As a shy kid growing up in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, nobody would have thought Colin Angus would go on to become an adventurer and best-selling travel author.
From 2004 to 2006, Angus travelled 43,000 km around the world - from Vancouver to Vancouver - to become the first person to circumnavigate the globe using only human power: cycling, walking and rowing. Angus was the keynote speaker on Saturday at the Northern Explorer Outdoor Adventure Show, sponsored by the Citizen.
"You don't have to be somebody extraordinary to take on a huge challenge. I think people who knew me as a kid would think I would be the last person to do this," Angus said. "I was brought up by a single mom and there were four kids - so needless to say, there wasn't a lot of money. I didn't really travel much. I read a lot of books about adventures... but for me it was more [like] fiction or something that wouldn't happen to me."
That changed when he read the book Dove, co-written by Robin Lee Graham, about Graham's five year voyage to become the youngest person to solo sail around the world.
Inspired by Graham's story, Angus dreamed to sailing off to explore the South Pacific.
He saved money from jobs until in Grade 11 he bought a 14-foot boat to begin learning the basics of sailing. Later a friend, Dan Audet, would join him in his dream and the pair worked to buy a decrepit 27-foot sailboat.
"Half the money for that boat came from here in Prince George, tree planting," he said.
In 1992 the pair set off - with a three-day sailing course and books on offshore sailing - on what would become a five-year, 20,000-kilometre trip for Angus, ending in Papua New Guinea.
While sailing the South Pacific was an adventure, Angus decided he wanted to mount an expedition - to do something no one had done before. In 1999 he and two friends embarked to be the first people to navigate the Amazon River from its source to the ocean in a raft.
Although a team had previously navigated the river from source to ocean in 1986, it was done in kayaks, Angus said.
The team successfully completed the five-month, 6,600 km journey.
"With the same team we went on to do the Yenisey River," he said.
They would become the first people to successfully navigate the 5,500 km river from its source in Mongolia through Siberia to the Arctic Ocean.
After that, he said, it seemed like all the rivers had been navigated, all the mountains climbed and the all the depths of the ocean explored - that there were no firsts left.
In 2001, he said, he discovered that there was an obvious exception.
"I was amazed to find that, at the turn of the [21st] Century, that no one had gone around the world by human power," Angus said.
It bugged him until he finally decided to make the attempt. He, his finance Julie Wafaei and then-partner Tim Harvey planned the journey for two years -raising money and planning logistics for a largely-unsupported journey of 43,000 km - including a 10,000 km unsupported row across the Atlantic Ocean.
On the first leg, cycling from Vancouver up to the Yukon River, Prince George was a key milestone, he said.
"We spent two years doing the work. We anticipated we would do 120 km a day," he said. "We were going so much slower than we anticipated. We were doing 60 km a day the first two days. At that point, Prince George was 800 km down the road."
He said when they finally reached Prince George, it was a turning point for them.
"After that first week it felt more natural to be on the bike," he said.
The team began to feel like the journey was possible. Wafaei had to leave the team in Alaska because of work commitments, and planned to rejoin the team in Moscow.
Angus and Harvey paddled the Yukon River until they reached the shore of the Bering Sea, where they had an old sailboat converted into a offshore rowing boat waiting for them.
"... We underestimated the Bering Sea. It's cold and very shallow. It's just windy all the time," he said. "We thought it would take us a week to row across the Bering Sea -400 km. It took us a month."
They were constantly pushed by wind and waves, and they ended up having to dog leg 1000 km across rough seas, he said. They finally landed, 500 km from where they had cached their bikes and supplies, Angus said.
They had planned to row down the coast, but it was simply too dangerous to row close to the rocky shore. They had to make backpacks, because there was no where to buy them in in the tiny Siberian town they landed in, and hiked 500 km to their cache point.
"It was now winter. Siberia is the coldest inhabited region in the world," he said. "There are no roads. It took us about five months to get through this icy, frozen expanse. Siberia itself is bigger than all of Canada."
They hiked an cycled along frozen rivers, stopping in tiny, isolated communities and buying supplies from the locals, many of whom still live in the traditional way, he said.
"It's too cold for trees, so there were lots of whiteout conditions," Angus said.
The relationship between Angus and Harvey deteriorated in the frozen wastes of Siberia, and when they found the first roads they agreed to part ways and travel separately.
Angus said he and Harvey agreed it was not a race, and the first one back to B.C. would wait for the other. However, later Angus said he found out Harvey was planning to beat him back to Vancouver.
After travelling over 8,000 km through eastern Russia, Angus arrived in Moscow and reunited with Wafaei.
The 5000-plus kilometre journey through Europe to Lisbon, Portugal was relatively pleasant, he said.
"It was summer, good roads," he said. "[But] in front of us was 10,000 km [of ocean] and we planned to cross it with arms and legs."
In Portugal they found out that Harvey was planning to race them to the finish, Angus said, and had found a partner with a boat ready and waiting to go.
"We had two weeks to ready the boat for a five-month journey," he said. "I remember that first night [at sea] watching the lights of Lisbon fading away."
They were seasick from the rocking motion of the boat and anxious about the five-month journey at sea in a boat with "a cabin the size of a kitchen table."
"Imagine sitting under your kitchen table with your.... spouse and staying there for five months. It's just the ocean and sky and the boat - and your partner," he said. "We were rowing two hour shifts, 12 hours a day, always rowing. It takes a lot for your brain to adapt. The two hours not rowing seemed to just fly by. You rested and ate a bit, and then it was your turn again. The two hours rowing seemed to last forever. Especially in the middle of the night."
They rowed in separate shifts because they could average 3.5 km/h as an individual, but only 5 km/h together, he said. It was more efficient and safer to keep the boat moving all the time.
In one incident just off the coast of Spain their water purifier and GPS broke, after an argument they decided to work together to fix both at the same time.
"That was the biggest mistake of the journey," he said.
They were almost hit by a freighter ship that didn't see them until it was too late, he said.
They had timed the journey to avoid hurricane season in the Atlantic, he said. But what they didn't know is they were heading into the worst hurricane season in recorded history -the year Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans.
After getting a warning about a hurricane on the satellite phone from Wafaei's father, the pair realized they were alone in the Atlantic facing a hurricane. And there was no ships nearby to rescue them.
"Before we'd occasionally see ships, especially the lights at night. But everything with a motor motored out of there," he said. "It's a very strange experience to be in a quarter-inch plywood rowboat in a hurricane. There isn't a lot you can do."
They sealed themselves in the cabin and tied down everything they could, and prepared to wait it out.
"They skies turned a kaleidoscope of different colours. At the peak the waves were just over 50 feet. Imagine breaking waves as high as the ceiling [of CN Centre,]" he said. "The cabin was so narrow only one person could lie on their back at a time. We'd never envisioned both being in there at the same time."
They were tossed and hammered by Hurricane Vince for three and a half days, he said.
"The odds of encountering even one [hurricane] was almost zero. We were hit by two hurricanes and three tropical storms," Angus said. "It was 156 days of toil."
They also had amazing encounters with wildlife, including whales, dolphins, flying fish and sea turtles, he said.
They finally arrived in Costa Rica, then rowed to the mainland - making Wafaei the first woman to ever row across the Atlantic from mainland to mainland.
"From there it was 8,300 km back to Vancouver," he said. "It was pretty surreal coming back to the same totem pole [they started at] in Vancouver. The landscaping was the same, everything was the same. It was two years, 43,000 km. In one sense you've gone no where, and in the other hand its been everywhere."
He said never once in the whole journey was he able to mentally conceptualize the whole trip- it had to be broken down into manageable goals.
"The hardest thing... is to take that first step."
Angus has written several books about his journeys, including the best-selling Over the Horizon about his journey around the world.
