Great update – The kayak has been returned! Thanks for getting the word out.
This was sent to us on behalf of Steve Chard. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
“OK everyone this is what you shouldn’t have to be hearing from me, and I apologise if I end up not being quite as articulate and coherent as I would like to be…
Yesterday afternoon between 3pm and 4:30pm my kayak, containing most of my kayaking gear, was STOLEN from the beach at Chezzetocook Bay… -just brazenly thrown into/onto a vehicle where Causeway Road, the road from Marine Drive to Fisherman’s Beach, “touches” the beach!
Mark and I landed at a point further eastwards along the beach where he could safely camp overnight but there was no access to get a kayak up to the road -that meant that for me to be picked up and taken back to Halifax my kayak had to be paddled about 800 yards over to where the road came right to the beach. So we texted Ed that we were ready for him to drive over to collect me knowing that that was going to take some 90 minutes …and I decided to paddle my kayak over to the take-out point and leave it ready to be loaded onto the car. I did this and then pulled the kayak up the beach to be above the high water line. I loaded most of my gear inside the kayak; main and spare paddles, PFD, spray skirt, bilge pump, throw line, tow line, gloves, etc …thank God I kept with me the dry bag containing my wallet, passport and driving licence! And no, just (stupidly) NO, I didn’t think at all about locking it up to anything… after all this kayak did 9000 kms across 4 Canadian provinces and around 22 US States and was only ever locked up 3 or 4 times in a few urban areas! Even the RCMP constable who came down to us said she couldn’t blame me for not locking it up, that this sort of crime is rare in rural Nova Scotia… what confirmed it was theft was the drag marks in the sand where the thief/thieves had dragged it along the beach to get it right up to the road!
So.. the kayak is a NDK (Nigel Dennis Kayaks) Explorer 18 feet long expedition sea kayak, fibre glass composite, with a white hull, red deck and black trim and deck lines. It doesn’t have a rudder, having a skeg instead.
It is covered in the decal stickers of so many of the kayak clubs and places that I visited during my 15 month fundraiser adventure and has the logo of the dealer from whom I bought it, Eastern Outdoors of Saint John, NB, on it on either side up at the bow. The dealer’s importation certificate number is also up at the stern and somewhere the manufacturer’s reference number, which is 18194.
Please, PLEASE, everyone -get the word spread across every type of media platforms you can think of to try and get Her Majesty’s Canadian Kayak “Roberta” found and returned to me …you can see from that fact of naming her so in such a cheeky fashion how much she means to me…
Steve Chard
PS.. if anyone knows or find anything out about this you can please contact RCMP/GRC Constable Angela Banfield at Musquodoboit Harbour Office. The crime ref. no. is 2022-65913″
