If you were on Chandos Lake this summer and noticed a woman dressed in pink paddleboarding by your cottage, you weren’t the only one. In fact, over the course of eight days and 15 hours this summer, Tania Rightmyer paddled past every property on the North Kawartha lake.
On Sunday (August 24), Rightmyer paddled to her own dock where her two daughters stood with champagne, and danced to music by P!nk to celebrate the completion of her self-imposed challenge to stand-up paddleboard the lake’s entire perimeter and every island with a cottage.
With many neighbours cheering her on along the way, she racked up a total 72.57 kilometres on the water to complete the challenge.
“For me, it’s about the sense of community, but I also love to set a challenge for myself and make sure I get it done,” she says. “I’ve always been a water girl and I’ve done every water sport, but ever since paddleboarding came in, I just loved it as soon as I started doing it.”
Someone who loves to keep her “brain and body busy,” Rightmyer sets a New Year’s goal — not a resolution — for herself to complete every year, like doing the CN Tower Edge Walk or learning to speak Spanish. This year, her goal was to see every cottage on the lake from the water’s view.
“This (year’s goal) was big in the sense that it brought the community together,” she says. “A big part was I wanted to bring awareness to how incredibly clean our lake is and that everybody works hard at caring for it, and that’s very important to everybody that’s a cottager on Chandos.”
A real estate agent with BALL Real Estate Inc. Brokerage in Apsley, Rightmyer was born and raised in Peterborough but has been been visiting the lake since she was seven years old and began visiting the cottage her parents built in 1977. Now, she resides at the property as much as she can from May through October.
Paddling early in the mornings, Rightmyer set out on her paddleboarding challenge for the first time on June 8, leaving her property on the south side of the narrows, heading southwest into West Bay.
She tracked her mileage and time through the Strava app and wore her favourite colour, pink, so she would be recognized by cottagers and seen by her two daughters who chauffeured her to each day’s starting and end points.
“I didn’t want to rush because I would chat with people that I knew at their docks for a bit, so on the first day, I had to readjust my mindset that’s it’s not about how fast I go,” Rightmyer says.
“It’s about just being here and enjoying every minute of it and living in the moment of it. I get in a hypnotic state where I just get on a roll, and I get into the groove where life is pure bliss. I keep going and before I knew it, three hours were done.”
In stints of two to three hours each day that she paddled, Rightmyer achieved her goal of seeing all the roughly 1,200 cottages on the lake, which is one of the largest in the area.
“I’d see little unique things on people’s properties, like signs that are special to them,” she says.
“(I saw) really cute original old cottages, which would be over 100 years old, to places that are now being rebuilt into modern cottages. It was just a really cool blend of the uniqueness of each property, and everybody has pride in the property they own — you can just see it. Everybody loves their spot on the lake.”
But the cottages weren’t the only things Rightmyer was excited to be seeing along the journey.
“I saw lots of wildlife like loons, (great) blue herons, and turtles,” she says. “It was pretty sweet — almost brings tears to your eyes, just watching nature in its own element.”
Because she posted her challenge in regional Facebook groups and the story spread quickly around the community, she was being recognized and cheered on for doing the challenge, even when she wasn’t paddling but out in the community.
She even started a competition, urging viewers to post photos of her paddling for a chance to win a $50 Shantilly’s Place marina gift card.
“People would open up their windows and it’d be early morning, so you could tell they’re having breakfast, and they would yell because they were excited for me,” Rightmyer says. “Everybody was so lovely, and I wish I had been able to stop at everybody’s dock that offered a chat — but I would never have gotten it done.”
In addition to encouragement from her neighbours, Rightmyer says she couldn’t have done the challenge without the help from her two daughters, Taylor and Kennedy Daly.
“It’s nice as a mom to be a role model for your kids, even when they’re adult kids, so to see them cheering me on and smiling when I came in — that was the highlight,” she says. “I always say Chandos Lake is in our blood.”
