Currents
ROCK THE BOAT
SPECTATOR SPORT
While I write these words, Sarah Outen and Justine Curgenven are wending their way through the Aleutian Islands as part of Outen’s multiyear London2London Via The World enterprise. Russell Henry is somewhere off Vancouver Island, attempting a new speed record. Lee Sessions and Jenny Johnson are dragging canoes upstream from Hudson Bay to Ungava Bay, portaging 21 waterfalls. Jon and Kirti Walpole are forging along 900 kilometers of Nunavut rivers.
Meanwhile, I’m struggling to squeeze in a week’s tour of the
comparatively local and placid Discovery Islands. With hectic lives and little time to plan our own trips, paddling
is becoming a spectator sport. We live vicariously through the blogs and SPOT reports of those with the disposable income, gumption and skill to spend months braving foggy Alaskan crossings or dodg- ing mosquitos and polar bears across the Arctic. But I don’t envy them.
Besides being long, arduous, expensive and logistically complex,
these trips share another characteristic: they don’t sound remotely fun.
They’re feats of athletic prowess and dedication, and I’m sure if I did trips like that I’d be a better person in some abstract way. But I’m not likely to. Mega-trips are impressive but not necessarily inspiring—the gulf between these journeys and my paddling is as wide as the Pacific Ocean that Outen spent 150 days rowing across.
30 PADDLING MAGAZINE
STOP OBSESSING OVER OTHER KAYAKER’S ADVENTURES AND GET YOUR OWN
At a recent sold-out lecture I attended by another mega-tripper, the audience left shaking their heads with both awe and a sense of irrelevance. The average paddler is fully aware they’re unlikely to ever embark on a trip with grueling 40-mile days, considerable danger and weeks of separation from their families. To inspire, journeys must be possible for people without type
triple-A personalities. Seduced by the extreme, even active pad- dlers can feel like slouches on their local routes instead of enjoying themselves. That’s not the fault of the ambitious adventurers who are just
following their muse. However, the voyeuristic Internet tracking of mega-expeditions is the paddlesports equivalent of trashy celebrity magazines that line grocery checkout lanes. Just as following the glitz of the rich and famous can leave us dissatisfied with our otherwise fulfilling lives—why aren’t I driving a Ferrari and dating Taylor Swift?—the mega-expedition obsession robs more realistic trips of their own considerable gran- deur.
Though my paddling résumé lacks epics and even frequent
overnighters, I’m not an armchair kayaker. I’ve been out for a paddle six times in the past week. They were all short jaunts near my front door, squeezed between deadlines, meetings and social gatherings. The value of these so-called mundane trips isn’t that they’re the
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