Paddler News Feed

 

•	Features
•	Hotline
•	Letter from the ACA
•	Skills
•	Paddle People

< May/June 2001
	Hotline
Two-Man Team Takes Aim at Canoe Title

Four years. It could be someone’s college career. Or a tour of duty in the armed forces. But for Robert Carpenter, 31, and Jered Jellison, 26, the next 40-50 months will be spent canoeing a figure eight around the country, covering over 30,000 miles in an attempt to break the record for the longest continuous canoe trip.

The two construction workers saved for over a year before leaving Kansas City, Kansas, on May 26, 2000, surviving a wicked storm the first night out. "There were 50- to 60-mph gusts and Robert’s tent was flattened with him in it," Jellison says. "All I could see was his impression through the side of the tent."

The storm was only the first of many exciting moments the pair have already experienced, less than a quarter of the way into their journey (see diagram). They were also shot at by some kids on the Merrimac River, helped secure medical attention for an injured woman along the Current River, and freed a three-week-old calf that was stuck in a mud bank on the Black River.

The pair agrees that the hardest part so far has been all the miles they’ve had to paddle upstream. "People look at you kinda funny when you’re going upstream," Carpenter says. "Imagine if you’ve got a 200-mile-long treadmill going three miles an hour and you’ve got to run up that thing the whole way. That’s what it was like on the Merrimac."

The plan is to finish back in Kansas City where they started, hopefully in spring of 2004. Paddling one Old Town and one Dagger ("You don’t need to mention that," Jellison says. "We’re not trying to pimp anybody out or anything") the two have tried to keep portages to a minimum but they’ve already had one epic, 33-mile slog from the headwaters of the Merrimac to the Current, dragging their canoes the whole way. They eventually paddled their way down to the Gulf Coast and took the intracoastal commerce canal until they reached the mouth of the Nuences River near Corpus Cristi. Then it was up the Nuences until another portage brought then to the Rio Grande, where they are now making their way upstream, toward the big western loop they spent over a year mapping out.

The plan will bring them across Texas, down to the Gulf of Mexico, up through California, up the West Coast and then across the northern United States before circling back to Kansas City. “We’ve got to portage over to the Gila to catch spring runoff,” Carpenter explains. “Then we’re going to take the California aqueduct right through downtown L.A.” If they complete the trip, it will shatter the current record by over 10,000 miles. That record--recognized by Guinness--is just over 28,000 miles and is held by Verlen Kruger and Steven Landick, who set it by paddling from Red Rock, Mont., to Lansing, Mich., from April, 1980, to December, 1983. "That’s what we’re planning," Jellison says. "But we might just stop 50 feet or so after we break the record."

--tb