For two years from 1980 to 1982, Don Starkell and his teenage sons Jeff and Dana paddled a hand-crafted, 21 foot fiberglass canoe from Winnipeg, Canada to Belem, Brazil, completely self-supported. Account of the 12,181 mile journey was compressed from thousands of pages of Starkell’s salt-stained, smeared, loose leaf diary entries into a book, Paddle to the Amazon. Starkell and his son Dana both hold the Guinness World Record for having completed the “longest canoe journey ever” (Jeff dropped out in Mexico). The group endured modern pirates and starvation, dodging bullets and drug cartels along the gulf coast from Mexico, eventually along and through South America. Almost ten years later, Starkell lost the tops of all his fingers and five of his toes in attempts to trace the Northwest Passage by kayak. After three years, and nearly 3,000 miles, the trip was cut short by just 30 miles due to frostbite.