After close to seven months and over 6,500 kilometres of paddling, the Henry boys are back in town.
Russell, 21, and Graham, 23, have always been outdoorsy types, but they took their passion for wide open spaces to a new level when they set out in their kayaks from the mouth of the Amazon River on July 30.
They reached their destination of Juno Beach, Fla., about 135 kilometres north of Miami, on Feb. 22. The expedition was about a year in the planning.
Along the way, they stopped at French Guiana and Devil’s Island, Venezuela, the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. As far as they know, they are the first people to have kayaked the northeast coast of South America from the Amazon to the Caribbean Sea.
Originally, the brothers were just looking at a Caribbean crossing from Venezuela to Florida, Graham said.
“But upon planning … we decided to extend it, so then we went all the way from Brazil.”
Graham said the Caribbean crossing has been by kayak done only once before, in 1978. The leader of that expedition, John Dowd, lives near Nanaimo and drove to Victoria on Friday to see the brothers give a presentation about their voyage.
Sponsorships for paddles and other necessities helped with the bottom line for the ambitious trip, and part of the financing came through an inheritance from the brothers’ grandmother, Betty Baird. They honoured her memory by inscribing the back of Graham’s kayak with “Elizabeth” and Russell’s with “Betty.”
“We wanted to put the money we got from her to something we thought was a worthy cause, and we thought that a big adventure like this was cause enough,” Graham said.
The journey was not a fundraising effort, but the brothers hope to take a positive message about the value of the natural environment to local schools.
“When we came up with this trip, we wanted to just go on a cool adventure,” Graham said. “We wanted to go do something really hard and challenge ourselves in a way that we hadn’t been challenged before.
“We’re hoping to go to really as many schools as we can and just present about our trip, and get kids excited about getting outside and challenging themselves out there.”
To say that the brothers have considerable kayaking experience would be something of an understatement, since their father, Brian, owns Ocean River Sports — a longtime hub for the kayaking community. Graham joked that he had been in a kayak “since birth.”
In their younger days, Graham and Russell would sometimes be reluctant to go along on kayak trips.
“Then it switched somewhere, and now we really enjoy it,” Graham said.
The brothers enjoy a range of other outdoor pursuits, including skiing. Russell left Saturday for Mount Washington to work on the ski patrol.
“We run the full gamut of what you can do in the outdoors,” Graham said.
Graham said he and Russell are aware of the tradition of adventurers from Canada’s West Coast. People they talked to during their trip would often have no trouble guessing they were Canadians — and even West Coasters — because of the audacity of their venture.
“They’d say: ‘Only a Canadian would do this.’ ”
Now that the two are home, it’s time to slide back into regular life. Both have spent time in post-secondary studies — Graham at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna and Russell at Kamloops’ Thompson Rivers University — and are looking to resume their schoolwork.
Graham is considering a career in environmental law.
“I think we’re both happy to be home and having some stability in our lives after always being on the move,” he said.
For more information, go to henrykayak.com.
