Don Starkell

When Don Starkell was six years old, a judge gave him a choice: return to his abusive home, or go to live in an orphanage. Starkell chose the orphanage.

He vowed to do better by his own two sons. That’s how the idea for the trip came about. In 1970, not long after his wife walked out on him, Starkell took his oldest boy Dana aside.

“How would you like to get in a canoe right here in Winnipeg and we’ll paddle so far south, we’ll paddle right out of winter—all the way to Brazil?” he asked.

They started the trip a decade later, when Dana was nineteen and his brother Jeff was eighteen. Starkell was forty-eight at the time, and driven. “I did a good job on those guys. I was tough on them and made them struggle,” he said in a Canoe & Kayak profile. “And then the time came to do it and we took off.”

Starkell had discovered canoeing at age ten when he moved to a