NORTH BAY - Sixteen-year-old Hannah Gignac knows how to dream big and work hard to make her dreams happen.
This summer she fulfilled a dream, leading to the biggest adventure of her young life.
The Grade 12 North Bay high school student was fascinated with sailing from a very early age.
“My parents raised me around boats. It started with power boats. I fell in love with the water. So, every summer for the past 16 years, I’ve been on the water boating,” shared Gignac.
“My fascination with sailing came from my parents who wanted to circumnavigate the world on a sailboat. They had bought a sailboat about a year ago.”
When planning a vacation for last summer, the teen told her parents that she wanted to take part in a sailing expedition, even though she didn’t have much sailing experience.
As it happened, Gignac’s parents had been following The Cruising Kiwis, a popular YouTube family, who posts about their sailing experiences.
“They have been sailing for about six years. The dad is a former Olympic rower, the mom is a former triathlon world champion, and they have three sons. So, they decided about six years ago that they wanted to live on a sailboat full time because they want to circumnavigate the world,” explained Gignac.
“They obviously have a lot of sailing experience, and I thought that was perfect for me because I really want to sail when I’m older. I want to circumnavigate the world and do exactly what they’re doing. So, what better way than to actually get raw experience from them and get all their knowledge and learn how to sail that way?”
Her parents suggested she reach out to them.
“I thought that was an amazing idea, but I knew they were busy people, and I wondered if they would even consider having me come aboard. I was looking at it almost as a student exchange type of program where I could just go for two months and learn how to sail.”
Once contacted, the Cruising Kiwis enthusiastically responded to her request to join them.
“Within three hours they had reached back to me saying they thought it was an amazing idea, and they wanted to talk about dates and if this was even a possibility. So, we started planning for this back in February of this year.”
Following months of Zoom calls and emails, they managed to iron out the details, and with her parent’s support, Gignac embarked on a trip of a lifetime.
“I was just so ready for this new adventure. The only thing my parents were worried about was the fact I might get the travel bug, which I very much have now,” laughed Gignac.
Arrangements were made for the teen to meet the family in the Seychelles, an island country in the Indian Ocean, off East Africa.
“The plan was that we would stay a month in the Seychelles, and the entirety of this journey would be that I do an ocean passing with this family,” explained Gignac.
“They’re an amazing family, they put so much confidence in me. They taught me everything they could teach me about sailing. It was such a beautiful experience.”
The month-long stay in Seychelles was a busy one.
“We ended up touring different anchorages around Seychelles and they brought me to different snorkeling and dive areas where there was beautiful coral and there was sea life everywhere. They had been in the Seychelles for a month, so they had already done most of it, but they wanted me to experience it. So, they brought me everywhere and anywhere,” Gignac recalled.
“They took us snorkeling at a little island just outside the Seychelles and it was my first time snorkeling. We were drift snorkeling because the waves were so big, they just kind of take you along the surface. You didn’t even have to kick, the waves did it for you. I was snorkeling with the mom and son, and they said they saw sharks. That was the only thing I said I didn’t want to see because I do have a fear of sharks. Apparently, there were a few circling around us. They were harmless little reef sharks so nothing to worry about.”
Gignac said they had an encounter with turtles.
“We were swimming along and these two turtles showed up out of nowhere. They got quite close to us, I could definitely reach out to them, the space was about a metre from my face. They were beautiful and docile, the most docile creatures because you’re sitting there, and they are quite massive. But they just swim along beside you and don’t even care that you’re there. The only thing they were curious about were the cameras and my flippers which was quite cute.”
The teen adventurer also came in close contact with tortoises.
“In the Seychelles, we went to an island where it homed a bunch of tortoises. They were being killed off in the Seychelles over time, so they brought them there to relocate them. It was a rehabilitation centre for the tortoises. There were I’d say about 200 tortoises on the island. They were just stunning,” Gignac stated.
“I had my head down in one picture and I could touch my forehead to its forehead and just stroke its neck. I was told you must be careful because they can snap at you but none of them seemed like they wanted to bite.”
The group also did a lot of hiking and sightseeing, before heading to Tanzania where they wanted to take part in a safari.
Getting to Tanzania required a week-long ocean passage on their catamaran.
“The catamaran was about 42 feet with four bedrooms in it. There are two sails; there is the main sail and a head sail at the very front, and your main sail is pushed more towards the back. They had two light wind sails that we used during our passage,” stated Gignac.
”You’re out on the open ocean and you’re just touring however many days you can, with whatever wind you have. We tried to base the passage on wind conditions. We found a good time slot to go where winds looked like they would be up to 30 knots which is quite high and that means the waves would be quite big, but we were up for the challenge. So, we were pushing as far south as we could, so when we arrived in Tanzania, we could come up a bit more north if we had to.”
Gignac initially set out on this excursion wanting a sailing experience, which she went on to get in spades.
“You don’t put the sails down because you need to get there, so that was my first time doing a night passage. It was my first time really sailing. In the month we were in the Seychelles going from anchorage to anchorage, I had done some sailing, but this was my true test.”
She had big responsibilities onboard the boat.
“I would get up at five in the morning for my shift and they would leave me on my own. It was dark out in the morning, and they had full confidence in me, they left me there at the helm. The nice thing about sailing is, you have got an autopilot, so you’re not always hand steering. But, there were a few times where the autopilot was messing up on our course a bit, so I did have to hand steer, but altogether it was fun.”
The thought of running into pirates was in the back of their minds.
“We were a little bit worried because where we were sailing, we were close to the Somali border so, Somali pirates. This is why when I said we were trying to go as far south as we could, we were still teetering along the border. So that was our only kind of iffy part. But at night when I was doing a night shift, they said to look for lights, and then you can put on a tracking system on all of our devices and instruments that we had at the helm. And I could see what kind of ship it was and if it didn’t have a name, get the captain up and he’d deal with it.”
Once safely in Tanzania going on a safari was high on the agenda.
“We had met up with a bunch of other ‘cruisers’ and they had all done safaris so, obviously we wanted to jump on that train. One of their patrons named Josh reached out to us and said he was a fan of the family’s YouTube channel,“ explained Gignac.
“So, we embarked on a bunch of safaris, where we saw elephants, wildebeests, zebras, lions, some hippos from a distance, some gazelles, and we saw a rhino from a distance.”
They did manage to get quite close to the zebras.
“They are stunning. They are what you would think, they are so beautiful. We were so close to some that you could reach outside of the car and touch them, but of course, we didn’t.”
They were also given access to a remote Datoga tribe village, again thanks to Josh.
“We spent about five days there, and there was a celebration of life for the oldest member. He was 100 years old; he had nine wives and with those nine wives he had 51 children. So, it was a massive celebration. We were welcomed with such open arms there. It was so beautiful to see a completely different culture.”
Gignac got a sense of what life was like for the villagers.
“They would take logs, whatever they could find, and take cow feces and once that dried, it would make like a clay, and those were their houses, they were just little mud huts. That is where they slept and where they cooked, and they would usually fit about seven people,” Gignac noted.
“The second day there, we were invited to a tribal meeting. So obviously it is a very sacred thing. We were allowed to sit in and listen to them basically talk about their day. The language that they spoke was Swahili. We learned how to say good morning and other greetings and thank you.“
The young teen felt confident throughout her journey.
“I had no bone in my body that was telling me that this was something I should be fearful of, or something that wasn’t going to be an experience of a lifetime for me. My parents were 100 per cent supportive.”
The Cruising Kiwis were “fantastic.”
“They were exactly like my family. They were truly down to earth. I knew I would be well taken care of by them. They were just salt of the earth people.”
Gignac returned home in September, ready to begin her final year of high school with a new philosophy on life.
“It was seeing the way people lived and coming back home and seeing how uptight we are about little things that don’t matter, and how fast-paced we move, and just how angry we can get so quickly, and how everything is such a burden, such a big deal. Going there and especially seeing this tribe, even everywhere in Tanzania, seeing people in little markets and women carrying baskets on their heads, who don’t have a lot, and they are the happiest people. One saying they always said to us was ‘slow, slow,’” observed Gignac.
“That is how they live, taking everything in stride, and that is how we should live instead of worrying about things that haven’t even happened or worrying about things that are so minute. That was so interesting to me.”
Ever since the age of eight, Gignac wanted a life somehow connected to water.
“I want to be a Coast Guard member because, with the Coast Guard, I could do so many different branches of work, so if I want to study marine biology and do things around the world, I easily can. But I do think I want to take a year off after Grade 12 and just do some more travelling, because the world is so vast and I’ve only seen a small, small part of it, and I have just fallen in love with everything. I truly think that the world is the most beautiful gift we were given as a human race, and if we can, we should just explore and see everything. “
This big dreamer hopes her adventure will inspire others to follow their own dreams.
“I think when you find your calling, and I had a moment where I was sitting, and I was looking out on the water, and I just knew this is what I want to do. When you find something that you really want to do, if it can benefit others around the world, do it. Follow your dreams. Do whatever you want to do because life is too short not to.”
