It seems these days everybody is paddling around islands. Derek and Taino are paddling around Puerto Rico this August, the guys from Terra Santa Kayak Expeditions are currently paddling around Newfoundland, Freya and Greg are leaving next week to paddling around Iceland and finally, Erik is still paddling around the Toronto Islands.

Erik's trip is only 12 km round trip but he has been working on it for 5 years. I think that he is on his 1000th attempt...

I was recently reading a transcript of an interview of Bob Denver from 1994. Bob Denver is known for his role as Gilligan from "Gilligan's Island". It ran for 98 episodes from 1964 to 1967.

I had to read the following quote 4 times because I couldn't believe it:

Radio Station: Yet I understand, looking through some trivia books, that some people did take it kind of seriously. I understand the U.S. Coast Guard got some calls from concerned viewers who suggested that they try and rescue you guys off the island.

Bob: There was an Admiral in the East here somewhere. He's was a retired Admiral and he was in his 70s and he got the coordinates. We gave them out one time. The longitude and latitude, which if you looked it up was in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean. He knew the chain of command, so he called Washington and Washington called Hawaii and pretty soon they had one of the cutters steaming up. One of the young sailors came up to the Captain and said, "Sir, I think it's a TV show." And he said, "what, son!" He says, "I think it's a TV show, sir." They checked it out again and found out of course that it was. They came on the set, the Commander did, with this huge stack of memorandums and everything else that came out of Washington. We almost really got rescued.

For this who don't believe me, here is the original interview.

What does this tell us? Well, anybody who is planning a major trip around an island this year, if you run into trouble and help doesn't seem to be coming, your best chance for rescue is probably to start a television show and get it into syndication.

It has been a crazy week and a half since I got back from my expedition on the North Shore of Lake Superior. I have had zero time since getting back to collect my thoughts but I finally got a couple minutes so here is a short breakdown of our trip.

I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty details of our trip as I don't have the time and you will probably stop reading in about two sentences. Trust me, could easily make it super boring...

Way back in December 2006, Sean and I decided to do a trip up on Lake Superior. We wanted to do a really hard push trip with some long crossings so we thought why not early spring? Yes, the water is only 2 degrees C but who cares; we had drysuits.

Click Read More for full details...

Just got back today from our trip on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Over 7 days, we paddled just shy of 220 km from Wawa, ON out to Michipicoten Island and back. I don't have time to get into the details tonight as I'm completely wiped but I will post a more detailed report this week. Probably Thursday if I can get it all together.

Here is it in phrases. Basically it was over the top.

• 220km
• 2C water (cold)
• 35 knot headwinds
• Almost activated the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Techs...
• 4 hour night paddle through ink
• Two 18 km crossings
• First crossing - 1.5 meter following seas (actually 1.5m)
• Rainforest
• Caribou tracks
• Radio dead zones
• Very remote location
• Caves
  
• 4 am wake-ups
• Snow

All right, off to bed

Things are going to be slow around here for the next week and a bit. On Saturday I'm heading off with Sean from our little city of Toronto and driving north 12 hours to Wawa, Ontario. Where the heck is Wawa you ask? Good question. It is 12 hours north of Toronto.

Ok, ok. Wawa is a small town along the north shore of Lake Superior.

We are going to be putting in at Dave Well's shop/guiding company/paddling school, Naturally Superior Adventures. The plan is to paddle west along the shoreline, then out and around Michipicoten Island. Here is the route for Google Earth if you want to follow along. I added a couple points of interest so I you could follow along. I will update it later when I get back with more details.

The total trip is around 220km and the crossing out to the island is just a speck under 25km. We are hoping to do the whole thing in 7 days. We budgeted a wind day and with the size of Lake Superior, we will probably need it.

Sean and I have been working over the winter on lightening our load and trying to implement some of the ideas from lightweight backpacking. We will see how it goes. It if was warmer we would be cutting things out like drysuits, but with 2c water, they will be worn the whole time.

We good some inside information of a sauna location out there so we are going to try to get the beast fired up.

I will report back when we cruise back to Toronto.

For those who have been following V.Balaji’s trip along the coast of India might have noticed that he is paddling an Easky 15 by Venture Kayaks (P&H). I recently asked him how he acquired his boat as I don’t know any other paddlers in India.

This is his response:

Yes, it has been in my dream to make an adventurous journey in the sea, after I saw the program of Justine's kayak expedition in the east coast of Russia in National Geographic Channel (if you know her, say my hello).

In 2005, when I went for a mangrove conservation training program, I met Mr. Dominic from International Tree Foundation, UK. After my seminar on coastal conservation he was impressed and we had a few minutes chat - I told him I wish to make a kayak expedition, but i did not know how to ride it, roll it, its cost and I never seen before except in the TV. I was confident that the kayak will surely attract the people here as a tool to talk about the value of protective fragile, coastal ecosystems of tamil nadu (coral reefs, mangroves and sea grasses).

When I was in Germany in July 2006, I spend some time to rent a kayak in an enclosed bay at Baltic Sea and paddled it for a km myself - which was like a child walking first time.

Then, Dominic took a great effort in UK - he made a car rally with his friends from UK to France to collect money, I selected the sea kayak through websites and started to read the kayak lessons through internet.

Dominic (690 UK pounds +300 UK pounds) and I paid nearly 24,000 Indian rupees for Indian customs clearance. October - November 2006 is the training session and December 2006 the expedition start.

I am very grateful to Mr. Dominic and his friends, I have to be responsible to teach the children in the village on marine conservation, and paddle the kayak to next village - as a way to prove it.

Going to a village school today afternoon...

Yours truly,

v.balaji