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New Year’s Challenge

Glassy water and uncharacteristically dry, chilly temps greeted 103 committed Pacific Northwest paddlers who competed on Jan. 7 for Seattle’s third annual New Year’s Challenge paddling race. The six-mile course started on Lake Union in the heart of Seattle and ran through the Montlake Cut to Lake Washington. All types of craft competed, ranging from SUPs and sea kayaks to canoes, OC-1s, OC-2s, OC-6s, dragon boats, prone paddleboards, rowing shells, racing kayaks, and surfskis.

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En Route: Romania!

12.19.2011 // 2 Comments

We paddle through the night, guessing our direction from Orion reclining on the artificial canyon walls. Beyond the last portage in early morning, the water was salt, mussels clung to the rocks and seagulls took to the air at our approach. Beyond the breakwater, the sea pulses with the minute swell of diminishing energies. At this time of the year, titanic storms batter the coastline with 20-foot waves and driving snow. As we turn our tiny canoe north, the Black Sea extends to the horizon in glassy calm before melding with the clear, cold December sky. Fortune smiles.

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Deception Pass Dash

12.09.2011 // 0 Comments

The Deception Pass Dash is fast becoming a Northwest paddling tradition, and like holiday season gatherings everywhere, it attracts something of an odd crowd. Some 200 members of the extended paddling family showed up at the sixth-annual Dash near Anacortes, Wash. Dec. 4, bringing sea kayaks, surf skis, standup paddleboards, outrigger canoes, rowing shells and more.

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Delaware River Source to Sea

12.05.2011 // 0 Comments

Located on Delaware River shoreline in the industrial outskirts of Camden, New Jersey, my improvised site was the worst I had ever bedded down in, wedged between an oil refinery and a parking lot, directly under a freight train bridge. Life was not good where I was, 300 miles from the source, 60 miles from the sea. But with a successful run, I would have two rivers down on my quest to paddle the five longest rivers in the Northeast.

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Gatherings: Gales of November

11.22.2011 // 0 Comments

Long before the Lumpy Waters, Golden Gate and Rough Waters symposiums, sea kayakers gathered on Lake Superior’s Canadian shore for the Gales of November Rendezvous. The event was the brainchild of Detroit-based paddler Stan Chladek, which he named after Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot’s famous ballad of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 729-foot ore-carrier that sunk on Lake Superior in a 1975 storm.

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Across Canada by Water

10.27.2011 // 2 Comments

It was snowing, the temperature well below freezing and the Arctic waterways turning to ice when six friends finished a cross-Canada canoe journey on October 14 in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, on the Mackenzie River.

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Paddling for a Cause

10.27.2011 // 0 Comments

Tampa Bay area paddlers Sean Fitzgibbon and Jeff Fabiszewski, a.k.a. “Team Sweetwater,” departed on Oct. 19 for a 12-day, 190-mile paddle along the southwest coast of Florida, following the Great Calusa Blueway Paddling Trail.

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From Russia with Love

10.26.2011 // 0 Comments

Sarah Outen may have been new to sea kayaking in early October when she completed a 40-mile crossing from Russia to Japan but she was no stranger to piloting small boats across lots of open water. In 2009, Outen became the first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean, from Australia to Mauritius in 124 days.

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Through the Rain and the Night

10.24.2011 // 1 Comment

With water flowing fast and pushing flood levels all summer, Missouri American Water MR 340 organizer Scott Mansker was doubtful that this year’s 340-mile heartland odyssey from Kansas City to St. Louis could even happen.

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A wave of recognition

10.19.2011 // 0 Comments

U.S. waveski paddlers Fletcher Burton (Pismo Beach, Calif.) and Tyler Lausten (Maui) went 1-2 in Friday and Saturday’s 2011 Paddle Surfing Championships, claiming the top overall spots in a stacked field open to any international challengers.

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