Kayaking from Giurgiu to Venice

Lucian Ionescu made a cruise from Giurgiu to Venice, on a kayak he had built himself.

România Internațional, 26.01.2014, 13:08

Lucian Ionescu is 49, and until recently he was the manager of a small furniture company in Bucharest. Three years ago he started building his own kayak. As a former pro athlete, he rediscovered rowing in 2005, and started racing on various lakes and rivers in Romania. Unfortunately, as he was very tall, he couldn’t find a kayak fitting his build, so he decided to make his own kayak. He says it’s not as hard as it looks:

Lucian Ionescu: “It is not complicated to build a kayak, but you do need a lot of attention to detail and patience. It is built of thin wooden strips, very narrow, and each one of them has to be adjusted. It is thorough work. In a kayak, everything is curved, there are no straight lines, and it takes a certain amount of perfection, as with any boat; it has three sections that really must be watertight. It also raises some issues of flexibility, because the dividing walls have to cope with the small scale bending caused by waves or shocks when the boat hits the bottom. It has fiberglass on the outside and the inside, and until I built this boat I hadn’t worked with it. It took about three years to build it, but I worked only when I had time, and when I had money to do it. You can actually build a kayak in about 6 months.”

His intention was to be able to travel long distances, he wanted to make a cruise from Giurgiu to Venice. He made a Facebook page where he posted his plans, hoping to find sponsors. Here is what he wrote there:

“I will go to Sf. Gheorghe on the Danube. Then I will go south on the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, on the Marmara Sea, through the Dardanelles to the Aegean Sea. I will sail off the Turkish coast to Marmaris. Then I will cross to Rhodos, in Greece, then on to Karpathos, in the south of Crete, then on to continental Greece following the shore of the Ionian Sea to the border with Albania. If the weather is fine over the following few days, I will attempt a crossing to Italy, then, following the coast, I will go on to Vieste. Also, weather permitting, I will cross the Adriatic to Lastovo, Croatia. If not, I will follow Italy’s shore to Venice.”

Last May, the kayak was ready. He loaded it up and went out into the world, his only link being a tablet and a mobile phone. He returned in December, a little before the winter celebrations, covering the approximately 1,500 km from Giurgiu to Venice in seven months. 270 km of them he did on foot, dragging behind the kayak in a harness. He had no problems crossing borders, but had all sorts of adventures, since boats under seven meters in length don’t need registration plates. Hence the confusion among border police officers, who could not register his kayak:

Lucian Ionescu: “They don’t have a solution to that, because usually boats don’t cross borders. Yachts and commercial ships do, but not boats. They were very open, though, and supported me a lot. They told me to write a paper and then they stamped it. They told me everywhere that I was a European citizen, so I had the right of entry, and that the problem lay with them. I was quite nervous in Turkey, however, since it is not a European country. The first port of entry is 170 km away from Tsarevo, in Bulgaria. I could not pull to the shore before reaching a port of entry. I got in touch with the Turkish Coast Guard, and they told me not to stop on beaches, not to sleep in towns before reaching Istanbul, and there to go straight to the border police to have papers drawn up. When I got to Istanbul, I went to the border police, I told them who I was and what I was doing, and the officer had only one word for me: ‘Go!’”

Back in Bucharest, his wife was following his progress, keeping in touch with the authorities, enjoying the fact that he was all right. Everywhere he went, Lucian Ionescu met people eager to help him. In Salonica, a group of Romanians welcomed him warmly:

Lucian Ionescu: “Our consul in Salonica invited me to the consulate, we took photos together, then he organized a small farewell festivity. He congratulated me. The Romanian authorities were delighted with what I was doing and supported me all throughout, which, to be quite honest, was unexpected.”

Lucian Ionescu made loads of friends, visited places off the tourist trail, and has around 2,000 friends on the Facebook page where he posts his photos. He only spent one day in Venice. His wife was waiting for him there, and they both returned home, driven by a friend he had made on the Internet.

Lucian Ionescu: “I asked on Facebook if there was anyone who could come and pick me up in Venice. I could have just taken a train or go by car, but I would have been left without my boat. Two or three people offered. The kayak was light, it hardly weighs 30 kilos empty. The equipment went in the trunk of the car, the kayak on top, it was actually very easy.”

We asked Lucian Ionescu what he had discovered while on his fantastic journey:

Lucian Ionescu: “I discovered people, that was by far the most important discovery. I had sort of lost my confidence in the people around me. I had to leave the country and use Facebook to discover that there were kind-hearted people around me even here, in Bucharest. Secondly, I discovered myself, I got to know my limits, and I found out how far I could push myself. I was on the edge, in difficult situations, but I made it.”

Lucian Ionescu has no funding yet for his next journey. However, he says that if he made it once, he will make it again. For the time being, he is writing a book about his first kayak journey, from Giurgiu to Venice.