keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I’m getting old.
- neil young

Just another one of the great responses you may get when you begin to tell friends and family about your expedition plans. And of course I’m here to tell you to stick to your guns, walk tall, follow your dreams and all those other clichés you may see in an energy drink commercial. Well, yeah do it. But do you really have a clue what you’re getting into? One thing is sure, if you think you know exactly what you’re getting into. . . you don’t.

So Mike’s comment about good judgment got me thinking. . . I don’t know when it was exactly but it was not all that long ago that I really started noticing the number of sea kayak expeditions took off. Well, it certainly could be the fact that with the web it just looks like it has, but I feel fairly good saying the growth is real. It was not too long ago that it was pretty easy to list the year’s big expeditions, these days it’s hard to keep track. I’ve also heard a bit here and there from various companies about the number of sponsorship requests they get and I know they are getting way more requests than they can possibly support.

Like a lot of other sports that have been here before we start out with a few intrepid adventurers pushing the boundaries of a sport few people have ever heard of, or at the very least ever contemplated doing themselves. Usually there is one low budget magazine out there keep us abreast with poor quality photos, 4 advertisers and trip reports that read like grocery lists. Slowly things change. As interest grows so does the profit potential. The guy who used to make THE expedition boat that everyone used finds he has competition from new start ups. Marketing and advertising become important. Sponsored athletes start dominating the image. Suddenly magazines have more revenue. In fact so much so, that new magazines show up. Lots of them. They go “glossy”. They all need readers, so they are marketing. Shops open. They need customers. Of course in sea kayaking once you sell stuff to middle aged paddler the first go round, you’ll never make that kind of cash from him again. So if you are smart you market the sport in your community. You run school programs, offer symposia and such. The rule is of course that if you don’t reach the kids, you’re going to be hurting in a few years. Producers hire sales teams. Corporations buy up mom and pop shops. Everyone needs butts in boats. The rule of “if you ain’t growing your dying.” takes hold. Next thing you know you have paddling’s equivalent to full service “Seven Summit” adventures, and mother ships to Alaska. . Glad I’m writing this or I’d be breathless. . .

Then there’s Bob. Inside every one of us is a bit of Bob. The person who for whatever reason got into the sport. Get’s the magazines, reads the blogs, and buys the latest stuff. Yeah, we’re into it. Somewhere inside each of us is a bit of that accountant from Monty Python who wants to be a lion tamer. That’s ok. It’s how most of us travel new roads in life. We are influenced by media, our peers and our dreams. Some folks say they are not, but like the recluse who wants everyone to know he’s a recluse, they are. It reminds me of that crude statement that “There are two types of people, the ones who say the pee in their wet suit and those that lie about it. . . but that’s another story.

Over time many of us dream of the big one. The big trip where we battle polar bears and live on power bars. Some of us will do it too!, and that is really, really wonderful. But on the other hand like heading off to the Mosquito Coast, things in real life are much different than how they look in the living room. In glamorizing the adventure, we sometimes gloss over the hardship and risk. So much so that it seems negligible. Sometimes it is.

A good athlete with solid preparation and training will, most of the time succeed, seemingly without incident. In fact they may not always realize themselves how many potential disasters they avoided just because they had built up the good judgment to not get in the situation or because they had the skills to make a scary situation fairly benign. (Yeah, and sometimes they just get bloody lucky! ) Successful adventurers know fear and listen to it. They don’t give into it mind you, but they respect it. Then they train more, or learn more. The visit, call, write or email everyone with experience. They get the proper gear and often have redundant systems. Doing these things honors their fear, mitigates it and lets them move on. It does not however, make them oblivious to it. Casual observers see little of this. Often they may sense that it’s all much easier than it is.

Also our environment is not conducive to good preparation. Most of us live in a bit of a padded cell. The world of today is not the world of the Jomon. Life and death risk is just not in our wiring like it used to be. How can we prepare for things which we just don’t hold in our life experience? Something more to think about.

I think all this stuff conspires to create some of the issues we are seeing today. More and more paddlers are taking risks. Luckily in expeditioning most of the time bad judgment results in unnecessary call outs, but everyone lives to tell the tale. (However the number of weekend tragedies on local lakes and rivers does seem to be getting a bit out of hand.) While most are well prepared, some are probably not. Like any growth sport, the more we grow the more there will be people out there who will get ahead of themselves. They will have too many easy lessons and not build up that proper sense of fear. Worse they will let the testosterone lead them! They won’t give the attention they need to the “what ifs?” because they don’t actually feel the possibility in a real way. They won’t talk to folks with experience and will miss some important nuances of proper preparation. We know this, it happens in every sport. To some extent I doubt there is anything anyone can do. With more boats out there, there are going to be more tragedies.

In the end, if you’ve made it this far. Yes, by all means you can probably do it. Chase your dreams. But be your own best friend. Ask yourself, “Are you f’in kidding?” Do you really know what you’re getting into? The answer should be no. That’s what you prepare for. Practice, train, research and train some more. Reach out to those who have done it. Just ask them something simple like, “what don’t I know?” You’ll get a lot of answers, but some will have never crossed your mind. When you realize it’s what you don’t know that’ll get you and there’s a lot you’ll never know, that’s when you start really preparing. I mean, do you really want to be that person who everyone’s talking about on the web as the latest recipient of the Darwin award?

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