A completely arbitrary, shamelessly biased and utterly made-up list of the 10 best places to live for sea kayaking. We do hope you’ll disagree.

 

 

 

 

The best places to live now. The 10 best adventure towns. Dream towns. America's best outdoor towns. LIVE HERE NOW....

You've seen the magazine articles over an over again. Most self-respecting outdoor magazines produce one every year or two. In the spirit of that tradition, here is a somewhat underresearched, methodologically hunch-based yet not entirely tongue-in-cheek look at the best places for sea kayakers to live in North America. Think of it as the first draft of the authoritative magazine article we'll eventually produce, after you read this and straighten us out with your input.

Post a comment below to cast your vote for the best place for sea kayakers to live.

1. Victoria, British Columbia
While it's infamously home to the "newly wed and nearly dead," Victoria residents happily spend their in-between years sea kayaking. If you can get over the skyrocketing real estate prices this pocket-sized city may have the highest per capita coastline and beauty quotient in Canada if not the world.

2. San Francisco, California
The hippies were onto something. Northern California boats the most rugged and beautiful coastline south of the 49th parallel, all easily accessed from the Golden Gate City or sub-hubs like groovy Berkeley or Half Moon Bay.

3. Portland, Oregon or Maine
It turns out there's a Portland on both sides of the country. Go figure, both are great for kayaking. While Oregon's the apple of the country's eye for its Pacific Northwest beauty and views of snowcapped Mount Hood, its quieter sibling is the real sea kayaking paradise as the closest urban centre to Maine's island studded eastern shore and Acadia National Park.

4. Halifax, Nova Scotia
Informally renowned as the university town with the highest pub-per-student ratio and the fewest kayakers per mile of coastline, Halifax guarantees you'll find a place to paddle and a pub to belt out your sea shanties after a day on the water. With short drives to the scenery of Peggy's Cove, the quiet Eastern Shore, the inland lakes of Kejimkujik National Park and the tide rips of the Bay of Fundy, you'll never run out of water.

5. Grand Marais, Michigan
An epicentre of outdoor funk on Michigan's sparsely populated northern peninsula, Grand Marais is permanent home to many committed sea kayakers and summer getaway for hundreds more at the 25-year-old Great Lakes Sea Kayak Symposium. It's the gateway to the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Lake Superior and a short drive to Lake Michigan and Lake Huron's scenic North Channel.

6. Parry Sound
As the closest town to Georgian Bay's 30,000 islands and the municipal hub of the Georgian Bay UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Parry Sound is the launch point for some of the best sea kayaking to be found between Portland East and Portand West (see 3, above). Plans are afoot to build a coastal hiking trail in the style of B.C.'s West Coast Trail, but why wait when you can see it all now by kayak.

7. New York, New York
Such well-known, articulate and committed sea kayakers as Eric Stiller, Marcus Demuth, Joe Glickman and Ray Fusco call the Apple home for a reason. The swirling river currents and committed club scene of New York City's piers define hard core urban paddling. Manhattan is an island, the Venice of U.S.A., with its finger on the global pulse of exploration and direct flights to everywhere. Nowhere does it makes more sense to live car-free and kayak.

8. San Diego, California
Perched on the Pacific with a mediterranean climate that gets less than 12 inches of rain a year, and a hop-skip-jump from the Baja border. 'Nuff said.

9. Bayfield, Wisconsin
The self-titled Gateway to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is Wisconsin's answer to Grand Marais, home to the Inland Sea Symposium as well as a picturesque fishing village and arts and crafts community.

10. St. John's, Newfoundland
For a pod of sea kayakers lucky enough to have some of the world's finest coastal scenery, icebergs and whales right out their back door, Newfoundland paddlers are an awfully quiet bunch. Either there aren't very many of them or they're trying to keep things a secret, but it must be the former because the secret's out. From Nigel Foster to Freya Hoffmeister, the world's best paddlers can never resist a big island, and they've been making the pilgrimage to The Rock for decades.

Photo: Sheila Matheson/Tourism Victoria