Her next adventure will take her from Japan to San Francisco, across the
North Pacific. That’s 5,000 miles. And this time she’s rowing. She’s about
seven months away from that expedition. Her team is packing food for 180 days.
After that she’ll take on an even bigger challenge: circumnavigating the
globe. From San Francisco she’ll bike across the United States, row the
Atlantic, bike the roads of Europe, and either kayak, bike, or paddleboard past
Russia and China.
Not many people find themselves floating in the narrow body of water that
separates the United States from Russia. Then again, not many people consider
themselves a professional adventurer.
The Bering Strait is a 58-mile-wide
stream of water between Alaska and Siberia. She decided she wanted to
paddleboard across it because “people say it’s something that can’t be done.”
She would be able to float in areas that no boat can reach, and see parts of
the Arctic that have never been explored by anybody.
For Sonya, “something that can’t be done” is exactly what she wants to do.
She had already checked off mind-boggling quests–like rowing the Atlantic on a
team (that took 56 days), and biking 1,800
miles from Mexico to Seattle.
The Bering Strait isn’t exactly friendly waters; there’s a reason why it’s
not a regular destination for adventure travelers. In the winter it’s covered
by ice, and when it’s not, it’s about 35 degrees cold–enough to give anyone
hypothermia within minutes. Don’t look down, either: it can be as deep as 165 feet.
Sonya started the trek by taking a boat ride to the Russian side of the
strait once the conditions were clear enough and the intense wind had died
down. She kneeled on her paddleboard and started moving slowly toward the
United States, across the only ocean gateway between the Pacific and Arctic
oceans. Then she stood up and stared straight ahead, moving her paddle from
side to side, ever so slowly pushing herself toward land.
The hours passed. They would take up almost half a day. “If I had known it
would have been 11 hours, it would have been really unfun. You can’t think
about it,” she says. “I just take it one stroke at a time.”
As her board slid up to the Alaskan shore, she knelt there in place, her
hands on the board, facing down as the waves rolled in around her.
“The moment that I touched the beach, knowing I did what I set out to do,
was just incredible,” she says. “I just felt an overwhelming sensation of
happiness that I had stuck it out.”
That sensation pushes Sonya to take on increasingly risky challenges. Her
list of future adventures goes on: sailing around the Arctic Circle on a
handmade wooden boat, sailing around the world with just one other partner, and
hiking the Great Wall of China.
“There’s so much more,” Sonya says. “There’s always something left to be explored.
There’s always something new. What drives me is, there’s something around every
corner that I haven’t seen yet.”
