Dave Cornthwaite | The Creative Explorer

Now and then I receive an email that makes me smile in the morning. Here’s another one:

I’m M, I am a 12 yr old boy from Perth and I am reading your book (board free) at the moment after my mum bought it for me because I became head boy for my school, your journey was amazing and has inspired me to take up longboarding. I have bought one. I am even thinking about attempting to set the record for the longest distance traveled by a child on a long board.
Let me know what you think!
Ok thanks, hope you can reply and good luck on any future expeditions
cheers
M

Little did I know it when I jumped on a longboard for the first time in 2005 that my life was about to change quite dramatically. I was a shabby graphic designer with no ambition, no aspirations, no direction and no idea what was about to happen.

We all have a little pilot light burning inside us, waiting for ignition, all it takes is for someone or something to push the button. After that, the fire is ours, it’s up to us to keep it burning.

After my first adventures my flame flickered for a couple of years. It burned strongly when I wrote my first book, BoardFree, and then dimmed for a while before I decided to try and date 100 women in 100 days to try and find a girlfriend. And then the flickering commenced throughout 2008 as I tried to understand myself and where I was going. I needed another expedition to get me back on track, so I bought a narrowboat and lived on a canal in Wiltshire for the best part of a year, before walking and kayaking the length of Australia’s Murray River, an expedition which well and truly got me back on track.

Since then, I’ve felt pretty warm inside, I know who I am, I know where I’m going. I finally understand why a little voice used to tell me I had potential, back when I was a teenager no-hoper with love for very little other than a football!

I now make a meagre living without having a job. I have a long-term focus that glues together an existence based purely on belief and hard work. I’ve struggled for a few years, earning barely anything, building my wealth in experience, not money. Things started to gel only when I began to think beyond the simplicity of ‘what’ I was doing, it was when I considered ‘why’ that I started to understand.

I trusted how I felt, decided to combine my loves of sport and travel and the inner workings of the human mind and now, where once my friends and family would question my motives and my bank balance and my future, now they accept it, because suddenly I seem to be doing okay on all fronts and that makes it socially acceptable!

I think the world would be a better place if everyone was content with themselves. Happiness filters down, it’s delightfully infectious, and I’ve been privileged enough to spend the last three weeks touring around Australia with my friend Sebastian Terry discussing the nature of our life choices. We’ve presented to audiences in Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, and although there is so much more to come it truly feels as though the hard work of the last six years has finally come to fruition.

I sit here in my hotel room, looking out over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In two days I fly back to the UK, and two weeks after that I head to Minneapolis in the United States, from where I will drive out to Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and begin a three-month journey along the Mississippi River by Stand Up Paddleboard. Had you asked me six years ago what I’d be doing in 2011 I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but if you’d informed me that I’d be doing this, I can unequivocally say that I would have been very happy indeed.

Onwards, it’s time for a brand new chapter.

Official Website: www.davecornthwaite.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/DaveCorn
Facebook: www.facebook.com/expedition1000

Rather than spend my life Tweeting and Facebooking, I’ve decided to condense some of my news sharing with a monthly video podcast (or audio podcast, if you prefer it without pictures). This is the first, and provides an introduction to Expedition1000.

I write from Hervey Bay, the northernmost tip of our Australian Hundreds & Thousands Speaking Tour. These are heady heights for me, but alas! No more of the whimsical ‘ah, I recognise that rest stop, skated there back in [insert necessary date] 2007’ moments that have long since driven Seb to distraction. The road clear of Brisbane has been refreshingly new and our schedule has deliciously compacted, feeding our joint eagerness for experience.

For the sake of spicing up our tour documentary Seb and I have decided to have a bloke-off, pitting ourselvs head to head in a variety of very serious disciplines. Heading north we came across a Go Karting track and popped in, a chance decision that resulted in a five-lap race between the two of us and Charlie, a ten year-old with a sharp mouth and a predictable nickname – Stig! Sadly, being a non-driver, I was pipped to the post by both Seb and Charlie in the karts, but revenge was on the cards when we brought the skateboards out. A one-lap race (for which I gave Seb a little head-start) ended in him stacking face-first into the grass and then being mauled by a large dog. Quite funny. Thanks so much to Hervey Bay GoKartTrack for their welcome, it made our day!

Charlie challenges Seb and I to a karting showdown

Later on that day in Hervey Bay we briefly met Gabriel, who had driven down to loan us a FreeCross, a cross-trainer on wheels upon which I’ll travel a thousand miles across Europe next Spring (watch this space for more on the Freecross). Then to dinner with Hazel and Andy. Hazel had been a great help at the beginning of my Murray paddle last year and showed me her new iPod, upon which she’d engraved the words ‘It’s Time’, the same motto embroidered onto my trans-Oz skate shoes.

It's Time - is there a better motto for life?

I sit on a sofa so comfortable that twice in the last hour I’ve had to wipe dribble off my chin. The sofa belongs to Cuzco’s branch of Bembos, the Peruvian equivalent of Burger King, although at first glance I can confirm that they actually put meat in their burgers. Lively South American music blasts from colourful speakers spread about the place, and from what I can gather the man currently singing is a big fan of riding his car, his horse, and his woman. The woman sat next to me thinks it’s a karaoke bar and is absolutely murdering the song about riding, so much so that she has dribble on her chin and hasn’t noticed for a while. Fabulous.

Oscar parks his mototaxi!

I’ve been in Peru for 17 days as a representative for the League of International Adventurists. My task, as I chose to accept it, was to project manage this Summer’s Mototaxi Junket, a trans-Andean-Amazonian venture undertaken by several handfuls of certifiably mad folk who have an equal enjoyment of drinking gin and driving bad vehicles. A mototaxi is basically the front half of a motorbike attached to a small sofa. Some say the two have bonded through welding, but I prefer not to encourage such positive engineering, so let’s imagine a bit of gaffer tape and some happy thoughts.

On the first of August, about thirty mototaxis will leave Cuzco bound for Asuncion in Paraguay, trundling along a route totally improvised by the teams involved. The Adventurists refer to this as the ‘un-route’ so I can’t give an approximation of distance, except to say the last teams to successfully drive from Peru to Paraguay totted up not far off 6000km each. You might think that this is basic endurance motoring, but a mototaxi isn’t designed to do much apart from ferry brave passengers several hundred metres from urban spot to urban spot. Hills are not recommended. Neither are dirt tracks, extreme temperatures, surfaces labelled ‘unsmooth’, tight bends, windy locations or border crossings. Pretty much everything our Junketeers are about to do, then.

So what’s involved in preparing an event like this? Put aside the administrative duties performed by Adventurists HQ back home in the UK, the on-the-ground stuff involves appeasing the various embassies of countries that might temporarily host our three-wheeled friends. I’ve been working alongside Alfonso and Oscar, the two blokes in charge of the Adventurists’ South American branch, so they’ve done the Spanish talking bits, quite handy for someone who only understands Spanish for ‘I like riding my car, my horse and my woman.’ The mototaxis have been dusted off and had some oil put in them and we’ve nurtured a fine relationship with the eastern Cuzco district of San Jeronimo, from where the Junket will launch. Two days of mototaxi driving and mechanical training will ensue at the end of next week, and if our teams survive that they will be subjected to two days of fiesta, just to make sure they’ve forgotten everything they learned in training. We’ll also have a football tournament against some local players – officially, due to Cuzco’s altitude, there’s a 1.3% chance of an Adventurists team scoring – for which we’ll probably provide supplementary oxygen. And then there’s the personal touch; we want our Adventurists to feel wanted, welcome, happy even, so we’ve been preparing several little presents and useless branded things to make them smile.

Needless to say, the whole thing has been an experience already, and there’s still nine days to go until we launch. After that, providing a well-timed local strike (which threatens to block roads and burn tyres and stuff) doesn’t delay us for too long, I’m going to hop on a plane and fly to Asuncion to do everything in reverse. Which is, organise a finish line, some parties and sports matches, find storage for our strides and make sure everything is ship-shape for the return Junket in January. (Should you want to sign up for this, take a look at the Adventurists’ website.)

To end, I thought it would be appropriate to share with you a video I made of the first time I experienced a mototaxi.

Please note that this blog contains purely personal thoughts, and should not be read as The Adventurists’ official stance on anything. Thanks!

I knew he’d be trouble the first time he wrote to me. ‘Dave, I’d like to ride a scooter across Australia….’ Sebastian Terry told me. I attract his kind, but most of them finish writing and decide that they were being stupid. Not Seb.

That was in 2008. Two years later we met in person, and the first thing we did was take most of our clothes off and break lots of eggs together. Three days later Seb broke the world record for the number of eggs crushed between big toes in 30 seconds. Pretty standard behaviour for a man ticking off a list of 100Things he’d quite like to do before he dies

A month after that we Stand Up Paddleboarded some 85km across Lake Geneva, and since then the ideas have been flowing. Just last week Seb called me, at 2am. I was asleep. The message he left was quite wonderful, though, and fuelled by what I’d imagine to be things beginning with B and ending with EER. As someone on the lookout for non motorised ways in which to cover 1000 miles, it was quite a tasty message, here it is:

Check out www.davecornthwaite.com for the Expedition1000 story so far

On Saturday 3rd July the old paddleboarding double-act links up again, when Sarah Outen and I deliver a joint lecture at this year’s Blue Mile: Race For The Environment. Come along folks, you’ll dig it.

Well, we made it. A few ‘that’s not very far!’ suggestions were tongue-in-cheekily thrown in Sarah and my direction when we announced that we were going to Stand Up Paddle between Bath and London, and in all fairness, the 150 miles didn’t seem to offer any stature alongside some of our past trips.

But, you know what, I’m knackered! Almost as soon as you start paddling with endurance in mind two catchwords become regular visitors to your vocabulary. ‘Flow’: the speed at which the water travels, and ‘Portage’: where you must leave the water and carry your craft around an obstacle.

So with that in mind, we set out on our early June venture, with three days of paddling along the Kennet & Avon canal which seemed proud to offer no flow and over 90 portages, and then we scuttled onto the Thames with our hearts-a-bounding and our hopes were quickly dashed, for the water levels were down and the river crept slowly towards the Channel. In other words, we had a fair bit of work to do.

Let me introduce my paddling partner, Ms Sarah Outen. She has more world records than Mr Guinness, single handedly rowed across the Indian Ocean in 2009, consumes more chocolate bars per hour than any human I’ve ever met, and amongst all this still manages to be quite a nice person. Sarah and I went to the same school - Stamford in Lincolnshire - although we didn’t know each other due to the fact I’m an old fart and she’s a young whippersnapper, but at some point the establishment must have dished up some brussel sprouts laced with steroids and enthusiasm, because we’ve both ended up choosing a life of adventure. That was certainly not on the curriculum.

Although this expedition was raising funds for our selected charities, the AV Foundation and CoppaFeel, we were embarking on this cross-UK paddle as Ambassadors for the Blue Project, a Climate and Oceans initiative designed to encourage passion for the environment through sport. Both Sarah and I share very similar beliefs to Blue and push their message of participation and engagement and every step, Jaques Cousteau said ‘People protect what they love’ and that is especially eveident here. We Blue’s flagship community project, the Blue Mile, asking people to travel a mile without a motor on or beside the water.

Supporting us on the way were George, Sarah’s cousin in law, with us the whole way driving our Spaceship Campervan and making good use of her camera. Also involved for a good dea of the trip was Simon, who has followed me with his camera on previous trips, my lady Em with her clipboard and phone, Ann Slator who was official supplier of lads from Devizes Canoe Club(!) and polar explorer Alex Hibbert, who caught the all important pics on the final day.

Our path through southern Britain was touched on several occasions, ironically, by serendipity (also the name of Sarah’s boat when she rowed the Indian Ocean). On the Henley Straight a cruising boat broke down and we exchanged our paddles for a £20 donation. Past Newbury a schoolteacher who had written to Sarah the evening before appeared from a wood bearing gifts in the form of a bag of Percy Pigs(!), but most importantly an envelope full of paddle signs and good luck messages from Class 3K, to whom Sarah spoke a while back. Finally, on Day 5 dusk was falling and we just happened to be passing when a lady fell off her boat. The banks were high and she was struggling to reach the edge. It took Sarah and I three minutes to lift her out, we daren’t think what might have happened had we not been there. Wonderfully, the lady found us online later and made a £20 donation.

On our Blue Bath2London venture we invited members of the public to join us for a Blue Mile (or fifty) and had a marvellous response. Kayakers from Devizes Canoe Club (special mention here to Edd Dobson who totted up 50 Blue Miles including the last bouncy stretch into London), Stand Up Paddlers (thanks very much to Felipe Allard and Gerard Gray for paddling well over 20 Blue Miles and raising over £350 between them), the official Bath2London support team clocked up endless miles between them and plenty of others joined us en route.

Despite Charley Boorman popping down to wish us good luck, we were nearly denied a triumphant finale. As Sarah and I (and Edd and Mike in their K2 Kayak) approached central London on schedule, the Thames Harbour Master made it clear he wasn’t happy with us paddling in the choppy conditions, which had been made worse by construction work on the bridges and therefore required boats to pass closer to each other. Devastated, Sarah and I pulled over, Westminster and the London Eye already visible. We hauled our boards onto our shoulders and began a three mile walk towards Tower Bridge - if we weren’t going to paddle, we were sure as hell going to walk!

Thankfully, by the time we reached the London Eye the Harbour Master had changed his mind and sent out a boat to escort us - on the water- to our designated finish line. Our delight was quickly masked with the realisation that yes, the Thames in central London is hideously choppy. How neither of us plunged into the grey is beyond me, but I suspect it had something to do with Tower Bridge, lurking a mile down the straight when we began our final leg and finally sucking us beneath its beautiful span. The resulting images, I’m sure you’ll agree, were worth the wait, stress, and yes, even all of the standing up!

Hi there,

If you’re in the UK I hope you’re lapping up this gorgeous weather. And if you’re in Australia…well, you get it all the time and I’m quite jealous. Either way, I’m a bit red.

I thought I’d drop you a line with progress of the Great Big Paddle, 2010 is proving to be quite fruitful.

1) I’m working hard on a documentary about the Murray River Expedition, and expect it to be complete in time for some film festivals later this year. As always, I shall keep you posted.

2) I’m quite excited about the completion of another documentary, a 4-part 25 minute short about the Lake Geneva Crossing, a mini-expedition I paddled alongside an inspirational friend of mine, Sebastian Terry (who is also in the middle of his own project, called 100 Things - check out http://www.100things.com.au). Although a version of the documentary will find its way onto a DVD later this year, we’ve decided to make it free for all and put it online. We’d love to hear your thoughts, so without further ado here’s the link to all four episodes http://www.greatbigpaddle.kk5.org/#/geneva-crossing-documentary/4541155352

3) Finally, another mini-adventure is almost upon us! Between June 2nd and 8th I’ll be joined by a rather salty lady named Sarah Outen (who only went and rowed solo across the Indian Ocean last year) in a 150 mile Stand Up Paddle across the UK from Bath to London. We’re doing this for two charities, the AV Foundation and CoppaFeel, and also to promote the beauty of the UK and the fact that the spirit of adventure can exisit within these fine borders. We’re making a big deal of inviting people to join us on the way and raising a bit for our charities, too, so if you’ve been telling yourself to have an adventure and do some good things for charity, then maybe this is the chance! Take a look at our schedule on www.thegreatbigpaddle.com and if you can join us, please do. The weather’s looking tasty

Thanks as always for your support, if you’re planning your own adventure soon please let me know and I’ll help where I can. Last week I heard a quite inspirational blind man speak and he said something that seemed quite appropriate: The last time you did something new was the last time you grew as a person.

And with that in mind, cheerio!

On Tuesday 27th April Sebastian Terry and I jumped on our 12″ Nidecker SUP boards in Villeneuve, a small village at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, Europe’s largest natural body of fresh water. Our aim: to become the first chaps to Stand Up Paddle across the lake, notorious for its high winds and dramatic scenery.

Sebastian is living life on a high, chasing a list of 100 Things he wants to achieve before he dies. Number 43 on his list is ‘Learn French’, hence his current placement in Geneva. Number 85 on his list: Go on an Adventure. I run a sport and environment project called the Great Big Paddle and have my eye on a 3000 mile SUP journey in the near future, so we’ve fused our plans. For both of us, this is a first time attempt at travelling Stand Up style.

Dry bags strapped to the front, within half an hour we’ve reached the striking Chateau de Chillon, a 900 year-old architectural wonder built away from the shore.  Pedestrian tourists go all green eyed as we slip around the back of the castle, only accessible by those able to walk on water.

Sightseeing done, it’s time to cover some of the blue stuff. Geneva, at the other end of the lake, is some 75km away as the seagull flies, we’ve got three days to get there in time for flights home. The surface is kind for two miles and then the wind strikes up. We’re surrounded by snow capped mountains and the weather has turned like it does at altitude, barely any warning of the waves to come. We battle in vain for three hours at less than 2km per hour, and the turbulent junction of the Upper Rhone with the Lake rounds off our day. My bag is swept from my board and floats for a minute before I can collect. How we didn’t come off I’ll never know, but as we quietly pitched tent at the bottom of a private school’s grounds our 9.9km haul in 5 hours of paddling didn’t bode well. Geneva seemed a long way off.

The next morning we were up early, praying for calm. Prayers answered. We hugged the shore from point to point, paddling over glass between quaint Swiss then French villages. We’d chosen the rural south side over the built-up opposite shore, and the larger towns of Montreux, Vivey and Lausanne are hazy 15km across the water to our right. Compared to yesterday, we’re flying. What a feeling, our possessions on board, sitting down to navigate and rest, feet dangling in 8 degree water. The sun is blazing and we’re Energizer Bunnies, paddling almost non-stop for ten hours. By 7pm we’ve made up for Day One, 48.6km in the bag since morning and the mission now more possible than not.

We sleep beneath the jetty of a village surely designed for Disney, woken at 4pm to the spotlights of a ferry scaring the bejesus out of this pair of hobos in sleeping bags. The sun rises from the Alps as we turn south west, confusing fisherman with our transport. We’re paddling on glass, and are told later that two April days this flat and warm haven’t been seen for two decades. Our luck takes us through to noon by when we’re on the final straight, Geneva’s miraculous Jet D’eau perfectly visible, a 200 metre skywards burst of water. By 1pm we’re paddling beneath it, emerging from the spraying water with full circle rainbows surrounding our boards. 86.9km covered in a total of 47 hours, 20 of those paddling. I’m not sure two days could be any more rewarding than this, what a trip.

As always, more paddling pictures, video and stories on http://www.thegreatbigpaddle.com