If, on the third weekend in May, you happen to drive your pickup truck through Georgia, cross the Ogeechee River, take a right on Ogeechee River Road, go over the railway tracks and right at the bottom of the hill, you’ll rattle into the Traditional Bow Hunters of Georgia Southern Championships. And if you thought of packing your traditional hickory longbow and arrows whittled from wood, cane or bamboo you could, for 20 greenbacks, enter the tournament in the primitive class.

Thirty yards ahead of you, you’d see a McKenzie 3D deer target, the pride of the McKenzie Target line—the official targets of Buckmasters, North American Bow Hunters and the National Field Archery Association. As you drew back your handcrafted longbow and took a bead on the vital zone, you’d notice how exceptionally sculpted and meticulously painted the life-size buck is. A massive set of synthetic antlers adds the finishing touch.

McKenzie puts so much attention to detail into their targets because, they say, “We believe that nothing can prepare a bow hunter better for the hunt than prac- ticing with a target that looks exactly like the game they will be hunting.”

If, on the last weekend in August, you happen to be driving your Saab wagon along Highway 17 on the north shore of Lake Superior and turn down Michipico- ten River Village Road just south of the gi- ant Canada goose marking the Wawa exit, you’ll end up at the mouth of the Michipicoten River and the base of Naturally Superior Adventures.

If you had thought of tying on your homebuilt traditional Greenland skin-on-frame kayak or mass-produced synthetic replica, you could, for $250 Canadian, join 50 other Greenland-style kayak enthusiasts at the first annual Naturally Superior Traditional Sea Kayak Symposium. Once registered, you’d paddle your traditional hunting craft, learn rolls and build a paddle.

And on Saturday night you’d gather for a concert, although the organizers are still searching for a big-name musical act.

You would not, however, find yourself with a harpoon launcher in hand 30 yards off an anatomically correct 3-D narwhal or seal target.

Reading about Greenland-style kayaking, I was struck by how little attention today’s recreational Greenland-style paddlers, in their quest to master traditional paddling strokes and rolls, have paid to the kayak’s original purpose—hunting.

Even Chris Cunningham, author of the book Building the Greenland Kayak: A Manual for its Construction and Use, admits, “While I’ve made a few harpoons and darts and have even managed to get off some good throws, the only thing I’ve ever hit was the bow of my kayak.”

All is not lost.

Qaannat Kattuffiat is a Greenland-based kayaking organization dedicated to keeping the traditional kayaking skills alive. At their annual championships and through affiliates like Qajaq Copenhagen and Qajaq USA, competitors practice throwing harpoon for distance and targeting floating fluorescent balls about the size of seal heads.

I pitched David Wells, owner of Naturaly Superior Adventures, my idea of working hunting into his symposium. I thought Adventure Kayak magazine could sponsor the traditional hunting part of the week- end, and McKenzie Targets could surely sculpt a more realistic Greenland hunter’s target than an orange rubber ball.

In principle, Wells liked my idea of recreating the traditional hunt, but he concluded that throwing harpoons at lifelike narwhal or seal targets might not go over very well with the sensitive sea kayak crowd. I suspect he’s right, although it’d be a way to get anti-seal-hunting protestor Paul McCartney to attend the event. And maybe Paul would bring his guitar.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2006 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

I was seven the first time I saw Niagara Falls. My strongest memories of that family vacation are of the wax museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and grilled cheese sandwiches. The falls didn’t impress me much, and it certainly didn’t occur to me to run them.

The same can’t be said for others. Since 1901 Niagara Falls has attracted nutbars of all sorts going over the lip for their final swan song or for a shot at fame and fortune. Besides the 20 suicide victims police purportedly retrieve from the pool below every year, 15 “daredevils” have run the falls. Ten have survived.

Most of those 15 attempts sound like contenders for the Gong Show. They’ve relied on all manner of inner tubes, wooden barrels and metal kegs. One guy even rode off the lip on a jetski, hoping his rocket-propelled parachute would bring him down safely. Unfortunately he did a poor job of attaching the parachute to his body.

Most recently, in 2003, Kirk Jones, an unemployed man from Detroit, survived a swim over the falls wearing nothing but the shirt on his back (and some pants). He went on to join the Toby Tyler Circus. To paddlers, though, one story stands out.

Jesse Sharp, an unemployed 28-year-old from Ocoee, Tennessee, had ten years of whitewater experience behind him when he ran Niagara Falls in his red Dancer C1 on June 5, 1990, making headlines across the continent and reinforcing the public’s belief that paddlers are all crazy. He didn’t wear a helmet so his face wouldn’t be obscured in photographs. Friends believed he did it as a stunt in order to launch a career as a stunt man.

But Sharp may not have been a total quack. He had a decent creeking resume and he scouted the falls for three years. On the day of his attempt he made dinner arrangements downriver in Queenston. We can only assume he made his line, but he never made it to dinner. Authorities recovered his boat, which suffered only a mi- nor dent, but Sharp’s body was never found. It seems 170 feet of freefall was too much.

When Jesse Sharp went over Niagara Falls the world record for successful waterfall descents belonged to Shaun Baker for his freefall of 49.5 feet. Six years later Baker upped his own record to 75 feet. With Ed Lucero and Dave Grove both breaking the 100-foot barrier in the last three years, 170-foot Niagara is looking more and more like the type of river paddlers challenge themselves on and less like a sideshow for a wax museum.

People run waterfalls (and paddle whitewater, for that matter) for all sorts of reasons, but very few do it because it will make them famous. Those pushing the envelope of paddling are doing it with a noticeable lack of bravado after long bushwhacks through hordes of bugs. Ed Lucero fretted for a week with fear gnawing his sleep before he committed to running the 105-foot Alexandra Falls in the Northwest Territiories. Dave Grove thought his 101-foot run of Oregon’s Metlako Falls might be a record, but he didn’t get back to measure it until a month later.

These paddlers were not reckless seekers of fame. In some ways both were humbled by their accomplishments, but they also upped the ante when it comes to what is possible in a kayak. These accomplishments open the door for bigger challenges and expand the pool of what is considered possible.

Twenty years after my first family trip to Niagara, the falls impressed me more, and I spent a long time tracing lines over the lip to the pulverized froth below. It still doesn’t occur to me to run the falls—it’s both illegal and likely a quick death—but paddlers are now dropping falls nearly two-thirds the height of Niagara. It says a lot about the pace of progress in our sport that paddlers have even caused me wonder if they’ll ever reclaim this natural wonder from its dark history as a tourist-ridden venue for stunts and suicide missions. 

This article first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here. 

In the dead of wInter a couple years ago, at the end of a slow day in the office, I went out on a limb and dialled the number for Eric Soares of California’s tsunami rangers.

Kayaking was a magic word. all I had to do was introduce myself and my half-baked dream—“just something in the back of my mind,” I downplayed it—to unleash a flood of information and friendly advice from the opposite side of the continent, from a man I’d never met.

eric had just had heart surgery, wasn’t paddling much, and it was like he was passing on all his enthusiasm for exploring the coast to someone who could still go out and do it.

“the hardest section will be the great wide open stretches of beach around the Columbia riv- er where waves pound in at five to six feet most of the time, 12 or 15 or more sometimes. the best part will be the rocky sections, mid-Oregon and northern California. redwood national Park. the Lost Coast. Mendocino. Sonoma. Marin. San Mateo, Big Sur…”

A half-hour conversation was all it took to exponentially increase my knowledge about paddling from Vancouver to Mexico and make my dream start to feel real.

rob walker and Karen holm call this part of the planning process “project-based learning.” In rigorously researching their Chilean Passage expedition, they learned so much about the Patagonian coast that it felt familiar before they left home.

“We went and paddled one of the most remote and tempestuous places on earth for six months, and as crazy as it sounds, it was like we had done it before because we were so well prepared.”

Planning is at least half the journey.

Once you get a trip idea in your head, get on the phone and talk to the people who can help you make it happen. this is how expeditions begin, and the dark days of February are the best time to start.

A few years ago, a phone call to my buddy Dave with the words “let’s go this summer” launched a charmed existence of reading charts, packing food, the happy knowledge that we’d be checking out of civilization come June for 80 days on the B.C. coast.

My phone call to Eric planted the seed of a bigger trip that I may someday do. he knew two men who’d done the trip I proposed—a friend named Andy Taylor, and Ed Gillet. He gave me Andy’s phone number in Mendocino and told me to look up Ed in the San diego phone book. I added two more names to my list of contacts and the snowball started rolling.

Finally, just straightforward and friendly, as if anyone who’s going to paddle his coast is someone he will let into his house, Eric extended an invitation to a complete stranger.

“If you find yourself in half Moon Bay, give me a call. we’ll come pick you up, give you a place to stay, whatever you need.”

Expedition dreams open conversations and open doors. I still haven’t taken the first paddle stroke to Mexico, but in my mind I’m halfway there. 

This article first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.