Joe Glickman - Fearless

FEARLESS

One Woman,

One Kayak,

One Continent

JOE GLICKMAN

Copyright 2012 by Joe Glickman

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

Falcon Guides is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

Falcon, FalconGuides, and Outfit Your Mind are registered trademarks of Morris Book Publishing, LLC

Layout artist: Justin Marciano

Project editors: Gregory Hyman & Meredith Dias

Maps by Melissa Baker Morris Book Publishing, LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Glickman, Joe.

Fearless : one woman, one kayak, one continent / Joe Glickman.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-7627-7287-2

1. Hoffmeister, Freya, 1964- 2. Women athletesBiography. 3. Sea kayakersBiography. 4. Sea kayakingAustralia. 5. Voyages and travelsAustralia. I. Title.

GV697.H64G55 2012

797.1224092dc23

[B]

2011035891

E-ISBN: 978-0-7627-8305-2

He is able who thinks he is able.

BUDDHA

Always back the horse named self-interest, son. Itll be
the only one trying.

J. T. LANG, TWO-TIME PREMIER OF NEW SOUTH WALES

CHAPTER 1

The Freya Factor

Only dead fish swim with the stream.

GERMAN PROVERB

By the time Freya Hoffmeister was six years old, she could walk on her hands around her familys neat, two-bedroom home in Heikendorf, Germany. When she turned sixteen and had grown too large to continue competing as a gymnast, she earned her hunting license and became something of a local Annie Oakley, a deadeye for clay pigeons. She sped around Germany on a motorcycle in a tight red leather suit, finished sixth in the Miss Germany pageant, and competed as a bodybuilder. When she was twenty-three she began skydiving, and she eventually married her instructor. Ten years and fifteen hundred jumps later, including the first-ever tandem jump over the North Pole, she hung up her harness when she learned she was pregnant.

Kayaking would become her next obsession. She learned to paddle with her son in the back hatch, toiling in the Baltic Sea off the coast of her hometown and in nearby rivers. She discovered Greenland-style rolling and mastered all thirty-two rolls in two yearshalf the time it takes most people. She even invented a few moves, like balancing her paddle on her head while standing in the boat and, better yet, performing a headstand in the cockpit. In 2006 she flew to the Greenland Kayaking Championship in Sisimuit, Greenland, entered eight competitions, and won eight gold medals.

The following year she flew to Iceland with a boyfriend, a paddling instructor from Florida named Greg Stamer. They began their trip with a 55-mile crossing of Faxafli Baya first by kayak. The next day, they set out across Breidafjordur Bay. With 16 miles to go, a frigid 20-mph headwind slowed them to a crawl, and they wound up spending twenty-two hours on the water. Paddling with dolphins and whales, alongside waterfalls, cliffs, and icebergs, they notched the fastest circumnavigation of Iceland, covering 1,007 miles in thirty-three days. Stamer was impressed by the landscape and scope of the challenge. Freya dubbed the journey easy and more or less boring.

Throughout, they squabbled like an old married couple. Freya and I are both competitive, said Stamer, and it wasnt long before each day became a stage race. As they racked up the miles, they began acting more like competitors and less like a team. Not surprisingly, the relationship did not survive the trip.

Freya decided her next trip would be solo so she could do things her way, no argument needed. She settled on a circumnavigation of New Zealands South Island, a Lord of the Rings landscape of rain forest, snow-capped mountains, glacial valleys, and frigid rivers. The sea on the west coast is known for its gale force winds and dangerous surf, which may explain why only three solo paddlers, all male, had made it around. Freya wanted to be the first female; halfway around a reporter informed her that she was on pace to break the record held by New Zealands paddling legend Paul Caffyn. Freya got smashed in the surf, busted her boat, and lost a paddle, but she covered the last 103 miles in thirty-one hours and broke the record by six days. Caffyn, who greeted her at the finish with champagne, called her seventy-day effort the most significant solo kayak trip undertaken by a woman in the Southern Hemisphere.

But it was only a warm-up. In 2009, at the age of forty-four, Freya Hoffmeister flew to Sydney, loaded her kayak on the roof of a rental car, and drove ten hours to Caffyns Cove in Melbourne, where twenty-seven years earlier her friend began the journey that was the jewel in his paddling crown, a solo circumnavigation so audacious that some refused to believe he had actually done it. It took Caffyn 360 days to complete the 9,420-mile circuit. Freya aimed to do it faster. And without support.

I first learned of the Hoffmeister phenomenon in a short article about her South Island trip and went to her website to find out more. Im a freelance writer and marathon kayak racer and have known for some time that the word kayak qajaq to the Inuits who hunted from boats made of seal skin and whale bone twenty-five hundred years before Christ first cussedis spelled the same backwards and forwards. From my investigation of Freyas website, two facts became clear: She had as many gear sponsors as Madonna has had lovers and was equally bold when it came to displaying her female charms. In one picture shes straddling her black kayak with a suggestive smile; in another, her wrists are lashed to the paddle. In a series of shots taken at a trade show, shes mingling with admirers in a custom-designed black neoprene dress zipped up the front. And in the pice de rsistance, shes posing on tippy toes in front of a boulder in a sleeveless wetsuit, a pair of paddles crossed at her crotch.

I couldnt decide if she was an exhibitionist, an egomaniac, or just a good-looking jock with a ribald sense of humor, but I smelled a story and wrote to see if I could get an interview. In the course of our e-mail exchange I mentioned that I was headed to Puerto Rico to compete in a surf ski racea 24-mile open ocean race from the island of Culebra to the main island. Freya had never paddled one of these narrow, sit-on-top ocean racing kayaksshe barely knew what they looked likebut she was intrigued and, as I was about to learn, with Freya thats all it takes. She arrived in San Juan eight days before the race and started racking up miles in the ski.

When she stepped out of the elevator in the hotel lobby the night I arrived, I didnt have to look for a name tag. Shes 5 ' 10 '' and 165 pounds with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and striated shoulders. She reminded me of the East German Olympic swimmers I watched as a kidlarge, muscular, powerfulonly with shiny red toenails, a Maori necklace made of bone, and a silver kayak pendant. In open-toed platform shoes, she nearly looked me in the eye and Im 6 ' 4 '' .