The rescue hut at Skaftaros
The day after
The North Atlantic
photos from left: “If that rescue hut wouldn’t have been there I don’t know where we could have gone, or what would have happened that night. // Digging out the boats: “We buried a big log standing up so that hopefully it would be visible when we came back.” // Essential skills include: “Launching and landing in surf, controlling your boat in high winds with rough seas, ability to roll in advanced conditions, being able to do rescues and towing….”
the West Coast of North America that included California, Oregon and Pacific Northwest coasts…in a season like the spring, fall or winter to have the weather exposure.
You really trusted your lives to your kayaks. What kind of kayaks did you bring and why did you choose them?
All three of us had Nigel Dennis Explorers. It’s a great expedition boat. It’s fast enough and yet manoeuvrable enough to turn around and get out of a situation you might not want to be in. We also didn’t have skegs or rudders so we wanted a boat that handles nice without those mechanical features.
You said you encountered high winds and a lot of following seas, but you didn’t even have skegs on your boats? Why not? Mechanical things tend to break down and
they don’t work very well on trips like that. A skeg when you’re going out through surf tends to be the last thing to leave the beach. It gets jammed with rocks. On my Vancouver [Island] trip I did a good portion of that solo and I literally had to get out of my boat once I was off the coast because it was a very skeg-dependent boat and free up the rocks, and that’s a very unnerving feeling sitting out in the Pacific cleaning rocks out of a skeg box so you can use it. So after that trip I decided to go with boats that don’t need them. The Explorer is pretty good at that…. There were days when I would
ADVENTUREkayakmag.com 33
illustration by Lorenzo Del Bianco
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