Team Kokatat is our group of sponsored whitewater and sea kayaking athletes, with backgrounds and stories as mixed as their skill sets. These athletes travel the globe competing and exploring, trusting their safety and comfort to a mix of Kokatat products and apparel. Here is sea kayaker Graham Charles’ debut post to the Kokatat blog…
In April I managed a trip in the Canyon with a great group of friends from NZ and Otter Bar. As usual it was an incredible time and reminder that long trips are truly the way to get outdoors and forget about phones and email for a while. A wonderful clear run down the river with no rain at all and 21 days after we started we could have gone right back to the top and done it again.
It’s been a busy time since I left the luxury of California whitewater. While most other paddlers were moving south with the dropping flows in the Sierra’s I headed to Sptisbergen to work on a small (45 passenger) tour ship called the Akademik Shokalskiy. I had two trips to run, one around the Svalbard archipelago and then across to NE Greenland and Iceland.
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- A mother and cubs travels the ice of NE Spitsbergen looking for seals
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- Stunning red rock at Vasey’s Paradise – Grand Canyon
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- Perfect weather and perfect team at Little Colorado
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- Enjoying a warm rinse at the ‘horizontal waterfall’
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- Just to prove that kayakers can push rubber Otter Bar instructors Dave and Peter- Hermit Rapid
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- Canyoning in Deer Creek
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- 2 year old cub sits up to check us out. NE Spitsbergen
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- The leap of faith
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- Mountain light at 2am in Oscar II land
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- We traversed this massif from the right end to the left in a 14 hour push
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- Kokatat team member Graham Charles swopping kayak gear for mountaineering – only temporary
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- Mountain light at 2am in Oscar II land
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- deep in Kaiser Franz Joseph fjord, east Greenland
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- unclimbed spires in O Fjord. East Greenland
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- happy polar bears find a whale carcass
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- hiking group enjoy stunning conditions on Rode Island, Scoresbysund
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- ice and rock, Rode Is, Scoresbysund
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- ice shapes, Scoresbysund
Thanks to the recession in between these trips I had a few weeks off and took the opportunity to go mountaineering and explore the hinterland of Spitsbergen a little.
Myself and some British friends headed into Oscar II Land to traverse north and climb peaks along the way. It was a great trip and good couple weeks of exercise, especially having to carry firearms in case of polar bears and all the extra work involved in creating a bear proof camp each night and arming our perimeter with an explosive fence!
The sea kayak circumnavigation of Spitsbergen looks a fabulous trip and not too life threatening apart from all the bears! The entire circumnavigation of Svalbard has never been done and is a prime plumb – go get it!
Across to eastern Greenland and found an absolute paradise for kayak based climbing and hiking in the remote Kaiser Franz Joseph fiord in the massive NE Greenland National Park (biggest National Park in the world) and Scoresbysund (biggest fiord in the world). There is kayak exploration for the next 200 years in these two alone. And to mix it up with some hiking or climbing would be a great adventure.
I finished my season in Iceland and flew home to NZ via New York to start raising money for the next big Adventure Philosophy expedition – it’s going to be a big one! Stay tuned.
Check out more from Graham on the Team Kokatat page.
