For the first two weeks Tanya and I could only remember the first verse of Jimmy Buffett’s Parrot Head national anthem. We’d left the Port Arthur marina in Thunder Bay the day after the ice broke. It wasn’t until May 26 that spring—an exceptionally cold winter had Superior com- pletely frozen over. Our morning routine was to boil water for hot cereal and thaw our frosty pogies in the steam. The first verse of Jimmy’s “Margaritaville” was enough to warm our spirits and pass the time for the first couple hundred miles of our three-and-half-month expedition.

Music has always been used to pass the time paddling. Canada was opened by the French voyageurs singing of whiskey and women while moving further west away from the comforts of both. While the Inuit kayaked they invented songs of the hunt, songs they’d write while away and then share like stories upon their return.

Like the Inuit and the voyageurs, we shared “Margaritaville,” a song a little about booze and a little about women, and as we did, it slowly became the soundtrack of our trip. Getting all the lyrics written down took on equal importance to reaching our final destination in Hamilton. What began as a way to lift our spirits became a quest, almost greater than the trip itself. Along the journey Jimmy Buffet introduced us to more good people than we ever could have imagined.

Over the course of 1,600 nautical miles we sang and smoked tobacco around campfires on cobble beaches with other kayakers, drank rummy blender drinks aboard the decks of moored sailboats and, thanks to Canadian Coast Guard Radio, had the final verse patched through via VHF radio. With the help of the great people with their own boats and their own destinations we put all the words together and could sing aloud all the way from “Nibblin’ on sponge cake…” to “That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”

Five years after, “Margaritaville” was our wedding song. It still sparks spontaneous two-stepping around the kitchen floor and, like nothing else, takes us back to campfires on cobble beaches. It is four minutes and ten seconds of freedom and memories of the people you can meet travelling long distances by kayak… 

Whirlpools have always held a strange fascination as black-hole vortices into which things disappear and don’t return. Rumors of thirty-metre fishing boats disappearing in seconds, counter-rotation whirlpools in the southern hemisphere, and the elusive “floater” that never flushes down, have all been dispelled as local folklore and myth. Or have they? 

One evening in early June, I had just finished shooting some photos with Dale Monkman and we chatted about where the next place he and the “Island Boys” were heading to paddle.

“Lac St-Jean, Quebec,” he said. “Tomorrow.” They would paddle and practice for a few days in the small town of St-Félicien prior to the town’s annual whitewater rodeo.

Dale and a few others had gone to paddle the Ashuapmushuan River in Quebec’s Saguenay–Lac St-Jean region for two years previous and it had become something of a tradition, returning each year with more people to scout more rivers and find more of the undiscovered, un-run gems in Quebec’s whitewater Nirvana. Like most of the crew, I was out of a job, so I decided to tag along. Dale assured me the water is still high in early June and I’d get some sick shots.

Dale and I hooked up with Laura Nash, Nick Miller, and Aussie Anthony Yap the next morning just east of Ottawa for the daylong drive. En route we joined fellow Canadians Justin Thompson, Dave Tiedje, Mitch Braun, Patrick Camblin—plus Americans Marlow Long and Brooks Baldwin who were planning to do some shooting for Young Guns Productions’ next video offering. Some were veterans of the area, others were following Dale’s version of the gospel of St-Jean—Laura Nash included, who said she’d been hearing Dale rant all spring about the “Aswapmuswam” River.