“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.

Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison are no strangers to long expeditions. But their last undertaking to cross the country by paddle, sail and train to meet an iconic writer quickly took the form not of an expedition but a pilgrimage.

For writer Heuer and filmmaker Allison, the story began in 2005 when Heuer sent an unsolicited draft of his book Being Caribou to Farley Mowat. As childhood devotees of the 86-year-old writer the couple was amazed a few weeks later when Mowat called and invited them to visit his Cape Breton farm. Living in Canmore, Alberta, Heuer and Allison weighed the options for getting there. Then they realized that Mowat had already written a multi-volume guidebook for them: Why not plot a route over land and water, criss-crossing the settings of Mowat’s books? 

And so the Finding Farley project was born. Last May, Allison, Heuer and their two-year-old toddler Zev loaded up their Prospector and dropped it into the Bow River near their home. 

The early stretch of their journey had the family paddling through the setting of Owls in the Family and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, two of Mowat’s novels about growing up in the Saskatchewan prairies.

By summer, they were deep into the northern wilds, battling long portages, a thick haze of bugs and a near-miss with a sleeping polar bear. 

They followed the Cochrane and Thlewiaza Rivers through Manitoba into Nunavut, passing the barren settings of several of Mowat’s books, including No Man’s River and Lost in the Barrens. 

“Farley remembers being terrified running these rivers with his life in the trapper’s hands,” says Allison. “He knows how unforgiving the landscape can be.”

From Churchill, Manitoba, they caught a train to Quebec and then sailed across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Newfoundland. After three days on the choppy seas they pulled into Burgeo, the setting for Mowat’s 1972 novel A Whale for the Killing. 

In early fall, the family sailed to Nova Scotia and anchored in the bay at St. Peters, where Mowat stood waiting on the shore. 

Despite having never met, the group soon fell into easy rapport. “There was already such a shared history,” says Allison. “It felt more like a reunion than an introduction.”

The family spent three days exchanging tales from the Barren Lands with the Mowats. Mowat admitted being worried throughout the family’s pilgrimage, despite—or perhaps because of—his own extensive travels across the same land. 

“He had tried a few times along the way to dissuade us,” says Allison. “So he was very happy to finally have us safely ashore.”—Amy Flynn Stuart

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

• The aurora borealis, also called the northern lights, occur when charged particles collide with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen 80 kilometres above the earth’s surface. Enough collisions result in a release of light energy, in a process similar to that in a fluorescent light bulb. 
• In an early nod to multiculturalism, the aurora borealis were named after the Roman goddess of dawn and the Greek god of the north wind.
• Displays of the aurora borealis are most often observed within a 2,500-kilometre radius of the magnetic North Pole—not the true North Pole. 
• The lights were once known as “herring flashes” in Scandinavia where people believed the atmospheric glow was caused by light being reflected off schools of fish.
• Don’t believe those who say they’ve heard the aurora borealis. Physicists say the lights make no sound, since they occur in the vacuum of space.
• Northern Lights was the name of a group of Candian singers that raised $3.2 million in 1985 for famine relief with the sale of their single Tears Are Not Enough. The group featured luminaries such as Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and, um, the guy from Loverboy.
• Aurora borealis are most commonly observed around the equinoxes, when sunspots are most common. 
• Suspicious Russian men once associated the lights with a dragon that seduced women in the absence of their husbands.
• Curtain-like waves of the aurora borealis always follow an east-to-west pattern. 
• Aurora Borealis is a European record label. Their corporate motto is: “We who live on the edge of the Earth…have to this day been protected by our remoteness and by the mystery and fear created by our name.” They have yet to sign a polka artist.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.