The Water Man

Reg Lake won’t necessarily tell you, but he is one of the premier river runners from the early days of California whitewater kayaking, having accomplished several first descents with the likes of Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins and Doug Tompkins. He’s also a regular staff member of the famous Otter Bar Lodge Kayak School, a skilled sea kayaker with special knowledge of the Chilean coastline and Tierra Del Fuego, and he recently completed a sponsored expedition to a remote “forgotten” arm of the southern Chilean ice cap known as Peel Inlet.

Recently, I asked Reg about his ability to paddle both whitewater and sea boats with equal comfort and skill. He said that a friend once called him a good ‘water man.” It’s a general term that implies the ability to handle a bunch of conditions in a variety of circumstances. He thought it was a pretty fine compliment.

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Dawn Groves: Could you briefly explain about your recent expedition to Chile with Grayson Schaffer?

Reg Lake: I'm still trying to figure out what we did. (He laughs.) I've been paddling coastal Patagonia for over 15 years, slowly expanding myself, being out for longer periods of time, paddling further south. What Grayson and I did this year was nothing like what I did the first year I was down there. I would've been scared to death. We did the trip with a lot of forethought. We made rules for ourselves. For example, every time we left camp we took everything with us. Because of the weather, we couldn't afford to become separated from our gear. Little things mattered. Having a lighter was as important as having a spare paddle. Nothing was unimportant.

Dawn: Where precisely did you go?

Reg: Let me back way up. In Chile, there's a northern icecap and a southern icecap. In the southern ice fields, it’s mountains sticking up out of the Pacific. There's just no place for roads. The area is served by a couple ferries. It would be safe to say that there will never be a road through there. There's not much in writing about the area. Logistically, Peel Inlet was in the middle of nowhere. You have to go 50 miles off shipping channel to reach the heart of it. So you’re really tucked up in there. In 2004 I put together a charter boat trip (along with some friends) and we got within 10 miles of the area but there was too much ice. We had to turn back. So it was on that trip that I decided that if I had two kayaks and a month of time, I could do it. That stuck in the back of my mind and I started working on it. I was applying to Gore-Tex for a Shipton Tilman grant, thinking that the Tilman tie-in could be almost irresistible to them. In the meantime I met Grayson and he was asking a lot of questions about it. He was a Class V paddler, very quiet and accomplished. So I invited him to join me. I wrote the grant and he polished it and inserted a few buzzwords. He coined the term, "the Forgotten Arm." We were awarded $6,000. With Grayson onboard and his connection to Outside Magazine, we could better fulfill on exposure to sponsors; a whole lot of one hand washing the other. We never asked for more than we needed and we received equipment that we knew, chose, and trusted.

Dawn: $6,000 isn't much money.

Reg: I know. It was probably a $20,000 trip but we had most of the gear already. I knew the necessary connections and went down early. I was in Chile a total of seven weeks. Now that I have the logistics figured out, I’d like to do the same trip with one or two people each year. There's just so much going on: the calving glaciers and the area filling up with ice. I want to know if something different going on two fjords back. I'd like to do a lot of time in there, like I did in Tierra Del Fuego. I did maybe 15 trips in Tierra Del Fuego and no two have been the same. When you get tons of glacial ice moving around, on one day you might paddle fairly close to a glacier and at other times, there’s a mile of ice and you can’t even get near it.

Dawn: One of my dreams is to kayak Chile. And the Galapagos Islands.

Reg: If the Galapagos are on your list, you should also add the Falklands. The Galapagos are very well-managed sunrise to sunset and you must stay on the trail with licensed guides. In the Falklands, you basically take all your food, rent a little hut, and are responsible for yourself. You can get right up to the albatross colony, watching the birds preening and sitting on their nests. A bird will stand three feet away from you, spread its wings and fly up into the wind over your head. You’ll walk around a shoreline that’s littered with animal skeletons and shipwrecks. You really see the harshness of the area. There are no trees except in settlements. It's really a fantastic, wild, windblown place.

Dawn: If you were to advise someone like me on one special place that I should go kayaking, where would it be?

Reg: Oh, I don't know. I wouldn't send somebody down to Chile on there on their own, for instance. I just think its fun doing whatever you haven't done before. If you try to duplicate a really good experience, it's never the same. It's the new, fresh stuff that counts. So I'm doing more and more of that -- getting into fresh environments, exploring. It's like being a kid when life is expanding and growing. If you’re not expanding, you’re contracting. I just have to get out and see something new. So I’d tell you, go somewhere you’ve never been.

Dawn: You prefer kayaking in cold climates?

Reg: I prefer natural environments, not trampled by humans. In Peel Inlet, Grayson described it as being pristine only because it was obscure. There were no footprints. Tour boats would go in there, show people the glaciers, in 15 minutes they’d leave. I guess I like cold places because I keep going back to them. But what attracts me are remote, unexplored locations.

There’s nothing like the sound of a glacier as it calves; you hear the roar while you're lying there in your sleeping bag. The place is alive and in motion. But there are no maps, no signage, and no information about it. It was like doing a first descent, in a manner of speaking, because we returned with information that said, yes it is possible to kayak in this place.

Dawn: Is that why first descents appeal to you, because of the unknown?

Reg: I started paddling in 1970. There were no guidebooks at that time and lot of what we did was first descents. What was left when I started was the stuff that had portages in it because all the clean running rivers had been done. There was a hell of a lot of portaging and climbing on those Sierra trips that we did: the Kings, Kern and San Joaquin rivers. We had a lot of fun. We didn't talk about it too much, we just did it. There's more for value in saying “I did,” than saying, “I'm going to do.” I really hate to say I'm going to do something and then not do it.

Dawn: So you paddled whitewater before you got into sea kayaking.

Reg: We used to take our whitewater boats across San Francisco bay. Sea kayaking didn't get started down there until the early-eighties.

Dawn: Did you like sea kayaking better or worse than whitewater kayaking?

Reg: It's not fair to compare them. They’re two different activities. It takes a whole lifetime to figure it out. It's like this whole exploration thing. It's all about curiosity. I wasn't doing the whitewater for the adrenaline, but the more skill I had, the more I could see. People want to call what I’m doing ‘adventure’ but adventure is often just incompetence. If a person says, I want to go on an adventure with you, I get a little bit nervous. Are they going to slip off the trail? Or get under the ice? (He laughs.) They're looking for war stories to take home. I don’t often use the word adventure, I prefer to say: let's have worthy goals accomplished uneventfully. People glorify pain and suffering and I'm just not into that. I don't want to come across as a heroic adventurer, like I did this and you can't do it. I'd rather be an ordinary person that inspires people to do a little more. If you've never slept in a sleeping bag outdoors, do that. If you've already done that, then try it without a tent. Slowly stretch yourself.

Problems can get so big in your head. Major expeditions, first descents, even this trip, all these thoughts. Never once has a trip looked like my visions. It takes a lot of trips to realize that you can't give validity to preconceptions. The mind is a linear record of successive moments of now. Don't believe everything you think. (He laughs.) You see, the function of the mind is survival. It'll scan its backlog of experience to find something similar to what you’re currently doing. So when you see beginning kayakers tipping over, they'll put their hands out or grab at the bottoms of the boats. They’re instinctively doing what their minds think should be done because it worked in the past in a similar situation of falling or tripping. Of course it doesn’t work with kayak so they have to upload new information about bracing or rolling into their minds. Then those new responses go into the survival mechanism.

It's the same thing with a roll. When your head is underwater, all you want to do is get your head up. Until you upload the mind with new information about dropping your head instead of lifting it, you’re going to lift it up and blow the roll. The worst thing that could happen would be for a person to actually succeed in a roll when lifting their head up. Your minds like a hard drive and you don't want you upload a bunch of garbage onto it. Since it scans for experiences to relate to, try to get only good, useful things in there. That’s why it’s a good idea to get instruction early on.

Dawn: When you prepare for a long trip, do you have a system for packing that you always follow?

Reg: No. I could never write an article about how to pack or what to take. I change it all the time. I never want to chip anything in stone because what I say to you today may not be the same thing that I'll say to you tomorrow. There's something more powerful in the spoken word than the written word anyway. That's Indian lore; passing down stories.

Dawn: Ever want to try another water sport?

Reg: Because I started in 1970, kayaking was still a sport and not an industry. Everyone knew everybody. I was in the business so a lot of people knew me. I’ve been around for so long that I can move pretty comfortably through a lot of kayaking circles. I couldn't get into windsurfing or kite boarding and have that same kind of freedom and rapport. For example, with this recent expedition, it wasn’t like “oh boy, free gear.” These are my friends supporting me and it's my obligation to give them value for what they contribute to me.

Dawn: I’ve heard you say several times that kayaking is a dangerous sport. Could you elaborate on that?

Reg: If you consider that kayaking is a dangerous sport, you're going to do everything you can to minimize those dangers. If you believe that it is always safe, you are going to get complacent and let your guard down, especially in sea kayaking. With rivers there are known features to avoid, such as rocks and other hazards. The shore is close at hand. But with a sea kayak, anybody can just get into the boat and paddle.

Dawn: What's so dangerous about that?

Reg: Boaters can hop in the boat, tell themselves its not such a big deal, paddle out into the middle of the bay, and only when they capsize do they finally realize they could die. Sea kayaking can be very dangerous because people don’t understand the kind of trouble they can get into. It’s not always obvious. Of course it doesn't have to be dangerous. The "doesn't have to be" part includes good training, smart decisions, and taking three people. With three people there's a lot you can do no matter what’s going on. Two is still safer than paddling solo. When you solo, you're super-vulnerable.

Dawn: A lot of skilled paddlers paddle alone.

Reg: That's a romantic image; paddling off, alone, into the sunset. It's a neat thing to imagine but the reality is that most of the kayaking deaths we hear about wouldn’t have occurred if there was another kayaker present.

Dawn: You solo paddle, right?

Reg: Yeah. I think it took me about 10 years before I wasn't getting surprised by some little thing I didn't know, and didn't even know that I didn't know. But that takes experience, time in the water. So it takes a while to build the confidence. And even after you’re confident and trust yourself, you still have lots of surprises. Every swim is a dumb one because you can look back at it and see what you missed or what happened that you weren’t prepared for. It's humbling.

Dawn: How important is rolling?

Reg: You don't have to learn to roll, a lot of sea kayakers don't. But when people get the roll, it’s a quantum leap in their boating career. It opens up lots of new territory. You can actually see the confidence in kayakers who roll compared to those who can't.

Dawn: Does that mean people who don't roll are bad kayakers?

Reg: No, certainly not. But it does sort out committed folks who want to see more and feel safer. Commitment is the difference between expanding and contracting in this sport. (As I say that, I have to acknowledge that I’ve contracted more in certain areas as I get older.) You have to commit when you’re entering a current. You have to commit yourself to staying in the boat and rolling up instead of wet-exiting.

Dawn: Why don’t people commit?

Reg: Fear and anxiety come from the unknown, so the way to maintain commitment is to slowly chip away at what’s unfamiliar. So that being upside down in cold water and all the sensations that go with it are no longer unknown. There’s a great refrigerator quote that applies to kayaking: "obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal." If people start looking at something and getting worried about it, they create a big agenda in their heads -- what if, what if, what if. They fixate on the what-ifs. If they're looking at a rock or something, they're gonna hit it. If they're looking at a wave that should be avoided, they're gonna run right into it. You have to focus on the route so that all you'll see is the route. If you focus on the obstacles and the agenda around them, all you'll see are the obstacles and you’ll move right toward them.

Dawn: But don’t you have to understand obstacles in order to avoid them?

Reg: Once you know where the obstacles are, don't focus on them again. Keep looking at the route. Keep going for the route at any cost. I’ll see people coming down the river and they’ll visually lock on to an obstacle. So I start yelling for them look at me, look at me. Don’t look at the obstacle, look at me. If they look at me, they’ll get to me. If they watch the obstacle, they’ll hit it. These are truths you can take into other parts of life.

Dawn: Yes, the wisdom you develop when you really get into a sport, it applies everywhere.

Reg: It’s about being focused in the moment. I can't be kayaking Deception Pass or running rivers without living in the moment. One of the best examples I can give is when I was racing in 1973 on the Truckee River. I knew the course really well. There were about 26 to 30 gates. I came down the river and at about gate 20 I suddenly realized I had a clean run going. I hadn't touched a gate yet. The moment I went inside my head, I clipped a gate. Then I thought about what I just did and I clipped the next one. And so on. It was a great object lesson for me. Leave whatever happened back where it happened. Stay present.

Dawn: Has your paddling style changed over the years?

Reg: Yes. I don't get much exercise out of it anymore. There's a certain efficiency. I don't exert myself as my students do. There's an economy of motion.

Dawn: I want to be like that.

Reg: I watched Candy Clark during that same race in 1973 on the Truckee; she'd been to the 1972 Olympics. She cleaned the course. She didn't touch a gate. She was so poetic and efficient; she looked like she was moving in slow motion. Ironically she was also the fastest overall. There's a lot you can do to increase efficiency, even when paddling forward. Planting the paddle and moving past it is much better than aerating the water. There's a lot you can do with the paddle on just one side of the boat. It's not easy, but you can play around with moving forward and backward, left and right, from the front quadrant and the rear quadrant. You can start the paddle with a slight draw stroke up front so that even though you're stroking on the right, you can still pull the bow to the right. There are all kinds of things you can do to control the boat; things that make you more efficient.

Dawn: I remember practicing paddling on one side of the boat. It's not easy.

Reg: It loads up your quiver with more ways of doing things. I think that's what it's all about, having a quiver full of information. You become a generalist. In a world of specialists, people are very secure in their specialties but when they get outside their specialty, they don't know what to do. They get nervous. Kayaking and camping force people into a variety of circumstances outside of their specialties. They learn stuff like knots, charts, weather, compasses. They become more like generalists and they aren’t as afraid anymore. There's so much more to kayaking than just paddling. The more you learn, the more you can handle. I've crossed so many boundaries as a kayaker compared to when I used to work as a machinist.

Dawn: You crossed boundaries?

Reg: I have instructed mayors, governors, a senator, CEO's and all sorts of interesting people that I could never have met under other circumstances. Same with Doug Tompkins, Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard. You spend a week in the wilderness with them and you really learn something, listening to their philosophies about climbing, kayaking and life. I just can't think of a better way to live than to cross these boundaries. It struck me the first year I was kayaking, I was sitting around the campfire with people from age 9 to age 50. It's cool to be out there appreciating something you have in common with a nine-year-old. Until that point in my life, I was always bracketed by age. I especially enjoy conversations around the table at Otter Bar. So many fields are represented: medicine, engineering, coral diving. When you interact with different kinds of people and you actually talk to them, you really figure out what's going on in the world.

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Reg Lake is definitely a man who knows water, coffee, and, apparently, human nature as well. What a great asset to the club. What a great friend.