The first time I sat in a kayak I thought, “I have to have one of these things.” I started as a weekend paddler, fitting it in when I could.
At 63, I wasn’t getting any younger and I knew I had a lot to learn if I wanted to realize my dream of paddling the remote coast of Lake Superior. I started taking courses, eating a healthy raw food diet and losing weight. I learned how to roll, surf and paddle Greenland-style. This year I’m preparing for the Paddle Canada Level 3 certification.
My husband and I discovered this 93-acre property on a weekend drive up the north shore. I spent a year hiking the three-quarter-mile shoreline of the property, searching for the spot where the sound of the waves and the view were just right.
An architectural graduate friend helped us design the plans. We wanted a building that was aesthetically satisfying but also sturdy, low-maintenance and energy efficient. We used a lot of windows to bring the outside in. Since we are on a bluff facing almost due west, we have spectacular sunsets year-round but we are also exposed to heavy winds that build across hundreds of miles of fetch. We had to have special engineering and use triple-pane glass to withstand the wind. Paired with an energy-conscious lifestyle, a windmill and solar panels generate enough power to cover nearly all of our electrical energy needs.
There are a few disadvantages to living here. It’s not as carbon-friendly as I’d like because of the gas used to drive an hour to town for groceries. It’s socially isolated and a bug net is requisite for spring gardening. But there are many rewards: being immersed in nature, fall- ing asleep and waking up to the sound of wind and waves—it’s a spiritual place. And I can put my kayak in the water whenever I want.
Tammy Story, a retired nurse, and her husband live in a cliff-top home on Lake Superior. A latecomer to sea kayaking, Tammy now upstages the regulars at winter pool sessions with an array of greenland-style rolls and last summer completed her first extended trip, an eight-day odyssey on Lake Superior’s north shore.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine as part of a feature on kayak dream homes. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
I wanted nothing between me and the ocean. And now we have this place on Change Islands in Notre Dame Bay off the north-central coast of Newfoundland.
We spent a lot of time in the community, so people got used to seeing us. I put out word that I’d be interested in buying a house as our around-the-bay home. In 2005 something became available—and was affordable with some left over to be able to consider renovations (prices are noticeably higher now).
The house is just a bungalow converted from a two-storey house by an older couple who no longer needed the room and simply removed the top floor. But for us, it means we can arrive with our loaded van and within half an hour be on the water with the groceries put away, the water running and the beer cooling. That’s the joy of it.
A big part of the charm is that it’s a little bit hard to get to: it’s a five-hour drive from St. John’s, then a 20-minute ferry ride and another 20-minute drive. So it really is a temporal and spatial separation from regular life. And where else can someone have a view that looks straight down Dildo Run!
And you know what’s amazing? We paddle with icebergs, whales, sea ducks and dolphins. And there are some areas that, when it’s calm, the water is so clear you can see down 40 to 50 feet. It’s like an aquarium.
And there’s such variety of paddling. Within 10 minutes from the house you can be paddling in everything from Level 1 to Level 4 conditions with nothing between you and Greenland. But no matter which way the wind blows, there’s always somewhere sheltered to paddle, around the many islands and little passages. It’s incredibly beautiful.
In fact, it offers such variety of padding conditions that the Newfoundland kayak Company (Dan is a certified instructor) ran a Level 2 course out of our place. We even had people bunking in the garage. That’s something we’d certainly do again.
Leslie Grattan is an independent environmental consultant and Dan Miller is a retired federal fisheries biologist turned full-time paddler and photographer. The affordability of properties in Newfoundland’s outport communities make it fairly common for folks in St. John’s to have a home “around the bay.”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine as part of a feature on kayak dream homes. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
It’s been a long-term dream to raise a family on Maurelle Island since it was such a gift to grow up here. I wanted to raise my own son here. My aunt lived in this house when it was floating off of Read Island. I remember walking down through the woods to get to her cabin as a kid; it always had a fairytale quality.
The house, built by a French Canadian from bent saplings, was designed like a boat hull, but is built light, so when the wind blows, we feel it!
Our cove is really a one-of-a-kind location. Not often do all the qualities of southwest exposure, an excellent water source, shelter from wind and close proximity to Surge Narrows Marine Park all come together.
But the winters are long, we’re really dependent upon technology and it takes a lot of extra effort to be social when you live out here. It becomes a water world with the rain pounding the cedar shingles, the waterfall raging from the hillside and the high tide lapping against the pilings under our home.
We began the project with the plan for a home, but as kayakers, the potential for a base camp was obvious. We’ve both guided the west and east coasts of Vancouver Island plus Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand. We wanted to remove what we don’t like about commercial sea kayaking and run a business our way. The kayaking business enables us to live in a remote place yet still support a family.
Go with the Flow Adventures has three guest cabins, a wood-fired hot tub, shower houses and a workshop with plans for a closed-in, octagonal living room based out of the gazebo frame (which was crushed by a tree one winter storm) and also an open communal space for yoga, tai chi and cedar weaving workshops in the off-season.
We have some of the most beautiful, protected paddling on the Inside Passage, so it became our vision to reconnect people with the natural world.
Brody Wilson and Cristina Fox own go With The Flow Adventures on Maurelle island, where Wilson grew up, in the Discovery islands near Campbell River, B.C. They inherited their house in 2000, floated it to their land and, two years and six figures’ worth of renovations later, were ready to move in.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine as part of a feature on kayak dream homes. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
Most people don’t realize how noisy their refrigerator is. Or how much of their leisure time they spend on the Internet, watching the television, or on the phone.
When we get home we don’t have those distractions so we can relax and enjoy being in the house, listening to the birds sing and the trees blowing in the wind. For years, we lived in a 12- by 12-foot wooden cabin—144 square feet, which Leon says was his true dream house! So we don’t have much room for possessions. We only have what we need which means four plates, four bowls, four knives and so on.
We do have hundreds of books because we love to read. We’ll often spend two hours a day with a good book. We love sea kayak expedi- tions because of how close we feel to nature and the way we live is an extension of that lifestyle.
We run a kayaking store and school on Orcas Island, Washington, so in the office we have electricity, but at home, candles provide our light, a woodstove provides our warmth, we have a well for our water, and a composting toilet with a fantastic view of our pond and the forest.
Shawna is an artist so her linoleum block prints decorate the house and she’s made a beautiful glass tile mosaic around the woodstove.
We’ve built a new house so that Shawna’s 82-year-old mother and sister, who has Down Syndrome, could come live with us. We couldn’t expect them to live like we do so they have electricity in their portion of the house, called the “power pod,” while the shared portion of the house (kitchen, dining room, living room and our upstairs bedroom) is still off the grid and as simple as possible. While we built the house we lived in the upstairs of our barn where we store our kayaks. That was really cozy and also off the grid.
Through our past lives as biologists and our kayak expeditions we have come to appreciate how beautiful and fragile the planet and our lives are. It is because of this that we try to live a life that is rich in experiences, simple in what we need, and has as little impact as possible—so that we can continue to have opportunities spending time in a diverse, beautiful and untamed wilderness.
Leon Sommé and Shawna Franklin, BCU kayaking coaches and owners of Body Boat Blade international, have matched their home life to the simplicity of their paddling trips. Leon says that because of the crises that are facing our world today, like global warming, “voluntary simplicity isn’t voluntary anymore.”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine as part of a feature on kayak dream homes. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
Our group was camped on a remote surf beach exposed to the west coast swells off Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia, making a video on weather for sea kayakers. We had chosen that location because it offered an unobstructed, picturesque view of the weather systems as they moved in off the Pacific.
In the far corner of the beach a small gray cabin was tucked into old growth forest, high on a bank above a small boathouse. Salal crowded against the walls and untrampled grass grew up to the doorways. The house was built of driftwood posts and sun-bleached shakes split from huge cedars that lay piled along the hightide line. Its interior resembled the cabin of a wooden ship. Sixteen-foot-high windows faced south into what had once been a garden, now congested with alder and salal. To the north, panorama windows looked over the beach and the northern coastline dotted with tiny islands. Adjacent to the house was a large workshop in need of repair.
I took photographs then returned to my friends on the beach.
“Well, I’ve found my dream place,” I announced. On the water and off the grid.
Bea was remarkably sanguine about giving up her job and moving to the wilds when I showed her the pictures back in Vancouver. It was exactly what we had been looking for. We tracked down the owner (who loathed kayakers) and convinced him to rent to us.
We enjoyed the hard work that first year: clearing the vegetation around the house, bringing back the old gardens, rebuilding the workshop and then adding a guest cabin. Our first winter project after getting the place in order, and six chords of firewood drying in the wood- shed, was to build a small lapstrake sailboat from beach lumber. The next year we opted for rocking chairs! Now, five years in, we spend our time doing the sorts of things we have been putting off for years: writing and painting the stunning land- scapes we can see from our porch and looking after two dogs, two cats and three laying hens.
During the summer and fall we catch two or three coho or spring salmon each day by wading into the water and casting out a Buzz Bomb. Although our nearest neighbor is some four hours’ walk away, and the trip to town takes two hours by kayak, it is by no means a lonely spot. The beach is popular with kayakers which makes for a lively summer social scene. From October through to April, however, there are no visitors besides family and a few hardy friends. Storms parade by and the nights are long. We love it.
Cell phone reception can be a problem (we have to walk a quarter mile) and we lost Internet access when Telus fiddled with the local trans- mission tower. For our weekly run to town we now use a rigid inflatable with a 30-horsepower engine, but breaking out through surf with an inflatable can be problematic, and when it is too big, kayaks are the only way to go.
John Dowd is one of the founders of the sport of sea kayaking and wrote the classic guide Sea Kayaking: A Manual for Long-Distance Touring, now in its fifth edition. John and Bea Dowd paddled from Venezuela to Florida in 1977.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine as part of a feature on kayak dream homes. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
For this kayak guide and business owner, Baja Mexico sings with a siren’s call. | Feature photo: Ginni Callahan
“We are the memory of the road we’re on.”
—Aaron English
October, 2009: Ol’ Blue, my trusty pickup truck, turns 200,000 miles on a California highway and breaks down at the oceanfront Aliso Creek rest area 45 miles north of San Diego. The unexpected stop is still a long way from my winter home base in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, but luckily not too far from a friendly kayak shop.
I spend a week sleeping on the floor at the kayak shop, Aqua Adventures, playing in the sea and importing kayaks to Mexico. Importing the kayaks takes longer than the truck takes to repair, so the truck doesn’t cost time, just $530. Some people pay a lot more than that for an adventure!
A week later, with kayaks imported and Ol’ Blue back to life, I set off under a crescent moon and Venus in the dawning sky. I cross the border at Tecate preoccupied with worries—about the truck, my progress, my safety on the road—then stop to remind myself that worrying doesn’t help anything. Enjoy the ride. Take what comes. It will be okay.
So I do. I enjoy the music, the passing hills and weird familiar plants—cirio, agave, cholla, cardon cacti. I savor the delicious solitude of driving alone in my truck with thoughts, memories, feelings all my own.
Rolling hills along the road to Baja. | Photo: Josh Withers/Unsplash
Bird’s-eye view of some of Baja’s “weird familiar plants.” | Photo: Josh Withers/Unsplash
The warm glow of evening paints itself on the curious boulders of the Cataviña landscape. The shadow of my truck with its kayak top hat and trailer passes through boulders and cacti like a ghost.
After paying the rancher at Rancho Santa Inez, I set out my sleeping bag under a spectacular ceiling of stars. Not just individual stars, but the swath of The Milky Way, clear as a trail in the wilderness. A trail with distinct puddles of galactic light to skip through.
I am sleeping between a trailer full of kayaks and a mesquite tree, to a chorus of crickets, the flatulence of distant truck brakes and the sound of some large ungulate chewing and digesting indiscreetly in the nearby shrubbery.
Lights come on in the house of the ranching family who runs the campground. It’s time to move again. I hold the naked morning to me for one last snuggle, then get up to pack my sleeping bag.
Life on the road to Baja
The landscape from San Ignacio down is incredibly green after the rains last month. I crest a rise in the road to catch a glimpse of a hand walking across the pavement. No, too hairy. A tarantula, silhouetted for a moment against the sky, legs outstretched in an inspired gallop. How did it just miss the 18-wheeler coming the other direction? I straddle it with my tires and send it a wish to miss the others behind me.
For this kayak guide and business owner, Baja Mexico sings with a siren’s call. | Feature photo: Ginni Callahan
Tarantulas migrate. Follow some irrepressible calling to move in a direction despite perils. Do they ever weigh the relative merits of just staying home this year? Or is it no longer home if you belong in another place at that time? Does some inner voice just say Move, and it does? Can the chunky arachnid hear the soundtrack of freedom as it struts through an ever-changing landscape? Does its heart sing as it passes a familiar landmark? Should we consider it lucky, brave or ignorant as it sets out on its journey?
I confess that I’ve been unable to hold down an indoor job for an entire year ever in my life. Boiled down to basics, I breathe, I paddle, I go to Mexico. It started with an innocent little invitation: “Get a sea kayak, learn to paddle it, and drive me to Baja. Then you can tag along for a few trips.” I did this as an ignorant adventurer, as a guide and now as a business owner. It’s been 13 years and the rhythm has become my life.
Seabirds wheel over the rocks and water at Cabo San Lucas. | Photo: Christopher Kuzman/Unsplash
I’ll speculate that part of the reason we “civilized” humans go into wilderness or the sea is to remind ourselves that we are not ultimately in control. Perspective. Humility. Some might call it adventure.
I migrate for work. I can make a better winter living as a guide/coach in Baja than I can in Washington. I migrate for sun. Solar heating. I migrate for Baja. Its landscape, starscape, seas; its people; the energy of the place. I migrate back north in the spring for trees, the garden, the community of farmers, paddlers and friends, and summer work. But do I follow a voice any different from that spider, or a gray whale, or an elegant tern?
Migration. That pull to move some place different, yet familiar. To leave security for a time and accept the vulnerability of travel.
Migration unleashes my mind and heart from the daily duties of running a kayak company, a farm and a symposium. Those are creative, too, but in a more structured way. My only mandate now is to go south. Be open to the journey. Open the senses. Open the heart. Breathe.
Ginni Callahan is a sea kayak guide on the Sea of Cortez, Mexico, in winter and on the Columbia river and Oregon coast in the summer. She owns Columbia River Kayaking and Sea Kayak Baja Mexico.
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine and get 25 years of digital magazine archives including our legacy titles: Rapid, Adventure Kayak and Canoeroots.
For this kayak guide and business owner, Baja Mexico sings with a siren’s call. | Feature photo: Ginni Callahan
Rock the Boat: Signs Your Guide Has Gone Off the Deep End
Lapses in judgement. We all have them. Even guides.
Most of us have encountered the arrogant guide. Barking orders, muttering insults under his breath and strutting around like a marionette pulled by a manic puppeteer.
With clipped words and patronizing voice he badgers the clients, “This is how we do it. Not like that, like this. Look at mine—right… yours—wrong.” This to a gaggle of surgeons and military personnel, as if holding a paddle correctly is the most life and death challenge they will ever face. As if this morning kayak trip is a grave endeavour on par with perform- ing triple bypass surgery or launching a clandestine raid into enemy territory.
Instead of a relaxing holiday from their over-worked, over-stressed lives the dumbstruck clients are treated to a militaristic drill of every minutia involved in the great pursuit of sea kayaking. The tour is nearly over by the time the group dips their first paddle strokes into the placid waters.
But can you blame us guides? We have some of the coolest, most envied jobs on the planet. It’s no surprise that our heads may swell just a little atop our block-letter-printed “GUIDE” spraydecks. Our judgement about who the clients are, why they’re here and what they want may be off ever so slightly.
Certainly we’ve all witnessed the reckless guide—even the most levelheaded of us may have been one on occasion. Throwing gainers off waterfalls five days into a 14-day wilderness trip. Stepping on the gas pedal in a rapidly ending passing lane while towing a trailer full of boats on the shuttle home. Showing off our très cool to a group of middle-aged clients as if mistaking them for a pack of our Jackass-watching, lewd joke-cracking friends.
Temptation. That’s what does guides in. The temptation of being adventure-seeking individuals plying our livelihoods in a massive natural playground. The temptation of being able to gratify ourselves whenever we please.
Every day we drink from a potent elixir of wil- derness and passion. It’s hard not to have a few too many now and then.
When too many temptations conspire against us, we may become the worst of all offenders—the oblivious guide. Staying out in the waves well past the white-knuckle comfort zone of our clients, waiting for that one last surf. Meeting up with a few other guides on a remote beach and hanging out until 2 a.m. making blue angels around a blazing campfire while our paying customers lie awake (think- ing what, I wonder?) in their nearby tents. Trying to get up the sprayskirt of the cute assistant guide as the group waits, cold and hungry, for their promised afternoon tea.
At its best, guiding is like being in a state of constant arousal but never letting yourself go all the way. Next time I’m out watching a fellow guide succumb to temptation and a lapse of judgement, I’ll do the considerate and understanding thing. I’ll go over and tell him (or her) to zip up.
Virginia Marshall has worked as a sea kayaking guide in Canada and new Zealand. She has never made blue angels on trip.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
As last summer’s eco-tour bookings declined alongside the economic slowdown, paddling guides across the country traded in their paddles, pancake flippers and natural history guidebooks for hammers, chainsaws and computers in an effort to put food on the table.
Although day tours did not decline appreciably, big-ticket, multi-day expedition bookings were down significantly across the board, with some large companies’ bookings down as much as 50 per cent from recent years.
This decline left many guides out of work and has forced them to take extreme measures: many of them had to find real jobs. This hardship had a significant impact on the lifestyles of these notoriously peripatetic individuals.
“I have been working for BC Ferries and for the Coast Guard,” said one displaced sea kayak guide.
“This keeps me on the water at least. But I miss the spontaneity and wilderness aspects of sea kayak guiding. On the other hand, I actually sleep in my own bed, see my family on a regular basis and have some money in the bank now.”
Other guides found themselves work in the construction trade, while some turned to other outside work as educators or forestry workers—but even those industries felt the pressure of the so-called recession.
Some guides, temporarily forced from the last wild reaches of the coastal world, resorted to the depths of homebound depravity, taking up computer-based work such as, well, writing.
The old barnstorming pilots of the 1920s called it “the patch.” Cruising sailors call it their home waters. We kayakers have patches too. Often it’s an overlooked section of water, a creek, river, lake or bay that is only a short drive away and provides an opportunity for the little-recognized joy of the impulse paddle.
The pages of glossy travel magazines, heavy with all-inclusive resort advertising, lure and distract us with stories of far off lands and challenging paddling. Yet for most of us there is an adventure just around the corner.
I am one of the lucky ones. My waters are across the street. A tough couple days at work or too much time spent working on the joys of home ownership and I can have a hull in the water in 10 minutes. My impulse spot is our neighbourhood lake, 55 acres small.
In my ancient Aquaterra touring boat and my wife Charity’s pretty new Dagger, or our Old Town canoe with Iggy the adventure dog aboard, it takes us an hour to paddle and coast along the meandering shoreline.
Every time we slide a hull in the water we’re in for something different. We check on Carlos, the cormorant that winters on the lake and stands on the dam’s spillway ruffling his wings in the afternoon breeze. In the summer we count turtles and watch the little blue herons that sit on empty docks and scan the tannin- stained water for their dinner. Petite finches flit overhead, executing ragged aileron rolls and bouncing across the surface like skipping stones. There are neighborhood legends of ‘gators in the lake. Rumour has it they creep in from the Escambia River, but after three years we haven’t been lucky enough to see one, though I guess luck depends on your point of view.
Charles Mackay wrote in The Dionysia that “Water is the mother of the vine, The nurse and fountain of fecundity, The adorner and refresher of the world.” It doesn’t matter what your boat is—canoe, kayak or inflatable duckie—there is probably some water near you. Everyone, at one time or another, needs a little refreshing. And who doesn’t want more fecundity in their lives? I’m sure I need more of it.
Adventure doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to be distant. A true boater never forgets the patch, and the joy of the impulse paddle. When you get right down to it, Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows was right— there really isn’t anything “half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
BJ Armstrong is a U.S. Navy Search and Rescue pilot, a long-time kayaker and sailor, and a novice fly-fisherman from Norfolk, Virginia.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
You never know where life’s going to lead you. If you’d asked me 10 years ago where I’d be living now, I’d have said in a mountain wilderness or on the water.
I grew up in the heart of Toronto, a three-minute walk from Canada’s busiest intersection, the Trans-Canada Highway and the longest street in the world. I spent my first 30 years trying to get away from the concrete. I never would have moved back to my hometown if it weren’t for the woman I love.
Now Tory and I own a house downtown with eight kayaks in the backyard, street parking, a hound dog and a nine-month-old baby girl. I bike to work at a loft office with an art gallery and a Starbucks next door.
For our article about kayakers’ waterfront dream homes, I couldn’t think of any place more inspiring than John and Bea Dowd’s on a remote beach in Clayoquot Sound. Two summers ago, when Tory was two months pregnant, I had the ill-fated idea that this would be a good time to introduce her to open-ocean kayaking. I found myself huddled on a windswept beach in a rainstorm with one wet and nauseous wife.
I’d known the Dowds were in Clayquot Sound somewhere and had a standing invitation from John to stop in, but when I’d called their cell phone from Tofino I got voicemail. So it was unlikely that of all the beaches, we would have found theirs. But we did. The energetic figure happening along with a fishing rod the very moment we landed was the Father of Sea kayaking himself, and very soon Tory was warming up with a cup of tea by the woodstove and I was moving our gear into the guest cabin just as the rain started coming down hard.
That was the end of our travels. We spent three days enjoying the Dowds’ hospitality, their rainforest produce and fresh-caught salmon, while each dawn and dusk I would borrow one of John’s fishing rods and wade with him into the surf to try and stock the larder. Thank you, John and Bea.
When I asked John to write us something for this article, I promised he didn’t have to divulge exactly where he lives and crossed my fingers that he’d say yes.“I’ll check with Bea,” replied John, and fortunately, she agreed to share the story of their little piece of heaven with the world, along with the eight other extraordinary people profiled in the article.
Too often consumer magazines flaunt the aspirational trappings of wealth and fame, like homes with million-dollar views or $300,000 Breguet Tourbillon watches. I don’t want to fall into that trap. This article shows that you can live the dream without a lot of money, because most of the people profiled have downsized or opted out in some way, sought locations or lifestyles off the trodden path. This is something I try to do even living in the city—like Colin Beavan in the book No Impact Man—turning down the thermostat and downsizing my life so I spend less time earning money and have more time for the truly finer things, like paddling.
This is our 10th anniversary issue and I’ve been at the editor’s desk for eight of those years. If there’s any theme that’s kept me inspired for all these years, it’s this dream of the kayak-inspired lifestyle.
You never know where life will lead you, but with a kayak you can always make your home on the water, with a tent in the hatch ready to pitch in the most beautiful places on earth.
Here’s to 10 years of kayak dreams and unlimited million-dollar views, and to all the people who have built a life around kayaking, wherever their homes may be.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine as part of a feature on kayak dream homes. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Adventure Kayak. 
