There is a particular kind of madness in asking a kayak manufacturer to trust you with their boat and then immediately taking it somewhere where everything possible will get thrown at it with a paddler whose experience certainly didn’t match his confidence. P&H did this anyway. They gave me a Scorpio, and I gave it Greenland — sea ice, polar bears, whales, walruses and a diet that would make most nutritionists lie down in a dark room, and a couple of million paddle strokes in conditions that ranged from cold to positively chilly.
This is the story of what happened next.
The Expedition
I have spent years now returning to Greenland — to Kullorsuaq, to Tasiilaq, to Ilulissat — chasing a question that has nothing to do with kayaking and everything to do with why it matters. My work is about evolutionary diets and Indigenous food systems, about what gets lost when a food culture is flattened by imported, ultra-processed convenience. Greenland is one of the last places on earth where that older way of eating — mikiaq (fermented seal), seal fat, fermented fish, food taken directly from a brutal and generous environment — is still a living practice rather than a museum piece.
But you cannot study a coastline’s food culture from a desk. You have to get on the water. This is where the Scorpio came in: a boat built for exactly the kind of long, loaded, unglamorous expedition paddling that this research demands — hauling gear between settlements, sitting stable and predictable in swell that wants to be anything but, and weather that can change on a penny and doing it without complaint day after day. And nearly every day ended with a hard drag up and over the highwater ice shelf, and so required a bombproof vessel. Scorp performed exactly as it needed to, which in expedition kayaking is the highest compliment I can give a boat: I mostly didn’t have to think about it, which meant I could think about everything else instead.
Qajaq Man
Some of that “everything else” is now a documentary. ‘Qajaq Man’ — produced by Ill Kippers and narrated by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (better known as Jaime Lannister of Game of Thrones fame) follows the expedition kayaking side of this work, and Scorp has a starring role. If you want to see exactly what a heavily loaded expedition boat looks like doing its job in Greenlandic conditions, rather than just hearing me describe it, this is where to look. More details on airings to follow; suffice to say it’ll be on the BBC at the end of November this year.
What’s Next: Tasiilaq to Ittoqqortoormiit
Here is the part I probably shouldn’t be announcing yet, except that I am no good at sitting on things: I’m looking seriously at a follow-up expedition next August, kayaking from Tasiilaq to Ittoqqortoormiit — a considerably more remote, the east coast of Greenland being a more exposed stretch than anything covered so far. It is, by any sensible measure, a bigger ask of a boat than the last trip was. I already know what I’ll be asking to take me there.
More on this as it firms up. For now: thank you to P&H for the Scorpio, for the trust, and for building a boat that made a genuinely difficult expedition feel merely difficult rather than impossible.