MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Summer 2019

35 T oronto’s Leslie Street Spit is a busy place on a blue-sky weekday morning in June. Hundreds of double-crested cormorants swoop through the air and roost on the denuded trees of the landfill turned nature refuge that juts into Lake Ontario just east of the downtown core. Below me, dozens of common carp huddle in the murky shallows of a small lagoon. The five-kilometre headland, a still-growing repository for construction debris, is closed to pedestrian and cyclist visitors during business hours. But there are no restrictions on approaching by water, so a friend and I pumped up our inflatable stand-up paddleboards at Cherry Beach and made the 15-minute crossing. Now we’re surrounded by the sights and sounds of cormorants and carp, seagulls and swans. To the northwest, across the inner harbour, loom the CN Tower and the glassy sundrenched skyline of Canada’s biggest city. Despite growing up in Toronto and spending my first two decades here, I have never seen this view before. Because I have never paddled in my hometown before. But after four years of an intensifying obsession with SUP— hitting the water from British Columbia to Newfoundland and a handful of provinces in between—I’ve made the familiar drive down Highway 401 from Ottawa to deepen my relationship with Lake Ontario’s urban face. One of the things I love most about paddleboarding is how easy it is to get onto the water. Another is the feeling of defiance. We leave behind the Spit’s sheltered shoreline and head into the wind toward the Tower, surfing the wake kicked up by police boats and aiming for the canals that cut through the Toronto Islands. Amidst a couple million other souls confined to dry land, this entire waterscape is our carefree and car-free playground. The route we’re paddling—a figure eight fromCherry Beach to the Spit to the Islands, with a short portage to the open Lake Ontario side for the return leg—was suggested to me by Antonio Lennert, the founder and CEO (Chief Experience Officer) of Surf the Greats. A Brazilian surfer who moved to Toronto in 2008, Lennert was surprised by how fewpeople he sawon and in the water when he cycled