Standing Waves: Boundary Creek

Trips

Photo: David Faubert — Standing Waves: Boundary Creek

Across most of the continent, the 49th parallel fuses two political siblings–Canada and the United States–like Siamese twins. Other than a line on a map and a few well-guarded crossings, it’s not much more than a toe line in the soil.

In Alberta’s Waterton National Park this political boundary becomes more than just a fantasy fence line. Tucked into the extreme southwest pocket is Boundary Creek, a liquid no-man’s-land that skirts back and forth along the two nations’ border. It has never smelled smuggled tobacco or twisted a barrel of bootleg moonshine because this Alberta-to-Montana crossing is self-regulating: it’s a class V run.

“Running Boundary Creek is a full-day commitment,” said Spencer Cox, one of a team of four who were the first to storm the border in the high spring runoff of 2006. “To get there you have a long flatwater paddle, a longer slog up a horse trail and to end it all, an illegal border crossing.”

Cross border kayaking

Like any crossing, you have to go through Customs first. That leads directly into the full-on class-V Cavity Search; eddy left at the bottom of the rapid and this is a straightforward domestic run. Eddy right and you’ve just paddled into foreign waters (unless of course you’re American, in which case you’re home).

“The scoured bedrock drops and crystal clear blue water make it a classic example of steep creeking in the Canadian—or is that American— Rockies,” Cox says.

The creek ends four kilometres later when it spills into the U.S. side of Waterton Lake. Paddling down the lake a few hundred yards gets you back into Canadian waters.

Chris Goble, who discovered the run, managed to enlist Cox, David Faubert and Joel Fafard for a first descent of the creek in spite of the international security risk. Now with the initial run made and passport laws relaxing ever-so-slightly to allow those wonderful, tiny, waterproof driver’s licence cards, the Treasure State of Montana could see a rash of border jumping creekers paddling toward her other jewels.

This article on running Boundary Creek was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

River Alchemy: Mystery Moves of Squirt Boating

Stories

Photo: Paul Villecourt — River Alchemy: Mystery Moves of Squirt Boating

The Tao Te Ching (pronounced something like ‘Dow De Jing’) is perhaps one of the oldest known books. As mysterious as its author Lao-tzu, its exact origins are unclear but likely date to before the time of confucius (551-479 b.c.). translated literally, the title becomes The Book of the immanence of the Way and how it Manifests itself in the World or, more commonly, The Book of the Way.

Translated into dozens of languages several times over, the Tao Te Ching is a book of wisdom; an instruction manual on how to navigate the forces of the universe. Its most oft-quoted line is likely familiar to all river people:

Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.

Lao-tzu’s philosophy is based on one of softness, and the giving up of control. One must understand and harness the forces of the universe rather than being rigid and fighting them, he suggested—common in the practice of Zen, t’ai chi and aikido. Throughout the years the Tao has been mined by hippy spiritualists, yoga instructors, high-powered management gurus, and squirt boaters.

Seen by the general paddling public, squirt boating is viewed as either confusing or passé… and totally awesome, on rare occasions. Unanimously regarded as the parent to modern playboating, pure squirting enjoyed its heyday in the early ‘90s on big-water rivers such as the Gauley and Ottawa.

The tight-fitting, custom-built, surfboard-like kayaks were designed for neutral buoyancy—half way between floating and sinking—and to tap into un- derwater currents. Back in the day, moves like pirouette squirts, cartwheels and blasting were radical and completely out of the realm of possibility for the voluptuous plastic boats of the time.

The last of the purists (all 70 of them) still gather every summer on the river-left eddyline above McCoy’s on the Ottawa for the infamous Jimmy Cup. The event’s namesake is, of course, Jim Snyder, the Lao-tzu of squirting.

His The Squirt Book is both a manual of squirt technique and an unintentional river translation of the Tao Te Ching. It is as instructive in the art of living as it is in squirting, and as relevant today as when it was first released in 1987 (Menasha Ridge Press).

Even though the moves seem quaint, it is worth re-visiting Snyder’s words at a time when freestyle kayaking is moving about as far away from the Tao as possible.

With pure squirting all but gone—stern squirting in a plastic playboat is incredibly uncool, I’m told— and freestyle defined by aerial acrobatics—getting as far away from the water as possible—softness and “going with the flow” are gone.

The similarities in message and style between the Tao and The Squirt Book are striking. Approach, humility, and control are a few of the many parallel themes.

Like the Tao, Snyder’s guiding philosophy is what he calls charc; the angle of one’s approach to the current dictates the outcome. Charge in and we will be rejected; look at the current and work with it, and we find the “power to apprehend the slipperiness of freedom for those few fleeting moments and to let it soak into our souls,” Snyder writes.

The Tao speaks of this, but refers to an approach towards life:

Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them. Forcing a project to completion,
You ruin what is almost ripe.

Ultimately, squirting is about humility and respect

Snyder writes, “Our attitudes are putty in the hands of the river… almost everyone went through the stage of being an expert-turned-beginner. Expertise re-emerges as an ability to learn, to listen to the river and our friends.” While Lao-tzu wrote simply:

All streams flow to the sea. Because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.

Snyder’s approach to squirting, rivers and life mirrors the Tao every step of the way. Snyder’s book, while setting the stage for much greater things in kayaking, speaks louder now as a comment on putting the river, current and universe first. It stands in contrast to the bounce and bravado in today’s kayaking, approaching the timelessness of the Tao Te Ching’s verse and message.

But if both of these philosophers are right, and time seems so far to have proven it so, it is worth noting these two final thoughts:

“The best way to affect the outcome of an event is through its beginning” (Snyder).

The master takes action
By letting things take their course.
he simply reminds people
of who they have always been. (Lao-tzu)

Do you think they know where kayaking is going in the future?

Jeff Jackson is a professor of Outdoor Adventure at Algonquin College in Pembroke, Ontario

This article on squirt boating was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Hell Bound and Determined on the Huallaga River

Stories

In the heart of the Great Bend, the entrance to the most constricted stretch of the Huallaga, the river-left wall rises straight up 2,000 metres. Photo: Todd Gillman & Andrew Oberhardt — Hell Bound and Determined on the Huallaga River

Disappearing into a deep canyon abyss just downstream of Huanuco in northern Peru, El Rio Huallaga carves its course around the base of a massive Andean peak, and doesn’t rejoin a road until it drifts into the steamy jungle town of Tingo Maria nearly a hundred kilometres later. The Department of Huanuco considers this River Styx unsafe for travel and the U.S. State Department forbids its employees from visiting it. The jungle surrounding the Huallaga’s lower reaches bubbles with malaria and besides Kurt Casey’s original attempt of the Huallaga in 1999, few Westerners have ever peered into the canyon’s depths.

On July 10, 2007, Andrew Oberhardt, Todd Gillman, Shane Robinson and I boarded American Airlines Flight 827 bound for Lima, Peru. Our mission: attempt the un-run stretch of the Huallaga that Casey’s team was unable to complete. Our team, The Range Life, was selected by the Vacation to Hell steering committee and awarded $12,000 to explore and document this last major un-run tributary of the Amazon.

It’s easy to see why the Immersion Research Vacation To Hell board members decided this would be the perfect holiday.

The Huallaga is a logistical nightmare. Situated in northern Peru’s Department of Huanuco, it is far better known for its history with the Maoist rebel group The Shining Path, and for coca production, than as a kayaking destination.

Research leading up to the trip had yielded scant results beyond ’70s topographic data, Kurt Casey’s failed trip report, and plenty of horror stories about the cocaleros and the Shining Path.

After arriving in Lima we made our way towards Huanuco, where we connected with Peruvian whitewater guru Piero Vellutino, who proved invaluable. Few locals knew anything about the deep canyon’s lower reaches. Pilots in Huanuco and Tingo flatly refused our requests for an aerial reconnaissance mission. Hiking the canyon with the help of a pack string was said to be impossible.

After 10 days in Huanuco, the sum total of our preparations was trumped by a couple hours of Piero’s research. We learned that there was in fact a trail some 1,200 metres high on the river-right canyon wall that offered possible egress in the event of a bail-out. Still, we were left with little other option than to just head in.

Late in the afternoon on July 22 we piled four Jefes and Piero’s H3 into the back of a worn Toyota pickup and headed off to Puente El Rancho to put in on the Huallaga.

It was just our second day on the river when we reached the towering gorge that forced the Casey expedition into a multiday evacuation. By sending one team high to scout the lower portion of the gorge and another at river level on the right to scout the entrance, we managed to put together a safe line through a series of blind ledges, dropping ever deeper into the canyon. Only strong teamwork made it possible for us to make good time through innumerable unseen and gorged-out rapids.

On the afternoon of our third day, one filled with endless boat-scoutable class IV–V rapids, the character of the river began to change. The canyon walls closed in dramatically and we had considerably more volume than when we started. The dense vegetation hanging from the gorge walls meant we had made the descent into a new climatic zone, la selva.

We were deep in the section of the river we’d referred to in our planning as the Great Bend. It was here that the river takes a 90- degree bend to the left and the canyon walls soar to more than 2,000 metres. That night in camp Piero, Andrew, Shane, Todd and I pored over the 30-year-old topos trying to count the gradient lines in the next 30 to 40 kilometres. The 1:100,000 maps were as good as we could get but lacked the detail we needed to be certain of what lay ahead. They were littered with wide swaths of white space and the words “datos insufcientes.” Insufficient data is the last thing you want to see on a topo when you are trying to reason your way through a potentially unreasonable river.

We woke up the next morning to a muddy river. The overall mood had shifted from stoked to somber. Knowing that we were about to paddle into a cavernous dirty gorge that dropped several hundred feet per mile, we pushed on cautiously.

The river disappeared into another, even more committing gorge

The Huallaga cascaded down a very marginal, sieve-laden rapid before disappearing under a huge chock stone 10 or 13 metres high, and then into what appeared to be an unscoutable, unportagable canyon. Scouting river left was impossible due to the gorge wall that shot up 1,500 metres from river level.

Todd and I volunteered to scale the steep and densely vegetated right wall to gain a vantage of what lay downstream. Beating our way through vines that would silently wrap around our ankles and any exposed gear, pulling us to the ground in an instant, we finally reached a high point on river right after about an hour of jungle bushwhacking. Unable to see into the canyon, we dropped down toward the gorge rim and belayed Todd over the edge to inspect.

From what he could see, the rapid under and just downstream of the chock stone might go. The crux being the exit rapid which had a super boily entrance with compression wave features, then a fast, narrow tongue down the middle, over a steep vertical ledge with massive holes and pockets on both walls. We felt good about it, but the problem was downstream.

Even if we were able to deal with this canyon, the river disappeared into another, even more committing gorge. From our perch, we could see that there was an eddy at the lip of the drop leading into the gorge, but from there, if we didn’t like what we saw, there were no options for egress right or left. We headed back to the rest of the team to give the grim details.

Piero, Shane, and Andrew sat on the rocks deep in discussion with the topos, GPS, and SAT phone littered about. Our plan B of accessing the old Inca trail 1,200 metres up on river right would disappear if we pushed on. We still had 60 kilometres left of the steepest and most committing section of river, and we had only travelled one kilometre in more than three hours.

Our river senses were telling us to get out. Slowly we came to the conclusion that we had to, at a bare minimum, hike around what lay below us. Shane described it as “this feeling of relief where you decide to go with your instincts of survival and judgment, versus your ego to want to complete something big.” None of us wanted to leave the river.

Piero and Todd bushwhacked ahead with the machete to scout a possible evacuation route while Shane, Andrew, and I began roping boats. It was slow.

In two hours we moved the boats only about 400 feet up the relentless terrain. Then Piero returned. “I hope you guys have insurance, ‘cause we are going to need a helicopter to get out of here.” As he was dialing numbers on our satellite phone leaving messages with his family and any other helpful connections he had, the rest of us hacked out a base camp on a thin, rocky jungle ledge above the churning, victorious Huallaga.

Fighting fierce ants we camped and waited. Our gear was soiled in mud, we were battered and demoralized. As we awaited rescue or finding our own escape route, the reality slowly set in; we were not on an ordinary summer vacation. We were at the gates of Hell, temptation trying to lure us in and divine judgment telling us not to look back.

This article on the Huallaga River in Peru was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Standing Waves: Wanderlust

Trips

Photo: Tore Meirik — Standing Waves: Wanderlust

To truly know someone else, walk a mile in his shoes; to truly know one’s self, huck a mile’s worth of waterfalls.

For no other reason than to test their mettle and prove it can be done, two Norwegian and two British extreme paddlers are teaming up to conquer just one mile in one month. Not impressed? Consider that it’s a more upright expedition than most, as the team attempts to drop 5,280 vertical feet (one mile) of waterfall in just 31 days.

Bliss-Stick team paddler Mark Burton, Liquidlogic’s Martin Vollen, Dagger’s Ed Cornfield and Pyranha’s Per Christian Pedersen will have to maintain a 170-foot per day average as a group. A 50-foot waterfall counts as 50 feet toward the goal, but only once. Then, the group has decided, they must move on to find another drop.

Waterfall, free fall road trip

Although still plotting the course and schedule the foursome has chosen Norway for their free fall road trip. Burton explained there are plenty of suitable drops all within short distance of each other, many close to the main roads, eliminating the need for time-consuming portages. He said there could be a couple of first descents, but for the most part all four paddlers will know the drops already, cutting back on time needed to scout unfamiliar runs.

“The big thing for us is time. we all love to huck, so getting us off the edge won’t be the problem, it’s the travelling between,” says Burton. “I’ve always enjoyed running drops, but I want to see how much we can do physically and mentally; I think we are going to learn a lot about ourselves.”

“And I love the fact that for a month I don’t have to work my ass off to get someone to go hucking with,” adds Vollen.

This article on waterfalls in Norway was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Open Canoe Technique: Power Steering

Skills

Photo: Carole Westwood — Open Canoe Technique: Power Steering

Forward Stroke Rebirth

The forward stroke is enjoying a renaissance as more open canoeists use it as not just a method of propulsion, but as a means to steer their canoes. A proven skill that harkens back to the earliest C1ers, power steering is the ability to control your solo boat while using nothing more than basic forward strokes. The key is understanding that the stroke can be broken down into distinct variables that allow you to easily guide the canoe in whichever direction you wish to go. All this without having to draw from the traditional set of rudder strokes, which slow your canoe and waste valuable energy.

Power steering with the 2×4 technique uses the four main variables which define the relationship between any stroke and your boat. These are: stroke cadence or timing; stroke position; paddle angle; and boat tilt.

Individually or together, these stroke elements are used to change the direction of your canoe while paddling with forward strokes. Add the cross-forward stroke playing with these same elements on your offside, and you achieve total boat control using only forward strokes. It’s also easy to remember. Think of the two forward strokes and the four variables, and voila, you have the 2×4 technique.

2×4 Forward Stroke Technique

Power steering builds on the concept of carving, or paddling your canoe on an arcing path. To understand this, picture the canoe in motion and how the bow is cradled by bow waves. By using the 2×4 technique you can control how these bow waves direct the canoe’s path, much like the reins on a horse. By simply allowing a wave on one side of the canoe to be bigger than the wave on the opposite side, the larger wave will push the canoe into an arcing path. Canoeists “steer” by controlling the wave effect by paddling on the inside of this arcing path in such a way as to resist, or enhance, the circular route of the canoe.

The easiest way to get the sensation of paddling a controlled arc is to experiment with stroke timing. Get your canoe moving by alternating three to four forward and cross-forward strokes. Finish with a cross-forward stroke, pause and wait for the canoe to arc toward your onside.

Now continue paddling an arcing path with just forward strokes.

If the canoe begins to straighten out, slow or pause the timing of your strokes and allow the canoe to regain its arcing path. If the arc is sharper than you desire, simply increase your stroke rate to straighten your path. The timing of when you apply power to your stroke has the effect of tightening or widening your arc.

Stroke position has the same effect on the diameter of your arc. By positioning your stroke ahead of your knee you will experience a tightening arc. Pulling past your knee toward your hip causes the canoe to straighten its path.

Similarly, stroking with a nearly vertical paddle shaft keeps the canoe travelling in an arcing path, while an angled shaft can dramatically straighten your path.

Finally, paddling the canoe with more tilt to the hull uses the chine to carve a tight arc, while paddling with a flatter hull favours a straighter course.

All these elements apply equally to the offside with the cross-forward stroke. As a result, solo paddlers have complete control for turning left or right while the boat is under power. One important rule applies for power steering: always place your strokes on the inside of the arcing canoe– never paddle on the outside.

Implications on Instruction

Often, beginners learn the 2×4 technique after their first lesson and show effective boat control for entering and exiting eddies. The implications on instruction are groundbreaking as teaching more advanced stern strokes can be delayed until paddlers reach higher novice to intermediate levels.

The bane of many solo canoeists—and their instructors—is the difficulty in getting the canoe going in a straight line from a stand still. By teaching forward and cross-forward strokes to beginners, along with a method of boat control, new paddlers quickly overcome the number-one obstacle to success in solo canoeing. Greater success surely means more new paddlers sticking with open canoeing.

The rebirth of the forward stroke as a control stroke maximizes forward speed and provides directional control. Use of various stroke elements to tighten or lessen your arc means you can carve the canoe with complete control. Power steering with the 2×4 technique makes paddling a solo canoe easy!

Andrew Westwood is an open canoe instructor at the Madawaska Kanu Centre, member of Team Esquif and author of The Essential Guide to Canoeing.

This article on the forward stroke was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Skills: Islands in the Stream

Skills

Photo: Bryan Kirk — Skills: Islands in the Stream

Rocks are often viewed as a river hazard, creating undercuts and sieves. What many paddlers don’t realize is that rocks can be very useful features on the river. Exposed rocks beside a drop can make the ideal launch ramp. Sliding across them may be the only way to avoid a nasty pin. Once you figure out how to make the most out of the river’s natural rock garden your river running and creeking will groove to new heights.

Use ‘em and Abuse ‘em

Using rocks to your advantage basically means getting away from the main flow and plowing up onto the edge of a rock that sits at water level, close to a drop. By getting your boat out of the water and up onto a nearby rock you can slide past a potential pin spot or undercut ledge that the main flow would otherwise push you into. The best rocks are smooth, around water level, and relatively close to the drop. Plowing up onto a sticky or jagged rock will kill your speed (if not stop you completely) and throw you off line. Smooth rocks at the lip of a drop will often auto-boof you to safety, allowing you to land away from the meatiest part of the hole at the bottom.

Body Positioning

As with any river-running skill you’ll want to maintain a forward paddling position. The trouble with leaning back is that you’ll be less balanced with excess weight on your stern. This increases the likelihood of your stern edges catching and is a more dangerous position if you happen to flip. To get yourself further up on a rock you can move your body weight to a less aggressive neutral position as long as you get your weight forward again before you land.

The Approach

If you plan to boof straight out from the drop, aim to make contact with the rock at about a 20- to 30-degree angle, with speed. Before your bow makes contact with the rock make sure your weight is forward and you’re ready with a stroke on the side away from the rock. If you plan to land at the bottom of the drop pointing to the left or right you’ll need to adjust the angle at which you approach the rock. As a general rule, making contact with any rock will straighten your boat’s angle and it will be difficult to angle away from the rock. This means that if you make contact with a rock on the left it won’t be easy to land pointing hard right.

Drying Out

Catch too much rock and you’ll lose all of your momentum, which often results in teeter-tottering over the lip of the drop. There are times when you’ll want to purposefully dry out, but for the most part drying out at the wrong time will blow your line. It’s important to understand the more rock you catch, the further you’ll slide back down into the main flow. When scouting a drop, look at where you plan on landing and consider the angle that you’ll slide off the rock. This angle will dictate how far you slide back into the main current.

Sound Check

Pick a safe drop and spend some time figuring out how your boat reacts to slid- ing on rock. Try taking different approaches to the rock, using lots of speed or no speed, lots of angle, straight on, taking a fast stroke, slow stroke, et cetera. With a little bit of practice you’ll be rocking out in no time!

Kelsey Thompson is a multi-time Canadian national freestyle medalist and Wave Sport team paddler, not to mention a music video producer.

This article on river-running was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

The Ghost Coast: Newfoundland’s Wild Southwest

Stories

All photos this page: Ryan Creary — The Ghost Coast: Newfoundland's Wild Southwest

Amid the bouts of seasickness that overcome my gut like the swells that pitch and roll this rattle- trap ferry, I feel a kinship with Joey Smallwood. The man responsible for bringing Newfoundland into Confederation in 1949 wasn’t much of a seafarer. He once spent days seasick in the hold of a hired schooner as part of a hare-brained plan to unionize remote coastal fishers and preach his political ideals. Since fishing season lasted from break-up to freeze-up, Smallwood decided that a wintertime voyage was best. When the captain dismissed him for a lunatic, the soon- to-be leader of the province disembarked and continued on his own, walking the ice of the island’s bottom half—locally known as the Southwest Coast.

Adventure Kayak editor Tim Shuff, photographer Ryan Creary and I came to Newfoundland with more rational plans. We sea kayaked 200 kilometres of the Southwest Coast, visiting many of the long-lost com- munities Smallwood attempted to unite. For 11 mostly glorious days in September our trip was nothing like Smallwood’s, with no high seas adventure, pack ice or blinding blizzards. But now, hanging over the stern of the coastal ferry as it retraces our route from Francois to Rose Blanche, I can’t help but feel fellow to a man who got to know the people of the Southwest Coast in its heyday, even if it was in the most manipulative way.

It’s fitting after a whirlwind journey by air and road to get here that Tim, Ryan and I find ourselves hunkered down with too much time on our hands scant kilo- metres from our launching point. We hummed and hawed in the fog at a wharf in Rose Blanche, New- foundland, while the local fishermen looked on with incredulity. Our general plan to spend the better part of two weeks paddling to the isolated outport of Fran- cois was as crazy to them as our immediate intention of launching into the three-metre seas punishing the breakwater. But we set off anyway.

An hour later we washed ashore on a decomposing boat slip in the old village of Petites, population two, where gale force westerlies held us captive for two nights. Petites was once one of the hundreds of “out- port” communities spread out along Newfoundland’s 10,000 kilometres of rocky perimetre. Few faces peer from the windows of the 20-odd houses remaining

atop rickety two-by-four stilts at the water’s edge or clinging to the treeless, granite barrens of uptown. Despite its mid-latitude location, the landscape in this corner of Newfoundland is an arctic-like, windswept and glacier-carved expanse of bogs, domes and fiords.

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At Petites we befriend one-half of the community’s resident pair who tells Tim and I how he returned to his birthplace in 2002 and bought a modest two-storey clapboard house for $2,700. A year later, the province sent in its last supply tanker to feed Petites’ diesel generators and most of the citizens collected $80,000 resettlement payouts. In choosing to stay, the man says the government paid him $12,000 for the house it now leases to him for one dollar a year. Petites’ last holdouts cook with propane and go to bed early. They let their subscription to satellite television expire and watch the caribou in- stead. The next morning, we’re paddling before the first curls of woodsmoke rise from their chimney.

There are about 90 kilometres of coastline to paddle between Rose Blanche and Burgeo, made up of rocky jetties, serpentine inlets, bedrock headlands, steep islands and, in the last half, sweeping sand beaches. Leaving Petites, we surf a residual swell and building wind waves past the ghost towns of Westport, French Cove and Cinq Cerf – outports that Smallwood once tried to unionize. The coastline is pleasantly diverse yet somewhat unremarkable, except for the portion between the active outports of La Poile and Grand Bruit where 300-metre-tall granite cliffs stretch far inland.

Wind holds us up for another day-and-a-half and we make tracks as soon as the swell is half-manageable, skirting the leeward side of a labyrinth of reefs with ominous names like The Smoker, The Jumper and The Galloping Moll. We pull into Burgeo after 35 kilometres and a long morning in the saddle.

Burgeo is the hub of the Southwest Coast with a highway to the outside world and an increasingly transient population of 1,700. The fish processing plant collapsed with the cod fishery and the town is now more of a bedroom community for Nova Scotia apple pickers and Alberta roughnecks. Streets of quaint saltbox houses radiate haphazardly from the probing fingers of the sea: Short Reach, Long Reach, Mercer Cove and Aaron Arm. The off-lying islands feel removed from the open ocean and make for great sea kayaking for the same reason that Rencontre—the largest of the lot—was chosen as rendezvous site for 17th century French sailors.

Everywhere we spend a night, entire lives have been lived before us. Smallwood for one was a benefactor of the clichéd Newfoundland hospitality—he need not have carried camping gear on his ice walk. Before the advent of deep-sea trawlers and on-board refrigeration, hardscrabble hamlets sprung up as close as possible to the best fishing grounds—sometimes within shouting distance from each other. Some outports date back 500 years to the time of Basque and French fishers and whalers, ranking them among the oldest European settlements in North America.

Up until Newfoundland ceded from England to become a province of Canada in 1949 and Smallwood took reign, outport communities thrived in an isolated, unheralded kind of way. Smallwood began the process of centralization and the majority of outports—like the codfish—started to disappear. By 1975, more than 300 communities and over 28,000 people had been uprooted. Our Sailing Directions guidebook, published in 1995, describes dozens of communities like Petites that have since been “evacuated” due to fishing moratoriums and the lure of greener pastures—not to mention healthy government-issued lump-sum compensation.

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A day’s paddle east of Burgeo, we tuck into a sheltered harbour rimmed by 150-metre talus slopes and forested hillsides and find a spectacular campsite on a gravel spit on the north end of Fox Island. Only two houses remain but the rotting cribbing of old fishing stages and a grassy meadow suggest there were once many more. I follow a trickle of a stream up a bram- bly hillside and discover a shallow-dug well brimming with ice-cold, peaty brown, sugary sweet water. Ryan finds the old cemetery on a dome-shaped promontory, its weather-beaten tombstones overlooking the sea.

The weather settles into a stable trend and the next day we knock off the 18 kilometres of cliff-bound coast between Fox Island and Grey River by lunch. The community of Grey River occupies all of the marginally flat land in a triangle-shaped bight. Otherwise, the 20-ki- lometre-long granite fiord is inhospitable. After some lean years the outport now bustles, though there’s less activity at the wharf than there is at the helicopter landing pad. The fiord echoes with the whirring thump-thump-thump of rotors and reeks of aviation fuel—the sounds and smells of a prospecting boom.

Luckily, the crux of the trip comes on a magical day of lifting fog, skirting clouds and bright sun and we tackle the better part of the near-continuous 300-metre-high cliffs connecting Grey River to Francois in idyllic conditions. The landscape blows the mind—as much Newfoundland as it is a combination of Alaska, Hawaii and Thailand. A talus valley bound by soaring, glacier-worn buttes fans out to the sea at the tiny in- dentation of Seal’s Rest Cove. And at Cape La Hune, craggy, crumbling spires of volcanic rock contrast with neighbouring slabs of granite. We round the promon- tory rubbernecked and walleyed and set up camp at another abandoned outport.

Screen_Shot_2015-07-23_at_4.17.30_PM.png We spend two days at Cape La Hune not because of miserable weather—by now the Southwest Coast is fully enveloped in a 1,025-millibar high—but because it’s so hard to leave. Hiking up the breadbox-shaped peak behind the campsite oc- cupies an afternoon with scrambling up sloping rocks and crashing through tuckamore thickets of dwarf birch and fir trees. From the top, the Atlantic stretches uninterrupted to Antarctica, save for the inconspicuous dots of the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon to the south- east. Facing inland, La Hune Bay cuts a granite corridor through a sweeping expanse of tucka- more and barrens. On the treacherous descent I find an old threadbare rope—proof that the Cape La Hune outporters did more than just fish. Later on, I watch the moon rise over the rockbound coast from within the foundation of the old church, imagining the building itself departing on a barge bound for the horizon.

In some ways, there was method to Smallwood’s madness. Like a used car salesman pitching to the spouse who’s keener on colour than anything else, Smallwood appealed to the outports where, at the time, the provincial balance of power was held. As dubious as his reputation was in St. John’s, Smallwood became a backwoods legend for his Southwest Coast sea ice expedition and popular radio show. He solidified his cause by flying into these same remote communities that had never seen an automobile, let alone an airplane, with promises of money for all should Newfoundland vote to join Canada.

Walking the ice of the Southwest Coast, Smallwood found communities of people who knew nothing of the concept of unionized labour, much less government and current affairs—the same way he was ignorant of their arduous and simple lives by the sea. Maybe Smallwood’s resettlement plans and promises of centralized labour and its associated benefits were innocently skewed attempts at giving thanks for their hospitality. One way or another, when the people of Newfoundland chose to cut ties with Britain and join Canada largely on the strength of the rural vote, it marked a beginning of the end that continues today.

Upon ending our trip in Francois—with 175 residents, two stores and a high school, the most populous and well-endowed outport on the Southwest Coast—the weather takes a turn for the worse. We board the coastal ferry in foggy drizzle and southerly winds, with the wavelets in the bay a gut-churning harbinger of what’s to come on the open coast. The last thing I remember before falling into the throes of nausea is spotting a pink, white and green Republic of Newfoundland flag flying taut alongside a line of sopping wet clothes, less an affront against Smallwood than a fading grasp on a way of life.

Conor Mihell is a freelance writer and kayak guide based in Wawa, Ontario.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Jon Bowermaster: The Ocean Ambassador

Stories

Photo: Fiona Stewart — Jon Bowermaster: The Ocean Ambassador

In January 2008, journalist Jon Bowermaster travelled to the Antarctica Peninsula to complete the final leg of his Oceans 8 expedition, a quest to explore all of the world’s continents by sea kayak. The Oceans 8 trips included Alaska’s Aleutian Islands (1999), Vietnam (2001), French Polynesia’s Tuamotu Atolls (2002), South America’s Altiplano (2003), Gabon (2004), Croatia (2005), Tasmania (2006) and Antarctica (2008).

Did you know that Oceans 8 was going to take 10 years when you started?
No I had no idea. When we went to the Aleutians it was just a pure, one-off adventure. It wasn’t until we’d done the second one, Viet- nam, that I thought that we should make this a long-term thing.

So how did you come up with the idea?
I was inspired by my climbing friends who had such simple and easily defined goals. I wanted some long-term project. Visiting each continent by sea kayak seemed pretty easy to me. At a sea- level way it’s our own kind of Seven Summits.

Why kayaking?
I’ve always regarded kayaks as our ambassadors. They open doors that wouldn’t open if we arrived by land. Along the coastlines virtually everyone we meet lives and depends on the sea. Everyone has a boat. Most of them are fishermen. So they don’t look at us like freaks, they look at us like brethren. Other than the Altiplano, no one ever said, “What are you doing here?”

So in South America you were just freaks?
We were dragging kayaks through the driest place on earth. The few people we did meet had never seen a kayak before. We’d rigged them on these little pull carts and harnesses. This is a place where people still believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials, so they’d see us come trundling across the desert and literally in some instances ran and hid.

In Antarctica you came across a sinking ship?
By pure coincidence when we had to drop the kayaks off in advance and I was riding on the National Geographic Endeavor, a big tourist ship, we were first on the scene of that sinking ship, the Explorer. We picked up the captain and the staff and all the Zodiacs. The captain had a guy with him who was carrying three bags—one was filled with all the passports, one was filled with the ship’s papers and one was filled with cash.

What’s next?
We’re going to South America and then Af- rica next month and the Galapagos and back to French Polynesia for other assignments.

Who’s “we”?
Fiona Stewart, my partner, travels with me, takes a lot of the pictures. She did all of the communication management from Antarctica. That’s the other part of this modern day adventuring is that it’s a lot of work. Every day you’ve got to download the images, edit the images, write the text, edit little videos.

Do you have a favourite place?
I’ve been back to French Polynesia and the Tuamotus many, many times. That might be my favourite. In a sense it’s more raw than some of the other places in that you can find people living very simply and not so removed from how their predecessors did, and it’s just incredibly beautiful.

What’s keeping you going?
Now that we’ve figured this website out and have gotten an audience that keeps checking in you really just want to keep sharing these kinds of stories—water-related and environmental-related.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Editorial: Apologies to Everyone I’ve Left in my Wake

Stories

Photo: Ryan Creary — Editorial: Apologies to Everyone I've Left in my Wake

“That looks like a good place to rest,” said Jacques Cousteau, while Mario Andretti and I pretended not to listen and continued our race to the campsite.

“Must keep going,” we grunted time and again. “No time to stop. Rest later.”

I am an inveterate impatient traveller. On my most recent kayaking trip I justified my abysmal behaviour by telling myself that Cousteau just preferred to paddle slowly and check out the sights while the rest of us charged forward. Surely he enjoyed shortcutting a kilometre offshore (which is why we secretly nicknamed him “Jacques Cousteau”) while we explored along the shore and waited for him at every headland. Of course, I never bothered to ask “Cousteau” how he felt.

It didn’t sink in how terribly I’d behaved until I was reading a blog, weeks later. Wendy Killoran and Rene Seindal are kayakers from different countries who tried, and bitterly failed, to paddle together around Sardinia last fall. Rene’s blog entry about what went wrong contemplates the importance of information sharing, mutual respect and patience that are integral to any expedition partnership.

Rene also slams the ultimate in disrespectful behaviour, “mock waiting.” Mock waiting means waiting just long enough for a slower paddler to get within a comfortable distance, then taking off before he has a chance to fully catch up and rest. I guiltily realized I knew exactly what Rene was talking about.

“Mock waiting is very destructive behaviour in a team,” Rene writes. It constantly underlines that ‘I’m faster and you’re slower,’ while it wears the slower paddler down physically too. It can drive the slower paddler into the ground, physically and psychologically.”

It further occurred to me that leaving someone in your wake highlights and abuses a power imbalance. Once you get far ahead of someone, it can be almost impossible for them to catch up unless you let them. Slowness gets compounded by wind and cur- rent, so a slower paddler will fall increasingly far behind and effectively be paddling farther through the water to get to the same destination. In other words, just as the rich get richer, the slow get slower.

I decided I don’t ever want to cause a Jacques Cousteau dynamic again. So I phoned for some expert advice from SKILS guiding school in Ucluelet, B.C. Instructor J.F. Marleau told me what should have been obvious. He said that when paddling with peers, you should first carefully choose partners with matching abilities, then make sure everybody has the same expectations for the trip, and communicate about any issues that arise.

A good way to do this is to start with a trip contract, which means sitting down with everyone before you leave to reach consensus on issues like how fast to travel, when and where to take rest breaks, what paddling conditions are unsafe, what to do if the group gets separated, how to communicate and resolve problems, and anything else that anyone in the group wants to lay down as a ground rule.

On my next trip I’m going to make a contract, and clause number one will be about paddling speed. I can already look back and remember all sorts of problems that this would have avoided. Like the first long paddling trip with my wife when we realized halfway through that only one of us cared at all about how far we paddled each day (hint: she wasn’t the one measuring the map distances with dental floss in the tent each night).

And while I’m at it maybe I’ll work on being a better communicator at home and at work. Because good expedition behaviour is really no different from good behaviour in everyday life. Nobody can be perfect, but a kayaking trip has a powerful way of showing you where to improve.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Boat Review: The Eighteen5 Sport by Delta Kayaks

Boats
Kayaks

Photo: Dave Aharonian — Boat Review: The Eighteen5 Spot by Delta Kayaks

Challenging the stereotype of what kind of kayaks you can make out of heat-moulded plastic, Delta Kayaks embodies all the ambition of a rock star stretching to compose a symphony. This company’s not stopping at the usual plastic rec and light-touring kayaks, no way. Its fleet includes a greenland-style performer, a 20-foot tandem, and even this—a true expedition-worthy long boat.

SPECS

length: 18 ft 6 in (5.6 m)

width: 23.5 in (59 cm)

depth: 12.25 in (31 cm)

cockpit: 18 x 32.5 in (46 x 83 cm)

weight: 57 lbs (25.9 kg)

volume: 121.9 gal (461.4 l)

dry storage: 67.6 gal (256.2 l)

MSRP: $2,750 Cdn

Reminiscent of fibreglass stalwarts like the Current Designs expedition and Seaward Quest, only wider, the eighteen5 Sport is the station wagon of the Delta fleet, a true cargo hauler with a stratospheric 256 litres of dry storage—the deeper eighteen5 Expedition has 24 litres more and fits larger paddlers. either boat will carry enough to paddle for a whole season without resupply.

There are at least two reasons why nobody has built such a long single kayak out of thermoformed plastic until now. The first we’ll get into later. The second is that thermoform is more flexible than other materials, so it’s harder to mould longer designs.

To overcome this, Delta has added a stiffener to the inner hull, an arched piece of plastic that extends along the keel from the bow hatch to the stern hatch. When we slammed the eighteen5 into large, steep wind waves, slight vibrations ran from our bums through to our neoprene-clad toes, but the stiffener kept the boat intact.

The convenient, oversized hatches were perfectly dry. We did notice some leakage around the seam of the rear bulkhead, allowing water to enter from the cockpit. however, Delta Kayaks says this leak has been eliminated in newer versions by adding a tighter-fitting bulkhead and modifications to the gluing.

The eighteen5 has a very comfortable cockpit with a sliding, fore-aft adjustable seat. The cruising speed is decent for a boat of its length. Performance is nonetheless nimble; it’s got quite a bit of rocker and it’ll about-face on an aggressive tilt much faster than you can say “Delta has tested its plastic to withstand re- peated hammer blows.”

all this capacity and performance comes in a beautifully finished package with the high- gloss appearance of gel coat and standard features you won’t find on boats from other companies—recessed foam grab handles, divots in the deck to make it easy to grab the bungies, paddle float straps, and more.

Which brings us to the second reason that nobody has built boats like this before: because it’s unknown if anybody will buy them. The mass market wants plastic rec boats while expedition paddlers—relatively few in number from the start—have always gravitated to pricey composites like bikers to leather. however, with expedition capacity, great touring performance and good looks at an attractive price, the eighteen5 may be one to break the mould.

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