The Sicily Kayak Expedition blog

Three months in the planning. (Not enough)

Two or three team members. (Third undecided as yet.)

One month to circumnavigate one very large island.


Welcome to the Sicily Kayak Expedition.

When we started discussing circumnavigating Sicily by kayak some months ago, we envisioned it having its own fancy website or at least a pretty slick blog with the sponsors listed out nicely and lots of glossy pics and whatnot. Between then and now, I've spent copious amounts of time traveling back and forth from the Middle East and other locales, gone into rehab for a bum shoulder, redone my portfolio site, packed up my house and put it in storage, left a job, started looking for a new one, trained and went on an insane gear shopping spree that spanned multiple continents, customs confiscations and one international incident. Basically, anything and everything but creating the nice glitzy site this expedition deserves. So I'm afraid you will have to make do with this one. From here on out, this blog will be my personal record of our attempt to circumnavigate Sicily.

As I write this, I wait in a hotel at the airport for the luggage shipping service to get back in touch. I had a sudden realization that, just because the European rail service will allow a 125 pound woman to bring two 65 pound suitcases, a fully loaded gear bag with paddles, a backpack full of computer gear and a tent on board doesn't mean that it is a particularly bright idea for said woman to do so.

Tomorrow I leave for Venice to meet René, the other confirmed team member. We're guessing we will head down to Sicily on Friday or Saturday. I don't know how often I will be able to keep this updated, but I will try to do my best. As I am getting a late start, I'll have to fill in back stories as I go. If you're curious about anything, feel free to ask in the comments, and I will do my best to answer.

0 days in, 900km to go.
Yee ha.

A-kayaking we did go

I've been wanting to get into longer kayaking trips for a while. I think sea kayaking gets kind of a bad rap, but like most things, you can do it easy, or you can do it intensely. A couple years ago, I went to Belize for about 5 days kayaking island-to-island off the coast. While fun, I realized I was definitely ready for a bigger challenge.

I found it in Greece. Nine days of 4-6 hours of intense kayaking a day through ridiculously beautiful scenery. Amazing.

I lucked out in a kayak partner as well. One of the guys from work is also very into kayaking and came along for the ride. I found a company that rented us all the equipment we needed so all we had to bring was a sleeping bag. They also gave us printed maps to work with, and we were off.

To be honest, I've always prided myself on my athletic ability - particularly when it comes to water sports. However, this trip definitely taught me some humility. While I've sea kayaked with guys before, they were never as good as me technically and usually not in as good of shape. Søren was the first time I'd sea kayaked with someone who was as good technically (if not better) and better than me athletically.

As we were on our own, we had the freedom to set our own pace. For us, this meant all out. We beat the estimated times by about 2 hours a day, and he was barely breaking a sweat. To some people, this would probably be a total nightmare. For me, it was heaven. We got to visit almost every island in the Greek isles, saw a lot of things most people don't get to see and actually ended up in better shape after our vacation than we were when starting it.

If you're me, it doesn't get any better than that.