Paddle to the Amazon
The Ultimate 12,000-Mile Canoe Adventure
Don Starkell and his son paddled a canoe from Winnipeg, Manitoba to the mouth of the Amazon River -- a two-year, 12,000-mile journey that remains one of the most extraordinary feats of human-powered travel ever recorded.
In 1980, Don Starkell and his teenage son Dana left Winnipeg by canoe. Two years and twelve thousand miles later, they arrived at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. No motors. No support team. Just two people, a canoe, and a relentless commitment to finishing what they started.
The route south from Winnipeg took them across Lake Winnipeg and through a chain of rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, then along the coast of Central America and South America. The section through the Great Lakes approach and the Canadian waterways – including Georgian Bay – covers terrain that Loopers will recognize, though from a perspective that couldn’t be more different from a powerboat.
Starkell’s account is blunt, physical, and sometimes harrowing. The hazards he describes – shipping traffic, storms on open water, muscle exhaustion, border crossings – make the Canadian portions feel genuinely familiar to anyone who has run Georgian Bay or Lake Huron in a small vessel. The risk calculation is completely different on a canoe, which makes it clarifying.
The book was edited from Starkell’s diaries by Charles Wilkins and became a bestseller in Canada. It is the rare adventure narrative that manages to be both brutally honest about suffering and genuinely funny. Starkell continued paddling into his seventies.
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