The Team Fat Paddler concept - fun, friendship, and paddling for charity.

10 paddlers and over 20 landcrew worked together to create one team.

Trav and FP get dressed up for the "Best Dressed Craft" competition

The pre-race pep talk - "good luck tonight, and remember to have fun!"

The TFP flagship - Trav and FP in their canoe, "SWAT"

The start of the 2011 Hawkesbury Canoe Classic

And it's on! Paddlers start the journey up the Hawkesbury River.

Dedicated landcrew (the Kayak Widows) await the arrival of their paddlers

Landcrew Captain, Burnsie. Taking control of meals throughout the night.

Grumm at the Sackville checkpoint. Only 80kms to go now!

Hungry paddlers. "Where are my sausages???"

Nat and Pete, fastest paddlers in TFP, get back on the water before everyone else

Ned, after failing in 2009 and fighting nausea throughout the night, crosses the finish line!

Team Fat Paddler crew join up over the last 20kms and finish together as a team.

FP finally beats the Classic in a canoe, finishing in 17hrs 52mins.

Mr and Mrs FP at the end of the race. Awesome support honey!

How was that for you Grumm?? One very relieved paddler (and Nathan in background)

Consoling Nat after his withdrawal at the 85km mark. He'll smash it in 2012!

Tags: HCC2011

The Barracuda layup makes the Wenonah Minnesota II look like a long blade

With the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic just days away, I spent this evening preparing the race canoe with stickers – name stickers, sponsor stickers and so on. When I finished  I stood back and admired the Barracuda Wenonah Minnesota II – long, smooth, glittering and light – a truly magnificent canoe. Then I started thinking about the journey that had got this magnificent canoe from North America to Sydney in time for this race.

It all started a year ago, when the 2010 Classic was stopped short for me. I was paddling a 14′ plastic canoe with a mate, and over the course of the night we’d pushed our little canoe 93km through torrential rain and gale force winds, only to be stopped after 17.5hrs of paddling due to worsening weather. At that moment I had fallen completely in love with canoeing, with the night’s calamities proving to be one of the most exciting and memorable paddling adventures I’d ever undertaken!

FP and Gelo with our little bath-like canoe at the start of the 2010 Classic

The race left me determined to actually finish it in a canoe in 2011, but I was keen to get my hands on one of the fancy canoes I saw in all the North American catalogues. I wanted something lighter, sleeker and better designed for distance on potentially big water, and started approaching the major manufacturers with a simple question – can you ship to Australia? After a few weeks of approaches I hadn’t had a single positive response, and was debating attempting to get a cedar-strip canoe made when I received an email from a bloke called Travis. He was a canoe instructor living in the Southern Highlands and was about to start importing Wenonah canoes into Australia. My enquiry with Wenonah in the US had been passed on to him.

Travis - a man with a serious canoe passion and skills to match

The rest, as they say, is history. I ordered my first canoe, the Wenonah Encounter, to allow me to train solo. The boat was customised specifically to my needs and when it arrived I was left breathless at it’s beauty and performance. The Encounter is of a standard just not seen in any canoe here in Australia, and I am ecstatic with it. On a recent photo-shoot with the press, it was the boat I chose to be in the pics.

Unwrapped - the Wenonah Encounter - so red and sooo sexy!

Then of course it was time to think about what to race in this year’s Classic. After reading lots of reviews and websites in the US on canoe marathon racing, I decided to give the Wenonah Minnesota II a test run. Travis brought up a ridiculously light canoe in a graphite lay-up and we let the test commence. All I could really say at the end was “wow!”. Beautiful, stable, and in canoe terms, FAST! Immediately after the test paddle, I decided then and there – a Wenonah MNII would be perfect.

At only 19kg, the graphite MNII was a piece of cake for Travis to portage

Another custom order made, a few months wait and then she arrived – the glittery canoe you see at the top of this post. Fast, sleek, gorgeous. And in two days time, about to make its debut in the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic, with not only me paddling in the stern, but with Travis himself stepping into the bow seat to do it with me.

So here I am 12 months after that initial thought about getting a decent race canoe here, admiring how good the boat looks with its new stickers in place, and I thought I really must thank Travis, Paddle & Portage Canoes and Wenonah for getting behind my canoe dreaming. Love the boats and love your work! Cheers – FP

Wenonah - maker of fine performance canoes

Tags: Hawkesbury Canoe Classic, Paddle and Portage Canoes, Wenonah, wenonah canoes, Wenonah Encounter, Wenonah Minnesota II

The first Team Fat Paddler canoe entry to the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic (2010)

It’s that amazing feeling before something big. That feeling in your gut that’s a mixture of  fear and anxiety, offset by a healthy dose of straight up excitement. Such is the feeling in the days before a big event, an event like this weekend’s Hawkesbury Canoe Classic.

I’ve been feeling it all week, as I expect the rest of the team’s paddlers are.  We’ve gone from 2 paddlers and 3 landcrew in 2010 to 10 paddlers and 20 landcrew in 2011, a massive increase in size and logistics. As I speak the fundraising from the team has just passed the $10,000 mark, a substantial kick towards a search for a cure to Leukaemia. Gear has been primed, catering organised (thanks Lt. Burnsie), and all that’s left to do now is to wait for the event to start.

But waiting is easier said than done. So in the meantime, here’s the video of Team Fat Paddler’s attempt at last year’s Hawkesbury Canoe Classic. At least it’ll kill another eight and a half  minutes of nervous excited tension! Cheers – FP

Tags: Team Fat Paddler

Shoalhaven River, Morton National Park NSW Australia

For Team Fat Paddler the morning started before 4am, as Benno (TFP Adelaide), Mike and I loaded boats and set off on the 3 hour drive to the Southern Highlands. There we were meeting up with my canoe partner Travis from Paddle and Portage Canoes for a trek to the Shoalhaven Gorge, considered one of Australia’s premier wilderness paddling spots, for a training paddle for the upcoming Hawkesbury Canoe Classic. Of course, it’s hard to call it “training” when you are paddling through such magnificent land, but then that’s much of the appeal of paddling. Cheers – FP

Tags: Shoalhaven, Shoalhaven Gorge, Shoalhaven River, Southern Highlands

Water is a brilliant thing. Not only does it make paddling possible, it also has ways of changing the landscape and adding new dynamic features. Here in Australia water is a valuable commodity and most of our paddling is done under dry warm conditions which is great. But every now and then we get a deluge of rain which gathers in the hills around Sydney and channels itself into creeks and rivers. In areas where there’s elevation and cliffs, the rain forms new features like waterfalls and rapids which don’t normally exist.

My Wenonah Encounter, a fun ride for exploring the rivers in the rain

So when the conditions are wet and cold, most people rug up and stay indoors. But for me its the time to grab the boat, rug up in waterproofs instead, and go exploring. Sure, its going to be dark and cold and wet, but most likely you’ll have the waterways to yourself and the bushland will look beautiful. On this particular day I was officially training for the upcoming Hawkesbury Canoe Classic, but was lucky enough to spend a fair bit of time exploring rocks and rapids, or getting out to climb waterfalls, or just generally enjoying the solitude.

So here’s a little video from the morning’s paddle. Hope it gives you a little taste of the beauty of the outdoors in the rain. Cheers – FP

Tags: Ku-Ring-Gai, Kuringgai, rain