Freya Hoffmeister, quite simply, is the greatest adventurer of all time. It’s an indictment of the sporting and outdoors media that she is not a household name. Perhaps it’s her ego, but here is an icon that no women, nor men, should eschew. Perhaps the only man who comes close to her is Lotan Baba (also known as Ludkan Baba, Mohan Das, the “Rolling Saint”), who rolled 4000 kms across all of India. Yes, rolled! Freya, by contrast, chooses to paddle the frailest of craft around continents. Her most recent achievement was paddling 34000 kms unassisted around the whole of South America and before that? Paddling 15000 kms around Australia. And currently she is on a ten-year quest to paddle around the whole of North America, including the USA, Canada and Alaska! To attain it she has to paddle over 100 kms a day, for days on end. It’s the equivalent of running the Comrades Marathon, or two standard marathons, every day for days and days. This sounds unbelievable, but this is why those in the know call her the greatest sporting phenomenon of all time, but It’s not like she is setting up a record for the Guiness Book of Records by say playing tennis for two weeks on end. She is entering the great oceans of the world in one of the most flimsy and dangerous of craft known to humans, sit-in sea kayaks, and putting her life in her own hands by launching and paddling out, unassisted, to the horizon, day after day. Sit-in sea kayaks require the greatest of skills on the open ocean. In your pool, or backyard dam, a protected bay, a river, or along the shores of a lake, they perform as well as could be expected and when they capsize and you fail to re-enter them, you can just float ashore, but in the open ocean, at the mercy of the weather and the capriciousness of the ocean, they are potentially lethal. But Freya has all the skills required to compensate for the shortcomings of such craft. Her incredible paddling record attests to it. Follow her progress on Youtube.
Note: PaddleYak Kayaks developed the Hybrid Kayak concept to overcome the shortcomings of sit-in kayaks so that those of us lacking Freya’s outstanding physical and rolling skills, could also venture on the great oceans and other sea kayak routes of the world. The award-winning PaddleYak Swift Hybrid Adventure Kayak has become a classic, bridging the gap between sit-in and sit-on sea kayaks. For more details, as well as a list of a full range of its kayaks, see info .