A new start after 60: I wanted to find myself – so I kayaked 6,800 miles alone

Mark Fuhrmann culled his possessions and set off into the deep, where he was chased by an alligator, brushed past a brown bear and saw a great white shark sauntering past ...

Shortly before he turned 60, Mark Fuhrmann realised what he wanted. “I thought: ‘I’d like to see things I’ve never seen before, I’d like to experience things I’ve never experienced before – and I’d like to be alone.’” Fuhrmann (who blogs under the name Mark Ervin) set off on a 3,700-mile kayaking tour, and now, at 65, has just returned from a second voyage, paddling the “Greater Loop” solo. His 6,835 mile-round trip from Nova Scotia took in the great lakes of the US, inland rivers, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.

Fuhrmann, who is Canadian but lives in Norway, embarked on these journeys “to kickstart retirement” from the maritime PR business he ran in Oslo for the past 30 years. Before he set off, in June last year, he swapped his house for a flat, and culled his possessions. “It was good to get rid of all of those things and say: ‘This isn’t a phase; this is a new season,’” he says.

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