the explorers journal the global adventure issue - The Explorers Club

have long, hot days of paddling and were guaranteedto see hundreds, thousands of peopleeach day. What’s more, one third of Vietnam’s77 million people lives and depends on thesea, and I had long been fascinated by Vietnam,especially the north.With that transition from the cold BeringSea to the warm South China Sea, the ideafor OCEANS 8 was born. Our the goal wouldbe to visit each of the seven continents, plusOceania, by sea kayak. Team rosters, whichvaried from trip to trip, included photographers,videographers, environmentalists, andlocal experts. To date we’ve completed sevenof the eight expeditions. As you read this, wewill have embarked on our eighth and final journey,to Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf.So far, the eight-year project has taken usfrom the Aleutians to Vietnam, to the TuamotuArchipelago—78 coral-reef atolls in the SouthPacific—to the high, arid Altiplano of SouthAmerica, on a circumnavigation of Gabon’sfirst national park and, most recently, an explorationof the 1,200 Adriatic islands off thecoast of Croatia.Our experiences have been marvelously variedthroughout our journeys, from paddling infour-meter swells off a barely visible coral reefin the South Pacific to facing down wadinghippos off the coast of Gabon. We’ve been inspiredby the lives of the people we have met,from the commercial squid fishermen in Vietnam’sHa Long Bay to the solitary urchin-diversoff Antofagasta in northern Chile. In 2006, wewent halfway around Tasmania, ending in itsremote Furneaux Group of islands in the BassStrait, where we encountered the wildest seasyet–yet because Antarctica may offer us ourgreatest challenge, with its frigid temperaturesand kayak-crushing icebergs.The fact that the world’s oceans face mountingenvironmental challenges, from globalwarming, pollution, and overfishing, has addedresonance to each expedition, making our finaljourney to Antarctica all the more important.If the surface of the Earth is truly onesingle, complex system, then Antarctica is itsheart, the slowly beating pump that drives thewhole world. Each austral winter, an 18-million-