Four Members of Our Diverse Kayaking Community

The Catalyst
It’s been quite a year for Ginni Callahan. She guided a full season in Baja, converted her business, Columbia River Kayaking, into an employee-owned cooperative and started another company that is poised to revolutionize the kayak-guiding market. Along the way she brought her farm’s first harvest to market, hosted a sea kayak symposium, and, not least, fought a bout with breast cancer.

Yeah, it’s been quite a year, Callahan says from the Slow Boat Farm, a 21-acre piece of Puget Island in the Lower Columbia River. “For the last 15 years I’ve lived in a 1971 Winnebago on other people’s farms. Now I have my own farm,” she says, “where I live in a 1971 Winnebago.”

Any real-estate hack will tell you location is everything, and so Callahan has everything. “The slough opens up into a bay, which opens up into the river itself,” she says. There’s also a house, which she rents out, and a barn where she stores kayaks. Headquarters for employee-owned Columbia River Kayaking is in the chicken coop.

“I really love raising food and working cooperatively with other people,” says Callahan, who for years traded chores and organic produce for Winnebago parking on friend’s farms. When her guides asked for more of a stake, turning Columbia River Kayaking into a co-op fit naturally with her philosophy. Her brand-new company, Sea Kayak Baja Mexico, is doing something that no sea-kayak outfitter has done before: Offering challenging trips to experienced paddlers in British-style single kayaks.

It all fit into her life’s rhythm, bouncing between the Pacific Northwest summers and Baja winters. In the fall of 2006, however, a lump in her breast threatened to change all of that. Callahan doesn’t bring up her cancer—“I don’t want pity,” she explains—but her response to it was vintage Callahan. She announced the Lower Columbia Sea Kayak Symposium would go as planned—at the farm in late August when the garden would be overflowing—then had the breast removed and went to Mexico. After a season of guiding and a month’s respite at a secret kayak-surfing beach somewhere on Baja’s Pacific Coast, Callahan was ready to paddle, and celebrate, when the LoCo crew arrived at the farm.