useful information for all types of paddlers. We are excited for the next phase of Paddling.com‘s growth as part of VerticalScope.”
“We are thrilled to add Paddling.com to our growing platform of enthusiast communities. Paddling.com is a highly engaged and passionate community and is a great fit with our outdoors-focused enthusiast sites,” said Chris Goodridge, President and COO of VerticalScope.
About VerticalScope
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, VerticalScope is a technology company that has built and operates a cloud-based digital platform for online enthusiast communities in high-consumer spending categories. VerticalScope’s mission is to enable people with common interests to connect, explore their passions and share knowledge about the things they love. Through targeted acquisitions and development, VerticalScope has built a portfolio of over 1,200 online communities and more than 100 million monthly active users. VerticalScope is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: FORA).
Forward-Looking Statements
This news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities legislation that reflects the Company’s current expectations regarding future events. Forward-looking information is based on a number of assumptions and is subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company’s control. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the factors discussed under “Risk Factors” in the supplemented PREP prospectus dated June 14, 2021. Actual results could differ materially from those projected herein. VerticalScope does not undertake any obligation to update such forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required under applicable securities laws.
Your life is to a large extent the sum of all your habits—good or bad. You have chosen at least one wisely. And you’re not alone. | Photo: Len Wagg
When I replaced the smoke detectors in the Paddling Magazine office last fall, I noticed the batteries will last 10 years. There’s even a little sticker on the device to write the year I installed them.
As I wrote the date on the line with a Sharpie, I wondered what the person (probably me) who changes the batteries a decade from now will think about when he sees “2020” written on the side.
Whatever happens over the next 10 years, if history is any guide at all, the year we just finished will be a mostly faded memory.
A little more than 10 years ago, supply outpaced demand in the housing market. Falling prices meant mortgage holders couldn’t sell their homes to cover the outstanding loans. The U.S. government had increased the federal borrowing rate. Thousands of questionable creditworthy homeowners who’d jumped on sub-prime interest rates were up for renewal. The defaulting loans were tied to hedge funds, derivatives and sketchy backdoor credit swaps. The burst of the housing bubble brought the U.S. banking industry to its knees, almost collapsing the world’s financial systems. Meanwhile, Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” topped Billboard’s Year-End 100 singles chart. But I bet you don’t remember that little detail either.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic because of a new coronavirus. Three months later, demand for paddlesports equipment outpaced supply.
The details of the pandemic will very likely fade from memory. We will probably forget how infected bats, or maybe pangolins, from a street market in Wuhan, China, led to social distancing regulations and the largest boom in paddlesports history. What will matter more than what just happened and how, is what we decide to do with all these new paddlers.
In this article, we asked 20 industry leaders the questions paddlers everywhere would be asking each other in bars over beers, if we could gather in bars for beers. How long will this boom last? How do we keep all these new paddlers safe? How do we keep their new boats and gear off Craigslist once Carnival’s cruise ships sail again?
For more than 20 years, I’ve been having serious conversations with marketing and sales teams, national paddling organizations, clubs, instructors, high school teachers and friends. How do we get more people into paddlesports?
Your life is to a large extent the sum of all your habits—good or bad. You have chosen at least one wisely. And you’re not alone. | Photo: Len Wagg
I’ve always been uncomfortable with the term, but an overwhelmingly optimistic growth strategy in the trade is commonly referred to as “Butts in Boats.” As in, if we can just get more people to just try paddling, they’ll love it and do it.
Will they though, really?
I went skydiving a few years ago. Maybe that industry has a similar “Newbs in Chutes” theory. Except, I only jumped once. I didn’t buy any gear. And will probably never do it again.
Never would anyone in paddlesports ever come up with a strategy to infect millions worldwide with a deadly virus. But here we are. COVID-19 put butts in boats and on boards. Lots and lots of them. More than our wildest dreams.
So, if getting more butts in boats was the answer to growing paddlesports all along, why not massive celebration among our industry professionals?
Where we will be in 3,650 days when someone (probably me) changes the batteries in the Paddling Magazine smoke detectors depends on the next 21 days. Because 21 days is the minimum amount of time it takes for someone to form a new habit. Like, say, paddling.
Thanks to the pandemic and social distancing driving thousands of new butts into boats—and some old butts back into boats, too—all we need to do now is make paddling a behavior repeated regularly. Habit research suggests 21 days of tying boats and boards to roof racks, donning PFDs and pushing off from shore is all that’s needed to create a subconscious routine, one these new pandemic paddlers will soon do automatically.
[ Paddling Buyer’s Guide: Find all your paddling gear here ]
Canoeing, kayaking or paddleboarding moves them closer to what they want—adventure, relaxation, fun or fitness. It will eventually feel strange to them not to paddle. It will be such a natural thing to do, they won’t know how to explain the reasons why they love it so much. Like us.
We can help get them there.
Here’s to possibility. To better world health. To good habits. And to meeting more friends on the water than ever before. It’s going to be great.
This article was first published in Paddling Magazine Issue 63. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions here, or browse the digital archives here.
Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Rapid Media.
Your life is to a large extent the sum of all your habits—good or bad. You have chosen at least one wisely. And you’re not alone. | Photo: Len Wagg
Onlookers watched in awe as a previously-dry rock bed in East Maui, Hawaii rapidly began to fill with rushing water.
Waioko Pond (also known as Venus Pool) is one of the country’s most spectacular natural pools. Surrounded by rugged mountains and a scenic coastline backdrop, it’s no surprise that the pools are fast becoming a visitor hot spot.
Due to being situated at the bottom of a vast mountain range with varying climates, East Maui can collect an unfathomable amount of rain. A Maui guidebook warns potential visitors that it could be raining hundreds of square miles upstream, even if it’s sunny and clear down at the pools.
The Dangers Of Flash Floods
Every year, sightseers and river users alike lose their lives in rapid flash flooding events all over the world. Earlier in 2021, KHON2 News reported the death of a 26-year-old Californian woman who drowned after swimming in the pools of Waioko Pond. She was caught in a sudden flash flood and swept out to the ocean within minutes. She scrambled to cling onto riverside rocks, but the force of the water proved too powerful.
[ Start planning your next kayaking adventure with the Paddling Trip Guide ]
Plan Ahead To Mitigate Risk
The best way of surviving a flash flood is by avoiding it in the first place. Avoid paddling in areas that are prone to flash flooding events, be sure to check the weather in advance of your trip, and always have an escape plan in mind. Additionally, make sure to check flood warnings for the area and park or camp well away from the watershed in question (if in a high-risk flood zone).
Welcome to the pandemic era. We’re all solo expedition paddlers now. | Photo: Kevin Light
What do we do when a storm might be coming through? I ask rhetorically. “Get off the water. Find a strong position and hunker down.”
February 2020
We’re sitting in the operations hub of a Baja sea kayak company. The topic is a group that wants to reschedule their trip because they’re worried about something called coronavirus. It’s easy for me to talk. My trip leaves tomorrow, six days of photography in the Sea of Cortez. The stress of running a kayak business isn’t mine. But it’s etched on the face of my old friend, the owner. Of course, the strong position is to do trips as long as it’s safe, so the outfit and its employees can weather the financial drain in a seasonal business already prone to strong flood and ebb cycles.
The storm, of course, is far bigger than we imagine.
For the next six days, we paddle with leaping dolphins, flocks of pelicans and boobies, and brilliant sunrises. I celebrate my birthday with the best seafood tacos I’ve ever had and a paddle with tropical fish. Then I fly home.
March 2020
Three weeks later, half the world’s 7.8 billion people are under lockdown. The storm’s hitting different places at different times, but it’s rolling in big. While I’m “social distancing,” life is still normal in Baja. Then the same patterns appear. My friend tells me cancellations are rising like the tide on a narrow beach, threatening to swamp everything. Some visitors make the last flight out. Two days later, I see videos of the Policia Municipal enforcing the lockdown at the fish taco place, the estuary where I launched, and the beach where we surfed amidst diving pelicans.
The storm is a hurricane
As the news builds, lockdowns strengthen and boat ramps close, I limit my paddling to short exercise paddles, reading a book on an island in the middle of the river. I know I could find water access, avoid other people until I’m afloat, and feel the water under my hull. But driving around with a boat on my car sends the wrong message about essential trips. So, I kill time with charts of Haida Gwaii, making plans for… someday.
Sea kayakers who paddle challenging waters always manage uncertain risks. We go where information is sketchy. Baja has no VHF forecasts; my haunts on the British Columbia coast have no current tables. Rounding an exposed headland requires anticipating what might happen somewhere else hours later when the tide changes and the wind shifts. Mistakes put you and your co-paddlers at risk. Welcome to the pandemic era. We’re all expedition paddlers now.
The grocery store becomes an exposed crossing. We hedge our bets: go early before the wind rises, paddle quickly to limit exposure, go when crowds are smaller, get in and get out, wash our hands. Or skip the crossing and have groceries delivered—the lockdown equivalent of hiring a water taxi to take you somewhere you’d rather not paddle.
Expedition behavior applies: Commit to shared goals. Take care of yourself so you can help the group. Help others but don’t do their job for them. Minimize unnecessary risks. Conserve energy. Be calm. But now my group is a city of 2.2 million, not a few trusted friends.
Welcome to the pandemic era. We’re all solo expedition paddlers now. | Photo: Kevin Light
June 2020
A wave fills my cockpit with cold seawater before I can seal my skirt. It’s my first beach launch in months, and I timed it poorly. The virus is clearly here for a while. Lockdowns are easing, not due to vaccines but human nature—we just can’t stay inside anymore. My paddling range has extended to camping on uninhabited islands, small groups, no shuttles, avoiding crowded put-ins. No meals and beer afterward. A friend who’s watched too many spy thrillers calls it Moscow Rules Kayaking: lay low, watch for opportunities, then move decisively. But we’re going rock gardening, not sneaking over the Berlin Wall.
August 2020
The lady from the next campsite asks where to put the garbage she kindly cleaned up after some jerk left an ugly trash pile. But there’s nowhere to put it. The overflowing dumpsters have been taken away. The bathrooms are BYO toilet paper. In a summer without little league or concerts, kayaks on cars are everywhere. The outdoors is swamped. And it’s getting, well, trashed.
Now we launch early in the morning when few people are around. But coming off the water later means navigating seas of people, many maskless, who flock to the water. Many friends bail for fear of outdoor-starved mobs at the take-out. The calculus between exposure risk and the benefits of fresh air, exercise and camaraderie are still a known unknown. It’s Yogi Berra paddling: “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”
Having spent my career encouraging people to love and protect nature, this new enthusiasm is great but overwhelming. A park manager says they’ve gone from emptying garbage cans once a week to four times a day. The pandemic’s economic hit has pummeled agency funding, so fewer staff now manage more visitors. This could create a groundswell of demand for more campgrounds, trails and parks. But it may come with agency budgets bleeding red ink. This double whammy is like a tough rock-garden rescue: the need is greatest when it’s most risky for the rescuer.
October 2020
A cold wind whips sea fog from the south. In Rosario Strait, I hear foghorns from ferries or tankers. I grimace and turn around: no crossing this afternoon. The end of my solo trip through the San Juans will be a day later. I’m pushing season’s end hard, and I know why: I dread the rainy, dark winter that’s knocking. With virus cases up and the mercury down, it will be winter without warm gatherings with friends. The annual rough water symposium has been canceled.
I’m pushing season’s end hard, and I know why: I dread the rainy, dark winter that’s knocking.
To brace for a five-month “weather day,” hunkered down with the news instead of the VHF, I make lists of quasi-paddling projects. Relearn knots, revive stalled photo projects, organize the gear room. Sure, there will be some rainy, cold paddles, too.
By the time you read this in spring, the storm will have eased. And that’s another thing we all learned from sea kayaking: the weather is king, and plans are always subject to change. The Haida Gwaii charts will come back out, and I’ll plan a trip for… someday.
This article was first published in Paddling Magazine Issue 63. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions here, or browse the digital archives here.
Neil Schulman paddles and writes from Portland, Oregon.
Welcome to the pandemic era. We’re all solo expedition paddlers now. | Photo: Kevin Light
A wildlife encounter on a paddling trip is a bucket list item for many. But when said wildlife crosses personal space boundaries, well, the experience becomes less desirable. We’ve rounded the top 6 scariest paddling animal encounters on the internet for you to enjoy—from a safe distance, of course.
Did we miss any great videos? Leave a comment below or send us a message on Instagram or Facebook.
6. A Kayaker’s Intimate Encounter With Basking Sharks This kayaker was paddling through the waters of Ireland’s west coast when over half a dozen Basking Sharks surrounded his kayak. Basking Sharks’ jaws can expand up to 3 feet wide and, although they rarely attack humans, we can clearly see that it’s feeding o’clock for these fellas. Watch the video »
5. Dolphin Wipes Out Standup Paddle Boarder This Australian paddleboarder is no stranger to sharing the wave with dolphins. So, when he noticed the pod of dolphins surrounding him, he simply assumed they were herding fish. Turns out, one dolphin had its sights set on something bigger. Watch the video »
4. Way-Too-Close Encounter With Orca This ocean SUPer was paddling off Kuaotunu Beach in New Zealand when a pod of orcas began diving for stingrays underneath his board. Things began to get a little tense when one orca swam up to take a bite on his board. Watch the video »
3. Scary Hippo Encounter On The Lugenda River The group was paddling on the Lugenda River in North Mozambique. The trip goes from placid to pulse-pounding when an unexpected hippo suddenly surfaces, threatening to swamp their boats. Watch the video »
2. Alligator Charges Kayak A kayaker exploring a section of a North Carolina river found more than he expected when an alligator slammed into his boat. The nail-biting encounter goes from bad to worse when kayak capsizes. Watch the video »
1. Kayakers Nearly Swallowed By Humpback Whale Two whale-watchers off Avila Beach in California had a terrifying experience when a humpback overturned their kayak and appeared to nearly swallow them.
This article was first published in Paddling Magazine Issue 63. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions 
