PUT-IN
AWARD-WINNING PADDLING FILMMAKER
BRYAN SMITH CHASING THE STORY. PHOTO: COURTESY BYRAN SMITH
THE STORY IS KING
“THIS IS A KILLER FILM,” the tanned and tat- tooed dude at the checkout said, pausing apprecia- tively to regard the DVD in his hands. My gaze followed his to the film’s cover image—a sopping wet kayaker, mouth wide and eyebrows raised, laughing exuberantly at the momentum of the steely blue wave curling behind her and seeming poised to toss her straight into the camera. “Have you seen it yet?”
I had not. But after a single season chasing waves whenever the responsibilities of my job as a junior sea kayak guide permitted, I was hooked by the promise printed below this new film’s yellow, block-lettered title, This is the Sea: The first ever action sea kayak video.
Of course it would be killer—how could it not be
with kayaking’s rough water playgrounds, remote backdrops and offbeat characters as its focus? That fateful fall of '05, I watched and re-watched all of This is the Sea’s 64 golden minutes.
I learned that the filmmaker (and the DVD’s cover girl), Justine Curgenven, was a tenacious
novice when she abandoned a conventional career in television to capture the excitement of kayak- ing the notorious tidal races of Anglesey, Wales. I applauded her vision and determination. I dreamed of following her 650 kilometers around Kamchatka surviving surf landings, dodging brown bears and evading the Russian military.
The limitations of the era’s film equipment didn’t detract from the adventures shared. As Reel Water Productions’ filmmaker Bryan Smith attests in this issue’s 10-year retrospective on the Reel Paddling Film Festival (“Where Are They Now?” page 40), “You can have a really good story and mediocre visuals and people will love it.” Curgenven understood the power of a compel- ling story long before box store action cams made every adventurer with a selfie stick a YouTube ce- lebrity. What distinguishes a memorable film from a forgettable flop isn’t the number of waves surfed or drones launched, it’s the quality of the charac- ters, the depth of their experiences and how the viewer relates to these.
Written stories work the same way. If you’ve ever pursued a passion, you’ll be captivated by Smith and Curgenven’s remarkable career tra- jectories. If you’re intrigued by Jon Turk’s quest to explore human history’s unanswered ques- tions by journeying the world’s wildest coastlines, you won’t notice Edward Rackley’s profile of the 69-year-old scholar-adventurer (“Lessons from a Life on Ice,” page 62) contains not a single image of a kayak.
In preparation for the stories in this issue, I grabbed some popcorn and slipped my original This is the Sea disc into a friend’s DVD player. Curgenven’s distinctive cackle brought me back to the steepening green faces of my first summer in the waves and, in so doing, illustrated that other quality of a great story: timelessness. It’s still a killer film. Adventure Kayak editor Virginia Mashall also enjoys action comedies and kids’ adventure movies.
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