Untested Waters

Turning the Tide through the Salish Sea

BY AUDREY NELSON

PHOTOS BY JEFFERY HUMMEL

796 miles.

That’s the distance island resident Jeffrey Hummel traveled on his racing-style, stand-up paddleboard between July 25, 2021, and August 25, 2022.

He calls his journey the Island Quest: an ambitious plan to circumnavigate every island in the U.S. Salish Sea, solo and unassisted. And after diligent research, Hummel is confident in saying he’s not only the first person to accomplish the voyage on a paddleboard, but the first person to accomplish it on any paddle craft, period.

Hummel completed the Island Quest in 45 separate circumnavigations, which took 189 hours total. He circled 405 islands along with what he called “significant rocks.” Initially worried about how to define an island, Hummel ultimately settled on “a landmass surrounded by water with anything living on it,” narrowing that to land that could fit him and his paddleboard “with some room to spare.”

As a self-employed architect, Hummel says he enjoyed the technical aspects of his journey. In addition to tracking statistics, such as his average paddling speed (around 4 miles per hour), he spent hours decoding the Salish Sea’s wind, current and tide patterns, which are some of the most complicated in the world. But he is the first to tell you that the Island Quest is far more than numbers and definitions on a page.

In March of 2018, Hummel suffered a traumatic brain injury when a tree he was trying to cut down crushed his safety helmet into his head. The accident left him with both physical and emotional symptoms. For the first time in his life, he struggled with PTSD, depression and severe anxiety. On July 21, 2021, after a nearly complete recovery, he experienced another concussion, this time while playing hockey for his Bremerton-based adult league team. His teammates told him enough was enough. He was done with the sport.

Hockey—as well as rock climbing, mountain biking, and other vigorous physical activity—had been Hummel’s outlet. It helped reduce stress and fight despair. Without that outlet, and with the COVID-19 pandemic still dragging on, he knew he would rapidly become depressed and isolated. So, he focused on the one passion he could still manage: paddling.

Before his first encounter with a paddleboard, years earlier, Hummel had assumed that paddling was “no more work than floating on an air mattress.” But a Lake Chelan headwind changed his mind. “I got the message that this could be a very good workout if it’s done with intention,” he wrote in a currently unfinished, unpublished manuscript about the Island Quest.

Just four days after his second concussion, Hummel turned himself over fully to paddling. He circumnavigated all 30 miles of Bainbridge Island on his 14-foot racing board, fighting the wind and falling in the water again and again. But his frequent spills didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.

“The funny thing about doing hard stuff that takes all your will to complete and can be literally painful to do, is that at the completion of it, time erases the memory of the hardship and pain and replaces it with a longing to…do more of it,” Hummel wrote.

Hummel worked his way up through the South Sound, documenting each trip on Facebook and Strava—a distance-tracking exercise app—as he went. He intended to finish the islands in the South

Sound by November 1, 2021, but was done by the end of August. It was then that he decided to expand his scope and take on the entirety of the U.S. Salish Sea.

Although his most daring and athletic friends—ultramarathoners, fellow paddlers and extreme skiers—were all in favor of the Island Quest, others like his wife, Carla, worried for his safety. Hummel ruefully recalled one of his circumnavigations, when darkness fell and he ended up walking about 5 miles along a dike road, carrying his paddleboard on his head. Occasions like these, where his carefully laid plans for a trip went awry, didn’t help his family and friends come around to the Island Quest’s allure.

In some ways, though, it was the solo aspect of the journey that Hummel valued most.

“Although paddling like this is isolating from other people,” he wrote, “it was exactly what I needed. It gave me time to reflect on things and to separate the hurt and anger from the reality of what I still had.”

In addition to his manuscript, Hummel wrote poetry and essays that addressed the healing nature of his time on the water. He compiled hundreds of Strava stories about the individual circumnavigations and sometimes paired his poetry with pictures he took during the Quest. Although he’d tried his hand at creative writing before, he found that it was easier to write during and after paddling, to such an extent that he some- times had to consciously slow down his brain to keep up with his typing.

Still, he was careful about the way he told his story online, adamant that he wanted to be more than just a “hey, look at what I’m doing!’ guy.” In his Facebook updates for his earliest trips, he asked people to support Alzheimer and cancer research. Above all, he wrote in his manuscript, he “wanted to be an example to people that they need to go out there and do things. It doesn’t have to be epic; it just has to get you inspired.”

Hummel’s not sure what’s next. He’s considering a similar Island Quest in the Canadian Salish Sea, which would involve another 400 or so islands in approximately 18 trips. The logistics would be even more challenging, because the islands are so remote. In the meantime, he hopes to paddle in a June race, Seventy48—a 48-hour, 70-mile boat race in which articipants must use “human power” alone.

No matter what Hummel does next, there’s no doubt that he’ll tackle it with the same mentality that helped him recognize joy as well as challenge in the Island Quest.

“You can’t really get off and walk,” he said, laughing. “There’s only going forward.”