“I signed up for this by mistake,” Susan confides, her secret feeling safe within our intimate huddle. Ner- vous laughter sends puffs of condensation into the chill air. We’re pressed beneath a malevolent sky, shoulders braced against a biting wind that cuts through our layers of fleece and wool, Gore-Tex and neoprene. Booties crunch on pea gravel coagulated with ice as we bob up and down, trying to get warm. Susan is the only one who’s said it, but I scan the pinched faces of the others, wondering if I will see it written there. Mistake. Moments later, having finished our round of class introductions—“Hi, my name is Virginia. I’m
just here to watch… really, if you guys want to practice rescues and swimmer landings, I’ll just shoot photos”—we’re using paddle blades to chip ice off our seats. Lead coach Shawna Franklin demonstrates “speed launching” and invites us to follow suit. The maneuver involves shooting your empty kayak into the water, diving after it to belly flop onto the deck, and then rodeoing your butt and legs into the cock- pit whilst gliding serenely away from the beach. Hmm, I see what you’re doing here, getting us wet now so it won’t come as such a shock later… very clever.
Still, Franklin, a BCU 5-star coach and co-owner of Body Boat Blade International in Washington’s San Juan Islands, makes the maneuver look so graceful we can’t help but try to do the same, with vary- ing degrees of success. It’s our second morning at the Gales Storm Gathering on Lake Superior and the weather has been
typical for October: 35-knot winds, heavy swell and bone-chilling temperatures. It’s just these types of conditions that event organizers were counting on when they invited top coaches from across the U.S. and Canada and as far away as Wales to their second-annual rough-water sea kayak festival at Michip- icoten Bay on the lake’s Ontario shore. “Most symposiums are in the summer and you’re paddling on flatwater,” explains Gales co-founder Keith
Wikle, a freelance instructor and
GoKayakNow.com blogger from Kalamazoo, Michigan. In 2011, Wikle partnered with Ryan Rushton of Chicago’s Geneva Kayak Center and together they conceived an event where Great Lakes paddlers could train in ocean-like conditions under the supervision of top-level coaches. “We wanted to create a venue where you can take that next step in real conditions, with a safety net
so that if you do have a swim it doesn’t end up being a fatal one,” Wikle says. The pair borrowed the event’s name from the annual Gales of November Rendezvous, a carnage-
heavy rough-water gathering organized by Great Lakes sea kayaking pioneer Stan Chladek in the early 1980s. The Halloween weekend meet-up was an informal, invitational get-together based around Aga- wa Bay, 50 miles south of Michipicoten. In its heyday in the early ‘90s, some 50-odd expert paddlers from around the world would join Chladek for epic tours and close calls in the surf. Now in his seventies, Chladek still gathers the troops—today a handful of old friends and local pad-
dlers—every October 31st, but Wikle and Rushton imagined a Gales that was accessible rather than exclusive. Yes, they would still invite some of the world’s best paddlers, but they would shift the focus to coaching and open the sign-up sheet to advancing beginners and experts alike, so long as they had a thirst for Superior’s notoriously rough fall waters. “We make it clear that you need to be into wind and waves and even snow,” says Wikle. “You’re going
to be cold and wet. It’s a smaller number of paddlers who are willing to embrace that.” The inaugural Gales Storm Gathering drew some 45 participants and 15 instructors to Superior’s
south shore in Marquette, Michigan. But while the city’s inner and outer harbors and proximity to the Menominee River offered an ample variety of conditions, Wikle and Rushton always planned to move locations from year to year. “Moving the event makes it accessible to different groups of people and showcases the tremendous
variety of paddling environments on Lake Superior,” says Wikle. “This is a rare opportunity in this part of the world with these coaches,” agrees Alec Bloyd-Peshkin,
a guest instructor from Chicago, “and the venue is a huge highlight.” Wawa doesn’t have a paddling town vibe. A blink-and-you-miss-it community amid the North
Shore’s seemingly endless cyclorama of scraggly black spruce and stoic Shield lakes, the town’s primary attractions are a giant roadside likeness of a Canada goose and the mountainous, dollar-scoops of ice cream at Young’s General Store’s mock trading post. Several dirt road miles and 350 feet downhill at Michipicoten, however, is some of the finest kayaking on Superior.
68 ADVENTURE KAYAK | SPRING 2013
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