The Arb Life

and from every corner of the Midwest, braving the cold Wisconsin winter.Despite temperatures in the low teens, spring fever was in the air for Rutabaga’s annual Canoecopia. Since 1981 visitors have been flocking to Madison, Wisconsin for a weekend of boating fun. “Canoecopia is a mixture of a consumer event, paddling exhibition, outdoor school and family reunion.” said Darren Bush, co-owner of Rutabaga. “It’s the sort of event that brings people back every year to see what’s new in paddling, but also to see fellow paddlers and enjoy that community.”

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Atop a towering 20-foot wave, I look down two stories and see my teammate Alex Nicks in the trough far below. We’ve been paddling in heavy seas for more than four hours and our day’s destination, Cloudy Bay, near the southern tip of Bruny Island off Tasmania’s remote southwest coast, is still a blur on the horizon. Lelia, who grew up on a sailboat, has already succumbed to seasickness, vomiting deftly over the side of her sea kayak, and then pressing on. This is our most exposed paddle yet. The Roaring Forties, after blowing unimpeded from Cape Horn, smack at full tilt into Tasmania’s west coast. Wind-lashed and wave-carved, 150 miles off the southeast coast of Australia, Tassie, as the locals call it, is the very definition of remoteness.

Our plan is to round the tip of tiny Devil’s Rock Island and then head straight for the big lighthouse, built between 1836 and 1838, that anchors the southern tip of South Bruny. We pass Devil’s Rock at noon, watching six-foot waves slamming into its far side and breaking toward us. Beyond them, the following swells grow with every paddle stroke, pushing us toward the big island. The sea is a churning mish-mash of waves colliding from all directions.

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Norway’s Lofoten Islands rise abruptly out of the North Sea to more than 3,500 feet. The densely packed archipelago curves southward like an eagle’s talon poised above the Arctic Circle. A haven for sea birds, including puffins in the hundreds of thousands, the Lofotens also host the world’s largest orca gathering. It’s a remote and dramatic landscape, one of the best places in the world for sea kayaking, and for a certain kind of skiing.

To free-skiing kayakers Ian Watson, Andreas Fransson, Fredrik Anderson and Patrik Lindqvist, the islands offered a synthesis of skiing and paddling. Sea kayaks are the perfect vehicle to access these mountain islands, and also fit the team’s self-powered hard-guy aesthetic. After all, these aren’t your typical resort skiers; these are people who climb for hours for a few turns in untracked snow. Not that the kayaks’ load-carrying charm was lost on the alpinists. “This was the strangest and best way I’ve ever begun a ski-touring mission,” Watson says of the day last March when the four men shoehorned backcountry skis, mountaineering and camping gear, plus a week’s provisions into their kayaks. “We’re used to carrying all of this on our backs.”

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