By Eric Simons
With his one good arm, Eric Soares drags his 15-foot kayak up the beach, toward the twin poles topped by a snapping "Don't Tread on Me" flag that mark the finish line. Slightly hunched, he ambles slowly, grumbles at the cheering crowd, "I'm goin', I'm goin'," and contorts his face into a grimace for the thicket of camera-toting spectators standing along his route.
Soares is 51 years old and after two emergency surgeries, has a new aortic valve. He paddles on a triple dosage of Norvasc to keep blood flowing to his heart. He is also co-founder of the most outrageous group of adventure kayakers around, the Tsunami Rangers, and has come to appreciate that a twenty-eighth place finish in the extreme sea kayak race he helped invent beats option B -- death.
It's something they're all getting used to, as Soares and his brothers-in-paddles are aging, graying, and appreciating the risks -- broken limbs, broken boats, broken hearts -- of their damn-the-torpedoes approach to sea kayaking. "We ain't getting' any younger," he acknowledges, while Rangers Michael Powers and John Lull nod in agreement. None of them care to elaborate.
Although the old salts brush off questions about the group's future, people have wondered. Soares has always been one of the chief instigators -- creative, brash, aggressive, funny, it often it seems like he defines the Rangers -- and his heart problems kept him out for two years and preclude future extreme stuff. His more spotlight-shy co-founder Jim Kakuk is 53, with a new boat shop in Crescent City, Calif. and a paddling-caused shoulder injury that sidelined him last year and still hurts. The indefatigable Powers, writer, photographer, world traveler and pyrotechnic connoisseur, is 64, and, much to the relief of his wife and others, won't have the race as an excuse to buy heavy ordnance anymore. White-haired, pony-tailed John Lull, 54, the master of rough water paddling and author of "Sea Kayaking Safety and Rescue," has turned much of his attention to his blues band.
If their ages weren't enough fuel for speculation, the small band of kayakers announced that 2005 would be the last year they sponsored their most visible event, the Sea Gypsy Kayak race. For 20 years a rite of spring in the San Francisco Bay Area, the race once was the ultimate place to prove kayaking mettle or demonstrate how fragile a rock could make a fiberglass boat appear. In its final iteration, fittingly, the sea was flat as a sheet of paper and no one got hurt.
When Soares and Kakuk first started paddling together in the early 1980s, very few people surfed the ocean or paddled the rock gardens. With their wild stories and creative determination to boldly go where few people had gone before, the Tsunami Rangers helped popularize a new kind of sea kayaking. "When we started, people were like, 'Paddle the surf and rock gardens? Oh my god!" Soares says, his voice rising into hysterical falsetto.
Without peers or predecessors the Rangers figured much of it out on their own: made their own boats, adapted hockey and motocross equipment to use as body armor, made up their own set of hand signals and condition ratings, plunged in and made the videos to document it. For timid Northern California paddlers accustomed to tranquil outings on lakes and the Bay Delta, the Rangers' flamboyant paddling style and Neptune-like mastery of the ocean was a revelation, a great leap forward into a world of crashing waves, rugged coastline and, of course, chest-thumping bravado.
Example one: Check out Soares' breathless written take on one of his first trips through Maverick's: "The biggest, baddest, boldest Bagwan of them all, as high as a three-story apartment building, reared up and bared its fangs. I lowered my head and paddled with all my strength as the wave steepened in front of me. A dozen feet or more of the wave's crest spilled over me, filling my ears with the hiss of trapped air from the whirlwind inside. I felt myself being sucked deeper into its maw, as megatons of energy started tumbling down. In the midst of all the chaos, I glimpsed a lime-colored wall of solid water near the crest of the wave and drove my bow toward it with everything I had. Bursting through, I sailed three fathoms down the back of that brute and splashed down in open water."
Now some of the Rangers have lost a step or two, which, given the right-on-the-edge nature of their paddling adventures, can be costly. Kakuk tore his rotator cuff in 2004 while filming a documentary for the History Channel. Soares says it was a split-second hesitation that did him in, maybe the creeping doubt that comes with age (an instance of that oft-dismissed "maturity"?) causing him to pause in front of a wave, which, unsympathetic, broke him and his boat over a rock. "I have to get that video," Soares adds, with characteristic Ranger compassion. "I have to prove to him that it was his fault."
Of course, one of the primary reasons Kakuk was in the position was because Soares, with his heart condition, could not jump into the fray. Instead, he had a first row seat as his partner got crunched.
In the old days, the Rangers met big, bad, bold Bagwans with equal force, charging into battle with suicidal determination despite overwhelming odds against them, and emerging triumphant on the other side. In their fifth and sixth decades, the fanaticism is waning. In its place is a desire to see it spring up in others.
"We're looking at that as the next phase," Kakuk says, "Our new focus will be teaching, instructional, passing along the information and hopefully generating a new team of kayakers who can do what we did or pick up where we left off."
Phase II found its first victim in the newest Ranger, clean-cut 31-year-old Seattle native Don Kiesling, who has taken his own paddling to the next level. After winning the 2002 and 2004 races easily (and breaking his boat on a rock in 2003), the fresh, unshaven young face of the group challenged anyone to beat a Ranger -- meaning him -- in the final race.
With Soares pressuring him to uphold the Ranger honor, on race day Kiesling blasted out of the gate, swished through the surf and flew out to sea. He was around the buoy and out of sight over the blue horizon before the last boat had struggled through the waves. Race favorites Kenny Howell and John Dixon, together in the Dixon-designed ugly-but-fast double (their label), stuck right on his stern, but Kiesling landed first, hoisted the ski onto his shoulder and jogged across the finish, breaking the yellow tape in under an hour. He grabbed some water, watched Howell and Dixon finish, caught his breath, chatted to a few reporters and then paused. He looked around, puzzled, and stared out to sea. "Where is everybody?" he asked.
The other boats hadn't even appeared on the horizon yet.
But there is more to being a Tsunami Ranger than paddling ability, and Kiesling, for all his skill, has much to learn from his elders -- like, for example, the rest of the verses of the Tsunami Ranger theme song, "I'll Swim In With My One Good Arm."
"They're still teaching me those," he says with a smile.
Soares has got it down, heart condition or not. His bold, operatic rendition one sunny afternoon on the patio of a busy Half Moon Bay eatery sends the bewildered customers scurrying inside with their omelettes, causing Soares to break into a brilliant, cackling laugh.
The song is old-school Rangers style, a summing-up of the spirit that the old dogs intend to carry on out of the spotlight. Now that the race is gone, they can retreat to their more private world, meeting once a year for remote paddles and midnight tribal dances around a burning pyre, training and grooming Kiesling in the fine art of the sea shanty to make sure the Tsunami Ranger spirit lives on.
"That's the real Tsunami Rangers, when you're with your friends and you can do whatever you want," Kakuk says. "It's never been just about kayaking, it's been about exploring. The stories, some of them are just hilarious. Those who are good storytellers can really relate to that, and that's what we'll carry with us the longest."
In 1985, Kakuk and Soares came up with the idea for an extreme race to show how much fun it was competing with your friends and paddling, essentially, wherever they wanted. They started in the North Bay and raced around the Golden Gate Bridge, had their insurance canceled by the American Canoe Association and got chased away into other parts of the Bay Area.
The race and its reputation grew with the passing years; the Rangers once knew everyone who participated (rare expressions of the risk-taking gene creating a limited pool), there were so few paddlers worldwide who felt up to the task. Among the 40 racers who arrived ready to paddle in 2005 were a handful of unknown faces, and most of the paddlers were from the San Francisco area alone. Meanwhile, Soares says the Rangers now get letters from paddlers in Australia, Japan, South Africa and England who are following their example on those coasts.
In 1990, after five years of transience, the race found a fittingly colorful home amidst tolling bells and flapping maritime pennants at Powers' Half Moon Bay driftwood-built Viking lodge. Powers threw himself to the task, particularly the start of the race featuring his annual star-crossed fireworks display. In 2004 he had an M-1000 go off at the end of a crossbow he was holding, causing a nearby photographer to bleed out his ears for the next three days (not covered under worker's comp). In 2005, said Powers, looking absolutely crestfallen, he couldn't find an M-1000, so he had some smaller stuff strapped onto the arrow along with a road flare. Come race time, he let the road flare burn down, savoring the last bit of drama. The crowd got antsy, well aware of the previous year's debacle. "Shoot it, Michael!" someone yelled. Others joined the refrain. At long last he pulled the trigger and the arrow arced high into the sky, followed by a trail of tiny, popcorn-like explosions, allowing the race - but not Powers - to go out with a bang.
Powers and the Rangers also dove into decoration, and the post-race party had become one of the more unusual of the year even in quixotic Half Moon Bay, with costume-clad racers receiving priority in the buffet line. The last race had a college reunion atmosphere as old friends slapped each other on the back, teased each other loudly, made bad jokes and rehashed old trips for the benefit of appreciative (if appreciation is expressed by eye-rolling) spouses and kids.
Powers hosted everyone in his A-frame house-on-the-beach, running maritime flags like Christmas-tree strings off the top of an ornamental pillar dominating his fine redwood deck. Partygoers dressed like pirates or gypsies - Soares noted with some chagrin, "I'm losing my touch. I've had my sword stolen twice today" - and danced to the South City Blues Band, fronted by saxophonist/Tsunami Ranger Lull, who, what with setting up and testing, didn't have time to watch the race.
For prizes, Soares gave out old Tsunami T-shirts, pulling them from a box like an awkward in-law distributing cheap Christmas presents. "Oh!" (feigning excitement), "here's a Tsunami race T-shirt from 1989!" He dug out more artifacts, like the "kayak Siberia" shirt, which the group never actually got around to ("It was 65 miles in the fog! Screw that!"). He was in his element at the award ceremony, celebrating the 25th place finish of his wife and her paddling partner ("These two young wenches, I'm their coach and they beat me handily"), teasing a fellow professor ("Good to see professors can do stuff other than sit around"), complaining about the number of racers ("We've never had 30 racers before. I'm used to being done by now.").
Watching Soares deadpan routine, it was hard to picture the end, of the race or of the Rangers, whose vitality seems to recharge underneath their pirate capes.
California Canoe and Kayak Program Director Howell, accepting his prize for second place, seemed to struggle with his feelings for the event; as an accomplished paddler he knew its time had come, but he also understood it might be a while before he would be able to drag the Star Wars kayak costume out again. Acknowledging his surprise at how much he already missed it, Howell turned to Soares and lamented, "This is the most beautiful goddamned race."
Neil Hooper, a 52-year-old Englishman living five minutes from the race site in El Granada, agreed.
"I regret its passing," he sighed. Hooper, in black pajama suit with skeleton print down the middle, had just completed the race for the first time. Before dinner was over, he had conspired with some of the more flamboyant of the non-Ranger racers to try to bring the race back next year.
Soares and company, of course, would attend as guests of honor. "Yeah, we intend to crash the party," he says. "We'll even bring food."
He probably won't be paddling, though. The heart medicine that keeps blood flowing to his surgically repaired chest means he doesn't have much blood to spare to keep extremities comfortable. As he raced, his left arm cramped up, followed thereafter by his right leg. "I'm fallin' apart!" he later screeched, describing how he nearly passed out at the finish line.
"I was in pain the whole time. I thought, 'this is how it's going to end, with me in pain the whole time,'" Soares says.
But that wasn't quite right. As he made that last 100-foot trudge to the flagpoles, dragging his boat, gripping his paddle loosely, the crowd let out a lusty pirate bellow for an aging Tsunami Ranger as he swam in with his one good arm, and Soares, looking up from his plod, finished with a smile.