Gary Kristensen dipped his double-bladed paddle into the Columbia River and pulled as hard as he could. The effort felt fruitless—it was like he was paddling through peanut butter. Kristensen, 46, had expected a gentle tailwind for his boating journey, but gusts were cresting 35 miles per hour, sending waves splashing onto him. Next to Kristensen, a support kayak was having to paddle backward just to keep even with his sluggish pace.
Kristensen’s journey would have been easier, of course, if not for his chosen watercraft: a 950-pound pumpkin.
From October 12 to 13, Kristensen, a real estate appraiser from Happy Valley, Oregon, spent 26 hours paddling his enormous gourd down the Columbia River. He completed 45.67 miles, which the as the new record for a category titled “longest journey by pumpkin.” Kristensen told ϳԹ that the arduous journey was a true test for any paddler—especially when gusting winds kicked up.
“Water was coming over the top constantly,” Kristensen told ϳԹ. “It was like paddling a bowl of soup.”
Kristensen is no stranger to using enormous gourds as boats—he’s been growing massive pumpkins since 2011 and paddling them since 2013. He’s raced pumpkins in the West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta, an annual festival for seaworthy gourds held in the coastal town of Tualatin, every year since 2013, and has won the event four times since 2018.
Until this year, the standing record for longest pumpkin paddle was 39 miles, set last October on the Missouri River by Steve Kueny and his pumpkin, Huckleberry. But as he watched his own pumpkins grow this season, Kristensen thought he might have one that could rival Huckleberry. He dubbed this challenger “The Punky Loafster,” partly as an ode to the eighties sitcom, but also because he’d jammed wooden boards next to the pumpkin as it formed, so that it would grow in long and skinny, like a loaf of bread.
“If you’re going to race a pumpkin, you want a smaller pumpkin, like around 700 or 800 pounds,” Kristensen said.
Growing pumpkin watercraft is a science, Kristensen explained. For a long distance paddle, on a river like the Columbia, with boat traffic, wind, and waves, you want a larger gourd, to give yourself more space to stretch, and more room to take on water without sinking. You also want the pumpkin to be as long and symmetrical as possible, with a flat bottom and smooth skin.
Kristensen trained for his journey with daily runs, and long weekend paddling trips with pool noodles wrapped around his kayak, to simulate the drag he’d experience with the pumpkin. Punky Loafster—which measured 14 feet around—weighed 1,224 pounds before Kristensen hollowed it out, and it still weighed in at a monstrous 950 pounds before he hopped into it and began paddling. Compare that to the average canoe or kayak, which might run anywhere from 30 to 50 pounds, and it’s easy to see why manning the Loafster was so arduous. “You paddle, and it just doesn’t move,” he said.
When Kristensen hopped into the Loafster on October 12, he carried a small pump to bail water and a yoga mat to sit on. Aside from that, it was just him, a pumpkin, and a paddle.
Even by pumpkin paddling standards, Kristensen had a rough go. Previous record holder Kueny averaged around 3.5 mph on the Missouri River inside Huckleberry. Kristensen and Punky Loafster recorded an average speed around 1.7 mph. “It was pathetic,” he joked. “At best we had a half mile per hour current. But at times I think the current was even flowing backward, because of the tide.”
The strong winds, which began hammering him when he was only five miles down the river, made things particularly tough. “These were pretty big waves. They’d be a lot for any boat,” he said. Kristensen tried to stop paddling to pump water, but battered by the waves, without his paddles to balance the pumpkin, he was at constant risk of capsizing. It took an hour for him to get to shore, drain his pumpkin, and let the winds die down, but he managed to do it without sinking.
That evening, disaster struck again. The electric lights strung up on his friend’s support pontoon boat caught fire and were destroyed. “We were trying to use those lights to help us find a beach and a safe place to park the pumpkin,” Kristensen explained. Without the lights, they continued paddling through the night—17 hours of continuous paddling in total—until the sun rose and they could safely dock the pumpkin.
Finding a gentle beach, Kristensen moored his pumpkin and climbed out to take a nap. He woke an hour later to find tides had left the Loafster high and dry on the beach. “I tried to get it back in the water, and I couldn’t budge it at all,” he said. “It would not move an inch.” His friend, David, furiously began digging the pumpkin out, but the pair soon discovered that the beach had been used to moor barges, and there were large industrial cables underneath the ground. Gingerly rolling the 950-pound watercraft around this minefield of cables, it took three hours for Kristensen to get the Punky Loafster back in the water. Kristensen paddled the remainder of the day to finish out his 46-mile trip.
Despite all the obstacles, Kristensen didn’t didn’t end his paddle because his pumpkin sank or broke apart, or because he was too exhausted to continue. The Punky Loafster was still riverworthy, but as darkness fell on their second day of paddling, he and David decided to end their journey. It was Sunday, and they had to go back to work the following day. “I felt strong,” Kristensen said, “but we were running out of weekend.”
Kristensen may have entered the annals of Guinness World Record fame, but there will be no floating off into the sunset for the Punky Loafster. Kristensen left his craft lying on the banks of the Columbia River next to the boat ramp where he put out. “I’m sure it rotted away long ago,” he told me. He plans to return next year with another pumpkin, and see how much farther he can go.