Freya’s first book, written by the late Joe Glickman about her circumnavigation of Australia was accurately titled ‘Fearless.’ It is an honest, if at times unflattering account of that record-breaking expedition. If I had to choose one word to describe Freya’s ongoing circumnavigation of North America, it would be “Relentless.” That, too, might seem unkind, and other synonyms come close but just don’t accurately describe the absolute determination, sacrifice, resourcefulness, and physical and mental fortitude it has taken for Freya to come halfway to closing the circle on her third continent.

I first met Freya at a Kokatat sales meeting at the Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City. Her reputation preceded her, and she was equally impressive and intimidating as she firmly shook my hand. I was delighted when she agreed to present at the Golden Gate Sea Kayak Symposium following her record-breaking circumnavigation of Australia. I was anxious that her remarkable story might get ‘lost in translation’ with an American audience struggling to understand her German accent. I needn’t have worried. She was captivating, not least because she wore a stunning, flowing white dress that was as audacious as unexpected since most sea kayakers would recognize her by the all-black, skin-tight paddling gear she had made her trademark.

My wife Gina graciously agreed to host Freya for the duration of the event, and being a firefighter and class five whitewater kayaker herself, is not easily impressed by other women. But the two of them got on really well, perhaps recognizing greatness in each other. Freya was very sweet with our kids, especially our daughter Shea, to whom she gave a signed poster that hangs proudly in our house. You see, whatever you may think of Freya’s approach to life and sea kayak expeditions, once you get to know her, you realize that she truly is a remarkable person.

I have traveled far enough by sea kayak to really know how challenging it is to journey for months at a time along wild and not-so-wild coastlines. Dealing with often harsh elements of weather, wind, and surf is only compounded by the threat posed by dangerous wildlife and unfriendly humans. The route planning, risk assessment and mitigation, logistics, and financial investment necessary to keep paddling on are mind-boggling. Freya seems to take it all in her stride, knocking out distances that an average recreational paddler can’t contemplate and even seasoned expedition paddlers find truly remarkable. As athletic endeavors, her expeditions are without equal and not just in the world of paddlesports. They have brought her many accolades, including the World Paddle Award ‘Sportswoman of the Year’ and National Geographic ‘Adventurer of the Year.’ With so much recognition already in what is a truly legendary paddling career, you might ask why she continues to suffer, to push herself and those she chooses to paddle with towards what must have felt so many times like an unachievable goal. I will not try to answer that question for her. But I suspect her reply would be characteristically matter-of-fact along the lines of ‘Because I can.’

We all tend to soften with age, which is true for Freya as well. Despite her apparent desire to finish what she has started, she somehow seems less competitive and more interested in describing the human interactions she experiences during her journey than the physical and mental demands she continues to overcome with astonishing ease. Freya’s writing has aged, too, like a fine wine, becoming richer, fuller, and with more interesting complexity.

Freya is, without a doubt, the most accomplished expedition sea kayaker the world has ever known and likely will ever know. Because she has chosen to share her journey around North America with us, even inviting paddlers to join her at the risk of slowing her down, she has enriched our knowledge of our continent’s coastline and the people who call it home. To read her blog posts and now her books is to get just a glimpse into the mindset of someone utterly relentless in pursuing her goals.

P.S. Freya: I still remember very well Sean's only words to introduce me to the crowd listening to my talk on South America at the Golden Gate Sea Kayak Symposium: "If you don't know Freya - I don't know what you're doing here!"

I first met Freya when sea kayaking was becoming central in both of our lives. We were at the Anglesey sea kayak symposium in about 2002, where a vibrant collection of paddlers from around the world gathered to play and learn in the dynamic and exciting tidal waters. I had recently moved to North Wales to be closer to this fantastic playground.

Freya fancied a change from being a dominant force in the bodybuilding and then sky-diving scenes. She showed up at Anglesey as a rookie paddler determined to make a splash as a sea kayaker. You do not remember everybody at an event with over a hundred people.

However, Freya tends to stand out, not just because of her six-foot stature but also her supreme confidence and go-get-it attitude. I remember her coming up beside me during one evening of dancing. She put her arm around my shoulder, saying, “Come on, girl!” and kicking her long legs high into the air. I was unsure whether she was trying to befriend or compete with me. If it was the latter, she definitely won that one.

One evening I would give the first showing of a new film I had made called “This is the Sea,“ which I intended to launch and sell. After the presentation, Freya was excited and urged me to sell her the first VHS tape, the only one in production. She wanted a signature, and I autographed it to her “To Full-On Freya.“

We would later meet as guest presenters at many sea kayaking events worldwide. At an event in New Zealand, I would film her for a sequel film, “This is the Sea 3”. Freya performed many Greenland-style rolls she had mastered but also renamed the traditionally “G-style“ to “German-style.“ She made an impact by playfully and somewhat provocatively performing headstands and other gymnastics and balancing movements in her kayak in skin-tight black pants.

 Freya moved on from performing and teaching rolling to expedition paddling. Her first big trip was around Iceland with Greg Stamer. She went out the gates like a racehorse, starting with a hundred-kilometer crossing. Her aim was speed, and she succeeded in being the fastest around the island. The same year, she set her sights on becoming the first woman to kayak around the South Island of New Zealand. She planned her trip the same season that another woman and I planned our separate trips. She named her kayak “Veni – Vidi – Vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered” and happened to be the first starting the southern summer season. She succeeded, which was by no means guaranteed. I can attest firsthand how committing the island’s west coast is with relentless surf landings and fierce winds in the fjords. I would not want to complete the trip solo as Freya did. Yet this was just a warm-up for the three continents that followed.

It took Freya eleven months to “Race around Australia” and thirty months to “THINK BIGGER“ around South America. When Freya took on her “Third Continent, the North Island“ - North America, I lived on Vancouver Island’s west coast with my partner. Freya stayed with us on her way past.

I accepted a last-minute invite to join her on the water for eight days. I never thought I would paddle with Freya as I had preconceptions that she would be competitive and set in her ways. I was not even sure she enjoyed her trips, having read one of her earlier blogs. She reported occasionally paddling with her eyes shut when the days on the water became too long. She described the paddling as ‘her job.’

I soon had my prejudices shattered. Freya was unfalteringly cheery, even after five days of almost constant rain when everything was damp. She readily shared her pre-packed ziplock bags of fresh vegetables, crackers, and cheese. Freya even gave me half of her favorite white chocolate. On day two, we ate our lunch drifting by feeding grey whales, and Freya’s “Oh wonderful” calls made me realize that she enjoys these trips. She thrives on the wilderness and the beauty around her.

Like all long-distance paddlers, she must constantly weigh up, lingering in a beautiful or exciting spot or pushing on to the next place. You cannot stop everywhere, even when you have set aside eight or ten years to paddle around a continent. Freya needs to cover thirty-three kilometers every day for almost six months of the year to complete her fifty-thousand-kilometer paddle in ten years.

In calmer waters, we chatted. Around rougher headlands, we typically paddled one behind the other until the sound of waves crashing on rocks had diminished. We compared my map and compass navigation with her GPS, waypoints, and her long, high-capacity ruddered kayak with my skegged boat. We had the occasional friendly sprint to a beach, but it was a collaboration, not a competition. Perhaps by the time you are on your third continent, you are secure enough not to have to constantly prove you are the best.

Freya recognized that her attitude had changed in the ten years since she started making these trips. She wanted a new challenge after many miles of putting herself alone against the elements. She said, “I need to work on my people skills.”

I was the first of a relay of paddlers to accompany Freya almost constantly around North America. She is sharing her considerable experience and learning from others. An experience shared can be more fulfilling and provide more entertaining stories, like those in this book.

I wish Freya luck on the remainder of her third continent!

I met Freya Hoffmeister in the United States in her early paddling days and later in different European countries, where we attended kayaking events to gain and pass on skills. As a teenager, she had been a competitive gymnast. The spatial awareness and training mentality she brought helped her naturally take to kayak rolling, and she was soon instructing others. She quickly mastered a vast repertoire of kayak rolls. However, one day, when challenged to think up ‘wacky strokes,’ she wriggled headfirst into her cockpit and grabbed the foot braces. Capsizing her kayak, she flailed her legs and rolled back upright again with her legs. The sound of uncontrollable laughter boomed from the echoey depths of her cockpit as her legs jiggled in the air with joy. It was one trick she was unlikely to repeat on demand, but it remains one of the most amusing I have seen.

Using a wing paddle, she joined me for a week’s sea kayak camping trip on Sweden’s west coast in 2005. The focus along the way was to play in the waves in the tight channels between the rocks. It was clear she was impatient to abandon the twisting and dodging. She could happily skip the precision turning control and was unenthusiastic about getting the timing exactly right for each wave. She would instead open the throttle to enjoy some fast long-distance paddling.

That speed kick got her into the guiding hands of medal-winning athletes Greg Barton and Oscar Chalupsky. However, an excellent racing technique was the means to another end. In 2007 she took off with Greg Stamer to circumnavigate Iceland, which she was eager to complete fast. The same year, she set off around New Zealand, happening to be the first of three women undertaking the same feat. But New Zealand solo was not enough. Multiday sea kayaking trips had become addictive, and she was ready to scale them up in size. Australia became her next target. Only one other, Paul Caffyn, had completed that challenging journey. Freya was determined to finish her trip in a shorter time than his. Making competition for each journey seemed to help her stay motivated, but that fell by the wayside. The magnitude of her trips began breaking new ground when she set off around South America. Now, apart from the elements, she has no competition, real or contrived. Her legacy is established.

The world is a measurably large place. Imagine circling the earth from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again or traveling around the equator. That distance falls short of the miles Freya has kayaked her fully laden sea kayak since I first met her. The little jaunts around Iceland, New Zealand South, and Ireland comprise only a tiny part of that mileage. But you would never guess what she does if you joined her for a glass of wine on the front patio or saw her dressed up to go out. Her achievements are astonishing, yet her skin is no different from yours or mine. No, what is different is her mindset and her ambition to achieve.

At her early presentations, she reeled off statistics: distances, times, speeds, the records she had broken, and the records she had set. In those early talks, she spoke quickly enough to win points from the word count. She had rehearsed the information she wanted to present and the precise allocated delivery time. Freya has since fine-polished her delivery. She was learning from what her audiences ask and the pictures that make them ooh and ahh. She knows the exact details will satisfy their curiosity.

It was a quiet morning at Golden Gardens Park in Seattle, just a small group of people watching Freya glide onto the Puget Sound water. My kayak, and that of Kristin Nelson, my wife, was light and cargo-less, slipping easily downwind. Kristin and I would turn back after an hour. Freya cruised steadily away, laden with all she needed for shelter, cooking, eating, and sleeping. It was time for her to ease in gently and warm up her muscles. She was setting off to circumnavigate the continent of North America, a coastline longer than the world’s circumference.

Since that day, Freya has completed most of America’s west coast in different sections, making the seasons’ best use. In this book, Volume 2, Freya Hoffmeister describes paddling in both hot and cold locations, Mexico and Alaska. It is a chance to consider what differences latitude makes when sea kayaking. Here is the opportunity to learn about an extraordinary person, Freya Hoffmeister.

 “It is what it is.” Suppose you have ever talked to Freya Hoffmeister about any of her many sea kayaking adventures. In that case, you may have heard her use those very words to sum up episodes that would fill anyone else with mind-numbing fear. “It is what it is” may seem dismissive of the genuine dangers she has encountered in the tens of thousands of miles she has paddled. But they reflect an attitude of acceptance that has allowed her to cover safely more expedition coastline than any paddler in history.

In 2005, I first met Freya at a sea-kayaking symposium in Llançà, a small town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. She was already making a name for herself as an up-and-coming paddler and a personality. ‘The Woman in Black’ - for her all-black attire afloat and ashore. She came to the symposium eager to learn and add to her skills. Aside from the scheduled classes, she was looking for more rolling techniques. She showed me a binder with pages documenting every roll she had heard of, including a few I mentioned in my book about Greenland kayaks. She had checked off all of the rolls she had mastered and would not stop until she had marked them all.

 When Freya announced she would circumnavigate Australia by kayak alone, many sea-kayak community critics denounced her as reckless. But she had done her homework with circumnavigations of Iceland and New Zealand’s North and South islands. Perhaps the riskiest stretch of the 10,000-mile Australian circumnavigation was the Gulf of Carpentaria, the great notch in the continent’s north coast. Following the shore would have meant trespassing through the territory of dangerous saltwater crocodiles, so Freya opted to take the ‘short-cut,’ a 300-plus-mile crossing of the mouth of the gulf. It would take her a week of paddling during the days and nights, sleeping while still seated in the cockpit. The alternative route had its own dangers: venomous sea snakes and box jellyfish that could inflict a potentially fatal sting. I was at work in Sea Kayaker magazine's offices when I got a call from Freya via her satellite phone. She was in the middle of the crossing, seemingly a bit bored and only needing the distraction of a conversation.

During her 17,000-mile circumnavigation of South America, Freya was swept up by a tidal bore on the Amazon in the dark of night and violently side-surfed for five miles. Close to Cape Horn, the famously dangerous southern tip of the continent, she was pinned down, alone on a rocky, barren shore, by unrelenting 60-mile-per-hour winds for five days and nights. It is what it is - the only way to survive is to prepare physically and mentally, to meet the world on its terms. In all the time I have known Freya, I do not believe I have ever heard her talk about good or bad luck. Luck has never been, and simply cannot be, part of the calculation she makes each time she launches her kayak to paddle into new territory.

In her early circumnavigations, Freya was intent on covering ground not just safely but quickly. For her circumnavigation of Australia, her goal was to break the speed record for something done only once. Hence, she took only a few breaks and closely watched the miles she covered daily. With North America, the short periods of open water along the Arctic coast make it necessary to circumnavigate in segments rather than in one continuous push. There is no record to break; she can set one on her own terms. It is usually the case that paddling with partners is slower. However, it adds a new human dimension to Freya’s North American story. And with a more relaxed pace, she takes more time to enjoy what the coast offers and convey her experiences through her writing and photography. This book is all the richer for it.

Freya’s circumnavigation of North America is a challenge that few even contemplate, daunting to the extreme. In all the world, only Freya has taken it on, chipping away at yet another continent, piece by piece, until she has taken its full measure. It is what it is - magnificent.