John Burleigh attempted to solo circumnavigate Iceland in 2003, and would have been the first solo kayaker if he would have completed the circumnavigation.

Read below John's chapter about the South Coast as published under A Solo Expedition Round Iceland By Kayak 

 " ... the general consensus was that I would be mad to attempt the south coast!

You have done well crazy man from Scotland, now go home while you are still alive!

My contacts in town were with the head of the rescue services and the local pharmacists. [ ...] 

I had heard stories about this section of the coast. I’d read articles about sandstorms, huge surf, and relentless winds.

Because the town of Hofn is a distance away from the entrance to the harbour, it is not possible to see the surf and sea conditions. After several days waiting for a break in the weather I decided that I needed to stay at the rescue shelter near the lighthouse, to more closely study the surf and be in a better position to make a start from Hofn.

My first attempt out of Hofn lasted not more than 2 hours. In some of the biggest seas I had paddled in during the trip the boat was thrown about all over the place. The scale was all wrong. The size of the waves and the water they were drawing was just more than I could work with. Surf on the beach was upwards of 6 to 8ft and in one constant line all down the coast. The time afloat had been an education, and something which I needed to experience, however the images stayed with me during the following two evenings as I waited for the surf to go down and make a dash for the glacier lake and river Jokulsarlon.

After a full day at sea and 28 miles of paddling down a long thin strip of sand I knew that coming ashore safely would all rely on what I did in the last 50 meters off the beach. I had been through the same process so many times before, however the surf was still big and I was tired. A slide and broach, roll and recovery, frantic ripping of the spraydeck and sprint up the beach with the boat, resulted in me being completely soaked, the boat filled with sand and the paddle leash ripped apart taking with it a deck fitting from the boat! Tourists who had watched the whole landing sequence applauded, and came down to speak to me whilst I shed the wet kit.

THE DECISION

My gut feeling the following morning was to stay where I was. The weather was marginal, though slowly improving. My main concern however was how I felt. I did not want to continue, I felt uneasy and concerned and deeply unhappy as to what I was about to commit myself to.

You only discover your limits when you take yourself to a place that forces you to make a decision. Throughout the whole trip, I had made decisions about whether to make an open crossing, when not to paddle and just wait, when to go and be quick in my progress…pushing the limits but always being aware of having something to fall back on….a point to get to, a PNR (point of no return). Right now this decision was something that would change the entire nature of the trip. Sitting on the beach considering all of this was one of the worst experiences of the entire journey.

Nobody had paddled the entire coast of Iceland solo, and maybe there was a reason for that. My head and my heart baulked at the idea of pushing on and committing myself to a further 150nm of exposed coastline. If the physical pressures of high mileage days weren’t demanding enough, the draining mental concern over how the fatigued landing would go in the last 50m, also had to be considered. I spent an entire day thinking through my options. To make matters worse, the sea calmed and died away, surf softened to a workable height and the sun continued to shine. Several days later the scene on the south coast would be quite different but right then the favourable conditions taunted and questioned me as to why I was even sitting here considering abandoning the south coast."

Rotem Ron, a kayak instructor for the Israel based kayak outfitter Terra Santa, is the only solo kayaker who successfully circumnavigated Iceland just 2 years ago, in 2006.

Rotem's blog mentions her experiences on the South Coast only in one sentence in one of her blog entries. Like Chris, Shawna and Leon, Rotem too abandoned her tent in a sand storm on the South Coast and found shelter in one of the 10 emergencies huts built by the ICE-SAR along the South Coast of Iceland.

While she sets off to the emergency shelter she writes that she hopes she will be able to find her kayak the next day, suggesting the wind must have blown very hard.

A team of highly experiences paddlers, consisting of Chris Duff, Shawna Franklin and Leon Somme set out the same year as John Burleigh, and encountered as well problems on the South Coast. 

Below is Chris Duff's update from the events on the South Coast, as published under

 "... our plan for traversing the south coast was to use the emergency shelters as places to hide behind in the event of a gale overtaking us. This was exactly what we were shooting for on the morning of May 30th.

After getting up at 3:30, we were on the water by 5:15 and paddling with a ten knot wind at our backs- perfect sea conditions for cutting away at the 23 miles between us and the lighthouse and rescue shelter at Skaftaros. It is quite difficult to attempt to share all of what happens on a normal day at sea. Each wave, each puff or blast of wind has its own character and effect on the paddler. No two minutes are the same and there is a constant interpertation and assessment of what the senses are taking in. What the reader must try to appreciate in this next portion of the update is the conditions that we found ourselves in and how we best dealt with them given our circumstances.

The first two hours of paddling were nearly as perfect as they get. With the wind and tide running with us we were making well over four knots. At the two hour break period I had moved well out in front of Leon and Shawna and could no longer see them. After a five minute break I continued on, a quarter mile out from the beach and just beyond the outer surf break.

By hour three the barometer had dropped three points and the wind and swell had picked up. The swells were now quartering in from astern which decresed the speed of the boat and forced a fair bit of corrective strokes.

By hour four it was clear that the weather forecast we had received was wrong. The barometer had dropped another point and the winds were steadily climbing to around 20 knots. I stopped and waited for Leon and Shawna but couldn´t see any sign of them. Twenty minutes later I barely made out the outline of the lighthouse through the sea mist but decided that the effort and risk to keep pushing wasn´t worth it. I had just put the helmet on when an offshore breaker hit me and sidesurfed me for quite aways. It was definetly time to head for shore.

The surf landing went very well- caught some nice waves that rocketed me in and deposited me cleanly on a flat long expance of beach. After waiting another half hour and glassing the sea with binoculars for Shawna and Leon, I started hauling the boat and gear to high ground and setting up a camp. An hour and a half later, after dragging a couple of logs and bits of lumber for anchor points, I crawled into the tent and waited. Another hour went by before I heard Leon calling out my name. I opened the tent doorway to see them both dressed in dry suits- they hadn´t started the day in them- and looking nearly exhausted.

While the winds drove the sands in around our feet, Leon told me what had happened.

Just about the time I had landed- 9:30- an offshore wave had hit them both. Shawna was out a little deeper and managed to cut over the top before if broke and buried Leon. H was able to side surf it a long way but eventually got rolled. With the shock of the cold water and the exertion of four hours of paddlinng in increasing wind he tried three times to roll, switched and attempted a roll on the other side, was hit by a second wave,and then regrettfully wet exited in the surf zone. Shawna was able to get a tow line attached and towed Leon out beyond the outer break. After struggling to empty the flooded boat and restowing all the gear they made the decision to run the surf, get into the beach igloo- a nylon dome used for emergency shelter- and get into their dyrsuits. By this time Leon was very cold and hypothermia was a growing concern. They eventually got warmed up, changed into drysuits, ate lunch, and came back out into the surf. By the time we met up, they had been working for over seven ours. We carried their boats to my tent site, set up their tent, anchored everything to the boats and the logs and crawled back into the tents for some rest. At 7pm we had a communal dinner in their big tent and then sperated again for what we thought would be a night of sleep.

By ten o´clock the winds had built to a point where the wind driven sands were burying the tents and boats. Every half hour we were getting up and shoveling the tents off with our paddles. Anytime we leaned down below waist level, the sand would blind us and blast our faces. With each passing hour the barometer dropped another point and the wind seemed to be increasing. By 1 am we decided the tents couldn´t take the continued loading of the rain and sand. Through the howling wind we yelled from one tent to the other and came up with a plan. We wouuld get dressed in full paddling gear for wind protection, take the tents down and stuff them in the boats, then take food, water and clothing and attempt to reach the emergency shelter at the light house.

Taking the tents down in winds that we later learned were over 50 knots was a job- to say the least. Before we set off for the lighthouse at 2am, we took a compass bearing from the quickly dissappearing boats, stood a log up on end to help us locate the boats later, and then set off.

The one problem with approaching the lighthouse from the land was that there was a river we would have to cross. I had brought a paddle to use as a probe and we agreed before we entered the river that if the water reached our waists, we would abandon the plan. Amid the shriek of wind, the blowing sand and the waves on the river, we started across.

All of this might sound crazy. And I can assure you that we would not have been in these conditions if we had had any other choice. But what we were dealing with in the faint light of the early morning was purely survival. In these instances you do what you have to do and you do it in the best way you know how. This is what we doing.

Less than a quarter way across the river, I felt the bottom drop sharply away. There was no way we were going to cross it on foot. We turned back. When we got back to the river bank we had a hasty and I think fair agreement on what to do next. I said that these were conditions in which people die- our decisions had to be made fast and accurately. We had two options- one, get the beach igloo and try to sit out the storm, and two, go get a boat and try to raft all of us across. The igloo was in my opion the wrong option.

The plan--- Leon would stay with all the bags of gear so they wouldn´t get blown away. Shawna and I would go for the boat. We set off on the reverse compass bearing we had taken and found the boats. We then dug one boat out, hooked up two tow lines and started the brutal work of dragging a loaded boat back to the river - to leave any of the gear behind which was in the boat, would have been to have lost it to the wind.

While Shawna and I were pulling the boat, Leon was attempting to find as much shelter as possible behind the bags of food and clothing. He later told me he was freezing and had to put on more clothing and keep getting up to warm up and then get back down and try to bury his face from the sand.

After stopping every twenty feet for rest, Shawna and I finally met up with Leon at the river´s edge, set up the beach igloo for a quick rest and snack and devised the next plan for crossing the river. Being inside the igloo was actually worse than being out in the storm. The billowing nylon provided more surface area for the wind to act on and it was incredibly noisey inside it. If anything the igloo heightened the stress we were all feeling. Given the conditions, the igloo was not the answer.

The plan for the crossing was for me to be in the cockpit while Shawna and Leon, who had dry suits, would wade out until they lost their footing. They would then hang on and attempt to kick while I paddled us across. The river was only 200 yards wide but it was the longest two hundred yards I have ever paddled.

We got to the far side of the river, dragged the boat to high ground, turned it into the wind and rolled it over. Shawna found a fishing float that she attached to one end to help us see the boat at a later date. Leon thought that he would never see that boat or his precious gear again. At this point, we left once again for the lighthouse and the emergency shelter a mile away.

When we finally reached the shelter and pushed the door open we were all exhausted. It was 5:45am. After checking for water, food and the condition of the shelter´s radio, I tried making contact with the radio to let Ari and our friends know that we were OK. Over the next hour I tried several more times but got no response. We all then climbed into the bunks and got a couple hours of sleep. At some point, Leon tried the radio again and mangaged to get a response from a coast guard helicopter in flight from Reykjavik to HÖfn. After a quick discusion and acertaining there was no immediate need for assistance, they decided to contact the local search and rescue team, and ask them to bring us out some water. We had enough food for two days if we stretched it and we knew we could get water from the river but we didn´t know how long the storm was going to keep us pinned down in the shelter. The helicopter pilot told us he had made contact with the local team and that they would be out in two to three hours.

Threes hours later fourteen guys from the Kyndill Rescue team were standing in the now crowded shelter. They had brought water with them as well as three of the biggest trucks imaginable. Broddi- the lead fellow who spoke very good English listened as we explained what had taken place for us over the past 12 hours. I explained where we had left two of the boats on the far side of the river, where we had left the boat we used to cross the river and that our plan was to continue as soon as the weather broke and we could retrieve all of our gear. There was a brief discussion in Icelandic and several of the younger men started getting dressed in drysuits. When we asked what was happening, Broddi explained that they would swim the river, find our boats and bring them to us!! I quickly explained that the boats were buried, loaded to the hilt, and that our only real concern was for the boat that we had left at the river´s edge. If we could get that boat before it blew away, we would be very grateful. Another exchange of Icelandic had everyone heading for the biggest truck that they had- a 1984 Russian built monster that had originally been built for the East German Army. With Broddi at the wheel and Leon and I in the cab, Shawna and half the team jumped up on the flat bed and we started across the sands. Broddi explained that he coud deflate the tires so that we wouldn´t sink into the sand and that all six massive wheels had power to them. In super low, mountain climbing gear we lumbered across the flats and into the sand storm. In less than fifteen minutes we found the boat where we had left it. Everyone jumped out, hauled the boat up and held on as we headed back.

By the time we had returned to the shelter Broddi suggested that we just come back into town with them, stay at the rescue center and when the storm abated he would send a truck out on a different road and we could get the boats we had temporarily abandoned. The winds hadn´t dropped at all and Broddi´s offer sounded too good to be true.

So here we are in the Kyndill Rescue center- warm, dry and a lot more comfortable than we would have been in the emergency shelter- thanks to the help and once again the hospitality of our host country. The guys here at the center have all been fantastic. There has not been a single suggestion that what we are attempting to do is either foolish or futile, perhaps by nature the Icelander´s seem to have an adventurous spirit of their own. We have insisted on paying for the fuel that the team used in coming to our assistance and have once again made some great friends.

The plan now is for a driver to help us retrieve the other two boats, possibly this afternoon, and bring them here to the center. I think we´ll be able to find them given we have a compass bearing and hopefully the log that we stood up- if it hasn´t blown down. We´ll have a bit of work digging for them and then loading them on the truck but then we can get them all cleaned up here at the center. When the weather stablizes- possibly by Friday, we can then put them in the river here in town and paddle back 12 miles out to the sea.

Well that pretty much brings everyone up to where we are at present. We are all doing well and in hind sight have no doubt learned a great deal from the last three days. Broddi has told us that any forecast we receive which is more than 6 hours old is really not dependable. That doesn´t leave us much leeway, but that is the nature of paddling this coast. If we can get two more days of good weathher we´ll be in Vik where the coastline offers more shelter. If all goes well we will email again from Vik. All the best to everyone who is following us along on our Icelandic journey.

Chris, Leon, and Shawna"