I was nominated by Liberate Wings to post one travel photo a day for the next 10 days. Each day I will share a photo and challenge someone else to do the same.

I also decided that though pictures say a thousand words… There’s always something more to the photo so enjoy each of the mini- stories of these photos over the next 10 days!

This photo is one of my favorites. It’s from two years ago, when Adam and I were learning how to roll out kayaks.

After watching some epic Reel Rock Film kayak videos, we were set on getting some white water kayaks.

The only thing was we lived in Fort McMurray and there not really any white water there. Except for the great flood of 2013 but we were quite at the skill level to be chasing flash flood waves!

We found some second hand kayaks on kijiji for a great price. We learned shortly after that there was apparently a huge variety of kayak boat styles and we bought play boats. Which are essentially designed for flipping and doing tricks in waves. We were hoping for creek boats which are designed for running white water rivers. Oops.

In any case we knew we needed to learn the basic essentials of paddling skills like rolling, crossing eddies and entering and exiting eddies and it really doesn’t matter what kind of kayak you have.

I remember everyday day for the first week flipping over in our kayaks. Failing to roll. Exiting our kayaks and then having to swim them to shore or the dock to dump them out and try again. Each day we spend about 3-4 attempts at rolling and dumping our kayaks. How in effective!

Then the following week Adams friend showed up t-rescuing, where a fellow paddler stays near by and you can use their boat to push up from if you fail to roll on your own.

Within a few attempts we were rolling left and right and even hand rolls!

With about 6 hours and 1.5 weeks in the water we had taught ourselves how to roll a kayak. All the way in Fort McMurray where no white water exists!