The water covers up mysteries, breaks down evidence and obscures footprints, so it’s no surprise that paddlesports harbor a few mysteries. From unexplained phenomena at sea to potential Sasquatch encounters, here are five of the strangest paddling mysteries.
Five of the spookiest paddling mysteries of all time
1 The Tom Thomson canoe mystery
In July of 1917, famous painter Tom Thomson disappeared on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park. His body was never found, and many point to foul play. Meanwhile, Winne Trainor, one of Thomson’s girlfriends who Thomson often stayed with never recovered from his death and was rumored to be pregnant with Thomson’s child.
She never married and she died at 77, leaving behind a strange note that read “If I saw you I could say things that I will never write.”
2 The Barren Lands mystery
A century ago, John “Hermit of the North” Hornby and British financier John Critchell Bullock set out to paddle the Barren Lands, find the then believed to be extinct muskoxen, and capture it on motion picture. In 1925, the expedition had become a battle for survival and the men chose to lighten their load, leaving behind a cache containing the movie camera and 10,000 feet unused motion picture film.
In 2015, Bullock’s journals resurfaced. Polish paddler Michal Lukaszewicz and his wife, Karolina Gawonicz pored over the journals, maps and satellite images, making it their mission to find the cache.
In 2023, the couple climbed into a canoe at Yellowknife and headed into the wilderness to find the cache in an expedition that solved one of the greatest paddling mysteries of the century.
3 The disappearance of Andrew McAuley
On February 8, 2007, with just 120 kilometers (100 miles) between him and New Zealand, expedition sea kayaker Andrew McAuley sent a text to his wife and son reading, “See you 9 a.m. Sunday!” McAuley was nearing the end of a 1,600-kilometer (1000-mile) open ocean crossing of the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand.
McAuley had weathered nightmare storms with nine-meter (30-foot) waves and spent a decade preparing for the trip. With shore within sight and a relatively friendly weather forecast it was then that McAuley disappeared, leaving behind a kayak in nearly perfect condition missing only its cockpit canopy.
4 The Sasquatch mystery of Vancouver Island
Paddler and explorer Sander Jain had kayaked into a remote cabin on Clayoquot Sound when the woods and seashore went silent. Then, Jain heard a strange sound in the distance as if boulders were being thrown followed by owl-like vocalizations, punctuated only by silence.
Enter Sasquatch. A stomping noise began on the ground near the front porch.
“The stomping was joined by the most horrifying vocalizations— disturbingly erratic and deliberate at once, tribal, not quite like human speech but similar enough to recognize certain elements. It sounded as if something was trying to speak, shout, articulate itself without quite mastering the language,” wrote Jain, in one of the more compelling—and unsettling—accounts of potential Sasquatch encounters.
5 Mystery collision in Mid-Atlantic
Thirteen days into his transatlantic solo journey from Portugal to French Guiana, paddler Micheal Walther had settled in for the night when his modified paddleboard collided with an unidentified object in the ocean.
The collision caused Walther to call off his expedition. The mystery object remains an Unidentified Floating Object—a UFO.
Kayaking through spooky fog on an island. | Feature photo: Maddy Marquardt
Please get your facts straight before publishing. Tom Thomson body was found floating in Canoe Lake days after he vanished. The mystery might be considered where he is truly resting, the cemetery at Canoe Lake or Leith Ontario.
Tom Thomson’s body was found. It floated up in Canoe Lake a week after he disappeared and was buried quickly without an autopsy. Surely you folks would know that.
regarding Andrew McAuley’s remaining distance, 120 km = 74.5 miles, not 100. 1 mile = 1.6km.