On December 30, 2014, acclaimed sea kayakers Mark Tozer and Helen Wilson will team with Jamaican resident Wes Moses to begin a 635-mile circumnavigation of Jamaica, the largest island of the Commonwealth Caribbean. To their knowledge, they will be the first people to attempt this circumnavigation. They will start and finish in the historic Port Royal, and paddle counter-clockwise. Their plan is to finish by the end of January.
More about Helen: Helen Wilson specializes in traditional paddling skills using traditional equipment. She has competed in the Greenland National Kayaking Championship in 2008 (Qaqortoq, Greenland) and again in 2010 (Nuuk, Greenland), receiving five medals in four disciplines. She has also been to Greenland on other occasions, guiding expeditions on the east and south coasts alongside her husband Mark Tozer. Helen performs rolling demonstrations, presentations and instructs at events worldwide. She and Mark are the organizers of the UK and US Storm Gathering Symposiums. Helen is an ACA Instructor with an ACA Rolling Endorsement and holds the DGI Certification (Denmark coach certification). Helen is a registered yoga teacher (RYT), and runs Yoga for Padders at events worldwide. Helen and Mark own Greenland or Bust, an instructional kayaking business located in Arcata, California.
Helen has spent most of her kayaking career paddling in cold places, and during a particularly cold afternoon in North Wales, while warming up after teaching a class and looking at a map of the world, she decided that she wanted to paddle somewhere warm but beautiful, and Jamaica has always been on her wish list of places to go. To her surprise, the pieces quickly fell into place, and so she believes that this expedition is meant to be.
More about Mark: Mark Tozer has been messing around in all kinds of boats in all kinds of waters as an active paddler and coach for the past 25 years, with sea kayaking being his specialism. In particular, Mark has made the most of the tide races and overfalls of Anglesey for his personal paddling as well as his classroom. Mark now travels the globe, teaching alongside his wife, Helen Wilson. Mark has gained a number of British Canoe Union awards, including the coveted Level 5 Coach (Sea). He is a coach trainer and assessor as well as a BCU Star Award examiner. Mark has participated in and lead a number of overseas expeditions to such places as Alaska, Baja, Norway, Greenland, Morocco, Tanzania, Kenya and Ecuador, as well as completing a doctorate (PhD) in expedition leadership.
Mark sees this expedition as an opportunity to engage in a fulfilling, exciting, worthwhile adventure with his wife, Helen, and team mate, Wes. It’s a big world out there and he believes we must not limit our experiences and opportunities to learn about the world to just our backyards. Such an attempt to sea kayak around Jamaica will be so much more than just physical endurance. It will be about opening up new horizons and bringing about the spirit of exploration.
More about Wes: Wes Moses has been living and working in Jamaica for the past 17 years. During this time, he began paddling and taught himself the basics of paddling before traveling to the US and taking classes to improve his skills. Over the years, he has paddled all of Jamaica, taking five- to ten-day trips along the beautiful coast of Jamaica and discovered some good surf spots. Wes enjoyed crewing on a sailboat taking trips to the islands off of Port Royal every weekend for years. He was a whitewater raft guide on the Arkansas River running Browns Canyon. Wes was a counselor at an outdoor wilderness treatment center for youth at risk along the Front Range in Colorado, leading wilderness trips. He got his start as a Peace Corps Volunteer conducting grassroots community development as a Youth Development Volunteer. He stayed in Jamaica as the Director of the Farmer-to-Farmer Program (Volunteer Agriculture Program) and then lead multiple projects to promote greenhouse technology, fresh produce value chain development and market information systems. Wes holds a BCU 2 Star and is a BCU Level One Coach.
It has been a dream of Wes’s to paddle around Jamaica for over ten years. He started that dream by buying an inflatable sea kayak and paddling for ten days along the South Coast. Subsequently he has upgraded boats and skill level to team with Mark and Helen to make the dream come true.
—Press release from Greenlandorbust.org, December 2014.
