The streak is over but its impact is still peaking.
For the first time in 2,100 days, Bob Purdy didn’t get onto his paddleboard on Oct. 1.
The Paddle for the Planet founder began his streak of consecutive days paddleboarding in an effort to motivate others to make changes that would benefit the planet.
He hatched World Paddle for the Planet Day and asked everyone to pick a change they wanted to see in the world and paddle for it. He hoped that by encouraging others to experience the ocean, he could reconnect people to the environment and spread a contagious desire to change the way humans interact with their surroundings.
Purdy is set to undergo surgery for a hernia on Oct. 25 and his medical team has assured him he will not be able to paddle through it. He will be off his board completely for about six weeks.
On Sept. 30, Purdy was joined by supporters at Tofino’s MacKenzie Beach for his final ride before ending the streak.
“This is day 2,100 and, with mixed emotions, I’m going to end the daily streak that I started back on Jan. 1, 2011,” he told the Westerly News on the beach.
“I’m really sad that the daily paddle is going to end. At the same time, I’m super excited and super happy about how far we’ve come, what Paddle for the Planet has been able to achieve, how we’ve been able to get our message out about changing the way we live on the planet and about what lies forward in the future.”
He added Paddle for the Planet is much more than a consecutive paddleboarding streak and the organization’s efforts are “just getting ramped up.”
“We have some really cool things coming up,” he said. “There’s so many new opportunities coming up and i’m super excited about where we’re headed for the future.”
Purdy plans to host a seven-day festival next year concluding on World Paddle for the Planet Day that will raise funds for children with special needs. He’s also putting a series of fundraisers together and is working on a book that he hopes to complete before the end of the year.
“Not many people know we’ve done a bunch of fundraisers over the years that I’ve paddled for and we’ve raised over $100,000 for various organizations, so that’s something that we feel we do quite well and we want to build on that and expand on that,” he said.
Purdy was the focus of the film ‘The Paddler,’ which received the 2015 Canada International Film Festival’s Award of Excellence for a feature documentary. He said he’s proud of what he accomplished during his paddling streak and that the media attention he received, along with speaking engagements and connecting with people at events, gave him a solid forum to spread his message.
“I look at the body of work and there’s a lot of things in there but, I think, the underlying current is this message that we’ve been putting out there: we need to change the way we’re living on the planet,” he said.
“I think we’re starting to wake up to that as a species. We’re starting to realize that we do need to take better care of ourselves, the planet and everything on it. To play a very, very small part in that has been the most rewarding for me.”
He added there’s still work to do and cited the federal government’s recent approval of the Pacific NorthWest Liquefied Natural Gas project in B.C. as evidence that Paddle for the Planet needs to up its volume.
“We haven’t totally changed the way we live on the planet. That’s why we’re going to keep going. We’ve got a long ways to go I feel,” he said.
“Just the other day [on Sept. 27], our government decided to announce, in their infinite wisdom, that they’re going to green-light the LNG Project to Lelu Island. It’s not right and it’s not where we need to be going as a planet so we have a lot of work to do and I’m going to continue to play whatever part I can in making the changes we need.”
He said he’ll be back on his paddleboard and motivating change as soon as he can be to convince others to reconnect.
“It’s up to all of us individually to change and one of the biggest things you can do is to do something you’re a little bit afraid of, or something you’ve always wanted to do. That’s where the window to unlearning is and unlearning is the connection to life,” he said.
“If we can all do that in our own, sort of, little universes, we’re going to see a tremendously different world and I hope to see that before I check out of the planet.”
