minutes before the 6:00 a.m. departure time that he’d deemed two hours too late. His compact pickup truck is buried beneath three boats—a sea kayak, whitewater kayak and his surf kayak. As my wife, Kim, and I scramble to pack last-minute items and se- cure our four boats atop my equally half-size pickup, Craig tells us how he typically drives 16 hours a day. “But I only slept a few hours last night,”
O
he adds, “so we may have to stop an hour or two earlier today, if that’s okay?” Kim flashes a look of relief. With that, we hit the snowy northern Ontario highway, en route for five days of Christmas surf kayaking in the southern United States. Craig has made a habit of this annual mi-
gration, driving south for two weeks of pad- dling when the grip of winter seems never- ending. To flip the pages of a Rand McNally atlas with him is to learn of the vast potential of winter paddling options: On one trip in the Florida Everglades he paddled at night through a minefield of alligators; another time he dodged board surfers at Cape Ca- naveral; and then there was the off-season is- land-hop he and a friend made to Ocracoke Island, North Carolina. Two years ago, Craig and our friends Jor-
ma and Lorraine spent the holidays surfing ocean waves off the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina and whitewater boating on Appalachian rivers. Te three of them (and two dogs) piled into roadside mo- tels, bartering for discounted holiday rates and cranking bathroom thermostats to dry their gear. It was on this trip that Craig was given his Wave Terrorist CB handle for his reckless abandon for paddling, and Jorma and Lorraine’s rusty Escort wagon became known as the Doghouse. Plans for a sequel came together seam-
lessly. Jorma, who was previously featured as Adventure Kayak’s thrift store expert
N A DARK, cold December morn- ing, my friend Craig shows up 15
(see Kayaker’s Journal, Spring 2009, www. adventurekayakmagcom/adventurekay- akmag_spring09), Lorraine and the dogs would drive down a few days early to get their whitewater fix. Meanwhile, Craig, Kim and I hit the road to rendezvous in the town of Surf City on Christmas Eve. Trip goals were simple: Endless surf, lots of laughs and cheap accommodations. Somewhere in Michigan, Craig gave us
the dash-mounted GPS he’d borrowed for the trip. He said it was too hard to track the screen and drive at the same time. From the cab of our truck, Kim became
chief navigator, calling out directions and relaying them to Wave Terrorist by way of a Motorola walkie-talkie. Approaching Co- lumbus, Ohio, in pre-Christmas rush hour, our convoy fell apart. Traffic thickened and sped up, exits blurred past and Craig’s truck was swallowed by a pulsing tide of last min- ute shoppers in SUVs. “Wave Terrorist, you’re in the wrong lane,”
blurted Kim as Craig disappeared up an off- ramp heading for downtown. “I’ll find you,” was the only reply. After an hour of waiting on the shoulder
of I-270, Kim and I agreed to carry on. Ten my last, shot-in-the-dark call for Wave Ter- rorist was acknowledged, albiet by garble. Minutes later, Craig pulled over. Down-
playing his adventurous lap of the Colum- bus’ city centre, he was ready to get back on the highway and make up time. After another navigational blunder amid a confus- ing network of highway junctions along the Ohio-West Virginia border, we eventually red-eyed to one-star accommodations south of Charleston, West Virginia, for the night. If you drive a two-day, 2,000-kilometre
diagonal from the Great Lakes across the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic sea- board, you’ll hit Surf City, North Carolina. Tis tourist-trap town is located 150 kilo-
metres north of Myrtle Beach, South Caro- lina, at the southern tip of a 300-kilometre-
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