My Canadian Rockies Whitewater guidebooks are in rough shape. The covers are delaminating, the corners are abused, a mildewed crust of dried salad dressing stains one of the spines and the desiccated corpses of mosquitoes litter the pages describing good spring runs.

Any paddler who lives along the peaks separating Alberta from British Columbia knows about these books. They are river-running bibles. Split into two volumes covering 250 river runs, the obsessively detailed descriptions have eliminated any need for local river exploration. Helpful as the books may be, they have taken the adventure of paddling new rivers and run it through a printing press 5,000 times.

“Adventure,” writes Rockies guidebook author Stuart Smith “is a quality inherent to the process [of discovery], one that loses much of its appeal when someone else tells you how to do it or ad nauseam describes how it was done before.”

Easy for him to say after detailing every riffle in every rapid in the Rockies. “To be honest,” he claims, “I dislike guidebooks!” Those 650 pages must have been painful.

Paddling around Banff usually means choosing between a handful of standard runs like the Kicking Horse, Pipestone, Upper Bow and Kananaskis. Exploration is not really a part of the paddling ethic here anymore. Few people even bother looking for new runs since the guidebooks were released in the mid-1990s. Want to try a different river? Go to the library and look one up.

Now the frontier of exploration lies on the West Coast. With so much water and so many logging roads being hacked out of the bush, new runs are routinely opened. Guess where Smith lives now?

Today’s paddlers are moved by written words on a page, and end up doing only what has already been done. But it’s hard to blame paddlers for being followers when it seems our predecessors have been everywhere. The put-ins and take-outs may change from time to time, certain features might become more popular and there may be some new wood that finds its way into a local favourite, but there’s nothing really new out there.

They will ask, “Whatcha doing this weekend?”

You will answer, “Paddling.”

Inevitably, they will reply, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go rafting.” It will pain you even though you knew it was coming, even though you’ve heard it a hundred times. There is no polite reply.

Our sport may be growing, but people—family and best friends included—still have no clue what we do. They can’t grasp the difference between a 20-foot blob of black rubber filled with pasty, poorly-dressed punters and a responsive piece of plastic paddled by a party of one. Rafting involves a paddle, a helmet and a lifejacket and is therefore whitewater in their eyes. They don’t see the cunning with which kayakers pick our way down the river. They can’t imagine the freedom of slicing through a roadless landscape or planing down the face of a glassy wave. They’ve never felt their gut lurch at the lip of a drop, the sensation of being airborne and the impact upon landing. They think rafting looks fun.

“I’ve always wanted to do kayaking, but I am so afraid of flipping over and being trapped under the water,” they will continue if you bother impressing upon them the subtle differences between the sports. (You don’t bother explaining that you don’t “do” kayaking.)

It’s hard to reply to people who say they are scared of being trapped underwater because, deep down, kayakers are afraid of being trapped underwater. So you respond, “Don’t worry, when you want to bail, you bail. It’s automatic.”

Then, just to confirm you might as well be talking to a stump, they will blather on about how they heard from a friend’s uncle’s cousin that his neighbour got trapped and almost drowned…but didn’t.

“I would be scared of dying by going over a big waterfall,” they point out.

Of course they’d be scared of dying this way. Most of us would be, but a little perspective please. 

I stumped upon a photo of Vic Van Wie and his kayak-fishing world-record 256-pound thresher shark while making some final online arrangements for my first kayak-fishing trip.

Here’s a guy in a T-shirt, surf trunks and sandals kneeling beside a 12-foot kayak and an 11-foot fish. Below the photo he recounts the catch: “The thresher shark hit about 20 minutes after I started soaking a live mackerel. He ripped off all 80 yards of mono top-shot and was into the Spectra backing within a few seconds. Even with my bait buck- et in the water [used as a sea anchor] I was still getting pulled at a pretty good clip. After about an hour and a half it turned into a standoff with him about 20–30 feet below the kayak. For another half an hour we played tug of war.”

When he finally landed the shark a kayak-fishing buddy named Rhino grabbed the leader and then “beat it upside the head” until it stopped thrashing.

I don’t even like putting a worm on my hook, let alone dragging a 256- pound shark across my kayak.

I’d committed to this article on kayak fishing and after reading about the monsters being caught off the coast of California I knew I couldn’t just spend a day filling a pail with panfry sunfish if it was going to be a good story.

Initially, it sounds like this might be interesting kinky talk. But no, it’s sea kayak rescues again. Sea kayakers lust after safety. Rescues are the hottest topic of sea kayaking conversation by a nautical mile. The number of different techniques is astounding.

Despite all the safety talk, sea kayakers often have surprisingly modest skills, eschewing an emphasis on judgment, conditioning and strong technique in favour of amassing safety gear and study- ing a near endless litany of rescue manoeuvres.

Safety, apparently, has nothing to do with good judgment or paddling skills. It’s all about rescues and rescue gear.

From the sounds of it, the best way for me to be safe is to cover every inch of my kayak deck with a sea of “international orange” rescue equipment.

Is it me, or does this seem like slamming the aquarium door after the sea horse has already escaped?

When clients on a guided sea kayaking trip turn greener than the seaweed below, it’s not always from seasickness, more often it’s from envy.

Envy for a guide’s job is warranted when it’s summer in Johnstone Strait and the sun is shining, warming paddlers as they laze around on cobble beaches or dodge orcas surfacing in glassy waters under the gaze of snow capped peaks.

News flash Mr. corporate executive, Ms. school teacher with a pension plan: it’s not always fun in the sun. Replace that idyllic scene with four days of rain, with wind so strong boats

are beached, when there isn’t so much as a sparrow in sight and clients who have paid thousands of dollars to be sea kayaking are instead cloistered in their tents. At times like these I’d happily trade my job for the prospect of 20 years spent sitting behind an accountant’s desk, having my fresh water come from a cooler at the end of the hall.

Summers spent guiding disappear in a haze of trip after trip on the water. Snoozing in an often damp sleeping bag for 100 or more nights a year is a job requirement. Relationships starve as loved ones seek comfort elsewhere, leaving you with no enduring company except for the foot fungus nestled between your toes. You invariably miss weddings and parties. The novelty of the campfire burns out as quickly as dry cedar, leaving the smell of smoke to linger longer than it’s welcome in matted salty hair.

When it’s six in the morning on the fifth straight day of drizzle, most guides would happily trade glowing campfire embers for a timer on the coffee pot.