Audrey has authored three books about her adventures. Paddling My
Own Canoe recounts her earliest trips in the 1950s and ‘60s along the north shore of Molokai. Paddling Hawai’i, which came out 20 years later, is the authoritative guide to sea kayaking in the Islands. Most recently, Paddling North, published in 2012, is the story of her longest paddle ever, an 87-day, 887-mile trek through the Inside Passage of Alaska and British Columbia. Monumental as it might have been, that particular trip was just a segment in a greater journey. Every year from 1980 through 2003, Audrey explored the straits, inlets,
fjords, islands and glaciers of Southeast Alaska and B.C. in her inflatable kayaks, racking up some 8,000 nautical miles over 23 consecutive summers. At 59, when others her age might feel adventuresome for booking a stateroom aboard an Alaska cruise ship, Audrey adopted the migratory schedule of a humpback whale, wintering in Hawaii and traveling to Alaska for the summer, and she maintained it for nearly a quarter of a century. I met Audrey in 2012 at her beach home near Haleiwa, where she’s
lived since 1956, and where we sat on her lanai watching the North Shore afternoon play out over the water. Beside us in the shade lay one of her kayaks, fully inflated and ready to go. But it had been a while since it hit the water. Audrey was born in 1922, and while she was paddling Alaska into her early 80s, nobody out-paddles age forever. Directly in front of Audrey's house is a surf spot called Jocko’s, a freight-
train left that’s named after one of her sons, big-wave pioneer Jock Sutherland. Audrey raised four children largely on her own; her husband left for good when the kids were young. Near Jocko’s there’s a spot in the reef with a cave in it, and Audrey says she wants to get out there with her mask, snorkel and fins before the winter surf comes up. “I just want to check in on it,” she says, “make sure it’s still there.” In her prime Audrey stood five feet, six inches tall and weighed 125 pounds.
She might have tremendous stamina but she’s never been particularly strong. That’s partly why she’s drawn to inflatable boats; they’re lightweight and she can haul one up the beach unassisted. She can also roll it up, stuff it into a duffle, get on a plane and go. It doesn’t matter that inflatables go half the speed of their sleeker hard-shell cousins or that they blow sideways in the wind. They suit Audrey just fine. And they actually represent a huge advancement over her original marine technology. On one of her earliest trips along Molokai’s north shore, Audrey had
no boat at all. She put her camera, food and clothing inside a rubber meteorological weather balloon, wrapped that with a shower curtain and stuffed it into an Army clothing bag, then towed it behind her as she swam along the coast. Paddling North describes the first time Audrey laid eyes on Southeast
Alaska while flying there on a business trip in 1980. There was so much wild country, so few people and so many islands to camp on. The wheels of her mind started turning. Her children were grown and she had a little bit of money saved. She writes: “I went home and looked at the Five Year Plan on the wall. … Paddle
Alaska, number one. I walked into the bathroom and looked at the familiar person in the mirror. ‘Getting older aren’t you, lady? Better do the physical things now. You can work at a desk later.’ The next day I handed in my resignation … Sometimes you have to go ahead and do the most important things, the things you believe in, and not wait until years later when you say, ‘I wish I had gone — done — kissed.’ … What we most regret are not the errors we make, but the things we didn’t do.” Before I left, Audrey shared a final fond
recollection, something Alaska fishermen used to tell her. “They would say, ‘You’re paddling 800 miles in that?’” she remembers, bright eyes flashing with delight. “‘You must be a real nut.’” David Thompson is a writer and editor based in
Hawaii. This story is adapted from a feature that appeared in Hana Hou! magazine.
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