Göta Kanal – Ice Cold Mission

25 February, 2014

About the adventure

After our run from Turkey, Carina and I were asked if we wanted to go to an outdoor fair in Gothenburg. We thought about how to do it in an adventurous way, but thought running 500 kilometers to get there was to easy. But kayaking there – in the winter! That was something that turned us on.

Read shortly about the adventure here.

Overcoming fears

I was afraid to freeze. I have for a long time been afraid of getting stuck under the ice and not being able to come back to the wake and drown beneath the ice. We acquired dry suits and practiced chow to rescue each other when one of us was lying there, in the ice cold water, we learned to always bring with us something hot to drink, how to make a fire and dry wet and damp clothes. We learned how to chop through thin ice and how to get up on the ice with the kayak, by using ski poles that we had cut off to suitable length, if the ice was thicker. We learned to keep us dry and warm.

Results

We arrived, as planned, and had a sometimes extremely beautiful kayaking in the pale colors of the winter. We had severe problems when we kayaked with a wind of 12 m/s with the waves right from behind, from the open sea. We balanced on the wave tops with cliffs on the right hand side, threatening to smash our bones into pieces in case we would loose our balance. What we learned from this was that we could actually handle the situation – and if we would kayak in the during the same circumstances again, we’ll make sure we’ve been practicing more on the Eskimo roll and paddling in really hard weather. I learned, above all, the beauty of just staring into the fire in the long evenings and just to exist in the enormously beautiful and desolate that the archipelago often is during winter.

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Facts

Ice Cold Mission

 

date: 15:e february – 23:e september 2014

activity: kayak together with Carina Borén, from Stockholm to Gothenburg, in the middle of the winter, through, among other things, Göta Kanal, which is drained on water

goal: Challenge my fear of drowning under the ice and experiencing the archipelago in the winter. And, of course, see if we can handle it!