No place to hide “If the surf gets big enough it washes across that big black expanse. In the background it’s meandering glacial rivers and the largest glacier in Europe, the Vatnajokull.”
Wow, a 3,000 kilometre, 81-day circumnavigation of Iceland is a pretty ambitious trip! What inspired you to take this on? Well, it was essentially an email from Chris
Duff. One day we just got an email that said, “Shawna and Leon, would you be interested in circumnavigating Iceland with me next year?”
Ireland, Great Britain, New Zealand—Chris Duff is known for doing all these grand expeditions alone. Why did he decide to invite you and Shawna along on this one? That’s a really interesting question…. He had an incident on the New Zealand coast where he had to have a helicopter rescue and his boat got broken. And I think he just kind of saw his mortality on that trip and needed to get his…mindset back to where he was comfortable being on the water again…. [Also], we live a very simple life like he does.
We have a cabin that’s 12’ by 12’—144 square feet with a little loft. It’s heated by wood. Our lighting is candles. No running water, no electricity. And Chris lives in a 13’ by 13’ straw-bale house…. Chris is a minimalist with what he carries in his boat and Shawna and I are considered minimalists by most people as well.
What happened during that storm on the South Coast that led to you having to be rescued?
The winds just kept increasing until they got to hurricane force and it was blowing that black sand
32 Early Summer 2004
which was just pelting our tents and burying our boats…. And we literally had to come out of our tents every half an hour and push the wet sand off the tent and then shovel it away…. About one in the morning we decided the tents had to come down before they got destroyed, and we were going to attempt to get to the rescue hut on foot which meant crossing a glacial river…. We dragged one of the boats over to the river and Chris [paddled] and Shawna and I hung onto the end toggles…. Got to the other side and then continued walking to the hut which was probably only…two kilometres from where our tent was. It took us from one in the morning until six in the morning to actually make that all happen. We couldn’t see anything. You could hardly breathe…. When we finally went back and recovered things, all the gel coat shine on the boats had been sandblasted off. Shawna’s helmet was sandblasted from a blue [colour] to black….
So you got to the rescue hut and out of the storm. Why did you decide to call for help? The storm was getting stronger, the rescue hut was actually shaking, being battered by the wind. So we called [by VHF radio] to notify people that we were there and that we may need help. A helicopter from Reykjavik happened to be out and picked up our broadcast, and they called the local rescue team in Kirkjubaeklaustur, the closest town,
and later that day they made their way out to us because we didn’t have very much water left, and we didn’t have very much food with us [at the shelter] by the time we got there.
That was a very bad day, because earlier you actually flipped and came out of your kayak while paddling in the rough seas. What happened?
That morning that we set out the barometer had actually dropped quite a bit but the winds for the most part were at our backs, so we were just trying to take advantage of those. And Chris’s pace was much quicker than ours…so we were separated from each other on the water and not in communication. When things started getting nasty we were still in hopes of reconnecting with Chris that day, so we stayed out maybe longer than we should have, but it was still conditions we could paddle…. It just happened to be one of those times where as much as you rely on and trust your roll to be there forever…it just didn’t work out. So all of our other training came into hand and it was very lucky we had it.
Being so far north and so exposed, Iceland is a pretty extreme trip. Is there anywhere in North America where you’d find comparable paddling conditions?
[Circumnavigating] Vancouver [Island] definitely
wasn’t as demanding. There are many more outs. It would be hard to say. Maybe a good section of
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