Workout of the Day
17 kilometer sea kayak
Day 6 saw us testing our fitness on the open water of
Isafjordur. Without much
experience in our group, everyone was paying very close attention to the
instructions of our guides. Near
freezing water temperatures and moderate wind conditions weren’t exactly
comforting conditions for the uninitiated. Still, people didn’t seem overly nervous, just anxious and
excited. The plan was to kayak 8
km across the fjord to the island of Vigur for lunch and coffee, spend some
time there warming up, then paddle back.
The whole adventure was expected to take 6 hours.
The paddle across was a decent challenge due to the wind and
current—both were directly into us so we were constantly having to overcome
them with our strokes. Dan and I
were sharing a tandem kayak, so our communication had to be on point in order
to sync our paddles and keep our nose in the right direction. Another issue was the wetness. All of
us were equipped with wet skirts to keep the water out of our boats, but these
proved no match for the choppy waves.
We were all soaked by the time we reached the halfway point, leaving
everyone wet, cold, and a little disgruntled. The worst part was the anticipation of having to hop back in
and do it all over again.
Luckily for us, the island family had lots of coffee and
cakes ready for us. And believe
me, when you’re cold and wet there’s nothing like sweet baked goods to pick up
your spirits. We mowed them down
in a way that would make Little Debbie proud. The poor girls in charge of feeding us were scrambling back
and forth between the buildings trying to find more bread, cookies, and pies
because everything was eaten as soon it hit the counter.
Finally we rallied ourselves back to the boats and began the
paddle along the coast of the island before turning towards the mainland for
the final 5k. Here’s where things
got dicey. The winds had gone from
moderate to heavy and the waves from small to large. As soon as we were away from the shelter of the island we found
ourselves smack in the middle of a situation that none of us were equipped to
handle. We were a pack of 26,
frantically corralled by 6 guides, trying to learn on the fly how best to
stabilize small slabs of fiberglass in severely choppy wave. Tense doesn’t begin to describe the
mental state we were in as a group.
Every few minutes you’d hear some call out, ‘Man down!’, signaling to
the guides that one of our party had capsized and was in need of assistance. We were taking waves on from the side,
from the back, and pretty much at every angle you can imagine, each requiring a
different bracing technique to keep the boat from tipping. And because people were tipping so
often, we spent a great deal of time waiting against the waves without moving
any closer to shore. It was
literally 2 hours of constant focus and attention without lapse, every stroke
expecting to be tossed over. It
was probably the most intense group situation I’ve ever been in.
Finally we made it to shore, everyone hugging and laughing
at how crazy the “calm kayak” trip turned out to be. Even the guides were high fiving the group and showing
visible relief. This was one of
those activities that went way beyond people’s physical limits and tested their
mental toughness as well. I could
tell that having gone through it together, everyone in this group felt closer
to one another. Perfect timing as
we turn towards the back half of the trip.
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