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Dave Shively

Dave Shively's outdoors column appears Sundays in the Steamboat Pilot & Today. Contact him at 871-4253 or e-mail dshively@steamboatpilot.com.

Steamboat Springs — People I met in Manhattan would always scoff when I told them I had spent the day kayaking on the Hudson River.

"Eeew. How many dead bodies did you have to paddle around?" was a typical response.

I always reacted the same way, defending how clean the water seemed to me and reiterating how the tidal changes every six hours flushed out whatever the worst contaminants people had in mind.

Not that the water isn't polluted, it's just that there's so much more of it to dilute. The whole of my Hudson River miles paled when compared to the more disgusting ecological surprises I've had paddling at the downtown Denver confluence of the Platte River and Cherry Creek.

I was amazed how disconnected people in the Big Apple were to their natural environment. After college, I lined up a job guiding sea kayak tours with an outfitter on the west side of Manhattan. Exiting a subway station at high noon to find Pier 63 for the first time, I approached stranger after stranger, no one able to tell me which direction was west.

But on the water I felt like I was experiencing the real New York City. Sprinting through swells to approach the Statue of Liberty, or soaking in the broken lower Manhattan skyline while trying to avoid a busy mix of sailboats, massive cruise ships and ferries only enhanced the direct contact with the elements.

Jon Bowermaster has spent the past eight years operating under the same conviction - that the only way to experience life on the coast is from the water.

"The kayaks are just a mode of transportation to get you to places you normally wouldn't see," Bowermaster said at his Wednesday presentation at the Steamboat Weather Summit.

The author has spent the past eight years gauging the ocean's health and its role in individual lives as he explored a specific coastline by sea kayak, one continent at a time. Funded by the National Geographic Expeditions Council, Bowermaster's "Ocean's 8" project is nearly complete with only a 2008 expedition to Antarctica to go (www.jonbowermaster.com).

Bowermaster reflected on the natives in French Polynesia's Tuamotu atolls who now realize they will be unable to live in their sea-level homes in the next 50 years. He talked about the massive Croatian fish farms that import Norwegian herring to breed Adriatic tuna for a Japanese market on the other side of the globe.

Bowermaster told me he has come away pessimistic about the state of our oceans when asked to consider the sum of his time on its far-flung reaches in three main areas: climate change, plastic pollution and over-fishing.

As Steamboat residents, we're among the 25 percent minority of global inhabitants who live more than 35 miles from a coastline and among the 17 percent of Americans who live outside of a metropolitan area. Still, it's worth considering the broader state of the global climate.