Stand-Up Paddling in Palau

We are officially the first (and as of right now the ONLY) people to have stand up paddled all the way from Koror to Peleliu. We paddled nearly 30 miles on Friday, May 22. (Our route is shown in white on the map below.)

This is something we've thought and talked about since we arrived here 7 months ago. We knew it would be quite the challenge and quite crazy to many, but that hasn't stopped us before. The weather conditions had not been just right until Thursday of last week. Part of our daily routine on this tiny island nation, is to check the weather, the tide schedule and the ocean conditions. On Thursday we saw the numbers and words we'd almost given up on ever seeing. Wind from the Northeast at 5-10 knots, seas at 3-4 feet, partly cloudy with isolated showers. And the tide times . . . high tide at 5 a.m., low at noon and then high again at 6 p.m. Everything was right, so we knew we just had to give it a try.

We called our crazy Palauan paddling buddy Fuanes, who is always up for a wild paddling challenge and owns Standup Paddle Tours here in Palau, and made plans to take this epic journey the following morning. The crazy goal we had in mind was to make this trip in one day. I was the only doubter in the group. I wasn't even convinced we could get passed the first reef, let alone cover all 30+ miles in one day. Shauna and I brought 3 sandwiches each, two water bottles each, an orange and mango bars to hold us over. Shauna also brought along our 3 man tent just in case we had to camp out on one of the uninhabited islands along the way.

The three of us were on the water and starting our paddling adventure at 4:44 a.m. We paddled pretty easily over the reef that I thought might be a deal breaker. Sure things got swirly and there were plenty of swells, but it was nothing like this section normally is - with big crashing waves. We even got to ride some waves as we passed over the other side of the reef.

Paddling on one side of your body non-stop for an hour makes your shoulders ache like you wouldn't believe. I'm so glad we brought enough Vitamin I to get us through. Once we got over the reef we got to balance our paddling and give our right shoulders a break.

At about 10 a.m., we arrived at Giant Clam beach. This would be our one and only time to put our feet on dry ground. There were bathroom trips to be made and beach clean up to be done. Fuanes loves his country and these Rock Islands and never misses an opportunity to pick up any trash left by the near-brain-dead tourists who don't mind polluting this paradise.

I must say I was surprise and thrilled at the progress we were making. Before starting I honestly thought I'd be thrilled just to get to this point by the end of the day. I was now starting to really believe we could get all the way to Peleliu in one day.

At noon, we had done about 15 applications of sunscreen, consumed more ibuprofen, and taken multiple dunks in the Philippine Sea to cool off, we were at Jackson Beach. From here it was one large section of open water between us and Carp Island. We've often found this area to be rough, choppy and white capped on days when the forecast tells us it will be mellow - quite unpredictable. Well it looked good, so we knew we just had to go.

It's a huge stretch of open water between Jackson and Carp. At low tide the sandbars come peeking out. Well not just peeking. They are so big they look like whole islands of sand. We were familiar with these, so we knew we had two choices as far as navigating our way. We could take a direct route and paddle in shallow waters to Carp. If we did that we figured, we might arrive around 4 and then just wait for the high tide to make the final crossing to Peleliu. Or we could take a wide arc skipping Carp Island altogether, staying in the boat channels and paddling wide around the possible sandbar that develops at low tide between Carp Island and Peleliu.

Since we couldn't see the monstrous sandbar at Carp, we decided on taking the direct route. Bad idea. As we got near to Carp, at 2:00 not 4:00, something came into view - the sandbar . . . in all its 12 miles of glory. We could either paddle up onto the sandbar and wait almost 5 hours for high tide, or we could backtrack a bit, moving over the shallow flats, around the sandbar and down to Peleliu. We were so tired, so fatigued, we just had to get this thing over with. We chose to keep moving rather sit on the sand and get thoroughly baked by the sun.

This decision meant attempting to paddle through really shallow sections. This turned out to be impossible, so we dragged our boards, walking through ankle and shin high water to get around the tip of the sand bar. The up side of this detour was that we got to see lots of rays and black tip sharks in the shallow flats. They swam right up to us. A few of the juvenile black tips seemed to adopt Shauna's board as their mother. They followed her as she slowed maneuvered her way through the flats. We must have seen 8-10 by the time we got to the deeper water.

We paddled our exhausted bodies, arms held on by nothing more than a couple of stubborn ligaments, and arrived at Peleliu dock at 3:35 in the afternoon. We did it . . . and in only one day. 10 hours and 50 minutes of paddling . We so exceeded my expectations! We were utterly exhausted, yet thrilled at the end.

We are now officially history makers. We are so glad we got to do this before we left!