My Account
Rikki Johnson’s life has been a turbulent journey from being adopted when a toddler, to a placement in a programme for at risk teenagers, a car accident which cost him his right elbow and on to finding a place where he could excel like no other, as a disabled kayaker. His journey has taught Rikki, who has just moved from Warkworth to Dairy Flat, one valuable lesson: nothing is impossible – no retreat, no surrender. His name will shortly be flashed across television screens world-wide, as he takes on his biggest challenge yet, for the sake of the Northland Emergency Services Trust rescue helicopter service ….
I was born in Nelson but moved with my family to Maungaturoto at the age of six. I had been adopted as a two-and-a-half year old. My adoptive Mum was a primary school teacher in Maungaturoto. I have a brother 18 months younger than me and also adopted. We are as different as chalk and cheese – he was quiet and I was rowdy. Maungaturoto was a great place to live. It is a very family-oriented town. I grew up loving swimming. I was a total water baby. I was the local swimming club age group champ five times between nine and 15 years old. I was very determined.
Then my life changed. My adoptive dad died when I was 13 and it was a downward spiral from then on. I lost interest in school, although I still did my swimming. At 15 years old I left school and also gave up swimming. Most of the other swimmers were taller than me, so I thought I’d try a different path. My first experience of kayaking was at Moirs Point Christian Camp in Mangawhai, while on holiday with my family. I enjoyed the half hour paddle a lot, but didn’t have opportunity for some years to have another go.
My downhill spiral continued after I left school and I ended up, at 17, in a Northland Wilderness Experience (NWE) programme for at-risk kids, based in Whangarei. This involved a 10-day expedition followed by 18 months of weekend activities. They were a great group of guys – I didn’t feel overpowered by them. We went on hikes and kayaked. We travelled to wilderness spots from Northland to Ruapehu, did caving in Whangarei and kayaked around the Bay of Islands. It was on one of my trips to Ruapehu that I met up with someone who would make a big impression on me – mountaineer and youth advocate Graeme Dingle of Leigh. Graeme was our guide on an ascent of Ruapehu. We nicknamed him The Human Spider because he never slowed down, no matter how steep the ascent. He made us work hard. Somehow I knew we were meant to meet and we would meet again.
While with NWE I got myself into a spot of trouble and in 1988 I was recommended for Graeme Dingle’s Journey Programme. Its aim was to get a bunch of violent young offenders together and take them on a long, physically demanding journey to teach them new skills and foster self-esteem. There were six of us. We had to get from Anakiwa in the Marlborough Sounds to Auckland under our own steam. The programme had a high media profile and a film crew followed us. One of the biggest challenges was kayaking across Cook Strait, which appeared easy until a huge storm hit. A 40-knot wind blew and every time I lifted my paddle, the wind caught it and nearly tipped me over. It took us 8.5 hours and I was the only one of the six to make it. It was a wake up call for me as a novice kayaker.
I returned from that experience, moved to Kaikohe to work and, in 1990, was involved in a car accident close to the town. My car was hit on the driver’s side by a 4WD and my elbow was shattered. My leather cycle jacket protected me from worse injury, but I still needed five operations to try and reconstruct the elbow. It was a toss up whether to amputate my arm. For a swimmer and kayaker, this was devastating. I didn’t take kindly to the treatment – the doctors put a pin in my elbow, which would have resulted in my having a ‘solid freeze’ joint, which wouldn’t bend. I pulled the pin out. The doctors eventually agreed to leave it out and I began to exercise my elbow until it moved. It was very painful. In a fit of ‘showing off ’ I broke that same arm and ended up in plaster for the next nine months.
After that experience I decided I needed somewhere quiet to ‘chill out’, so moved to Whakapirau for six months. I enrolled for a diploma in automotive engineering, got hold of a 350 Chevy engine and, with one good arm, did it up. Colin Smith Auto Services in Maungaturoto offered me a job and I started with him, cast and all. I worked for Colin off and on for five or six years. I was now in a state of denial about kayaking. I’d got back to swimming and even went skiing and water skiing but I’d decided you couldn’t kayak with no elbow. Then one day I watched a guy on the beach paddling his kayak and I wondered: “Could I still do that?” I borrowed his kayak and was back on the water again.
A mate and I designed a project to kayak across the Tasman Sea – we even took it to Sport Northland for comment. Then someone suggested I attempt to be the first disabled kayaker to paddle across Cook Strait. That was a new idea for me and I took on the challenge, in March 2006. I took 4hrs 8mins 51secs to kayak from Ohau Point near Wellington, to Perano Head in the Marlborough Sounds. The trip hit the headlines. I was now 38 and ready for more challenges. Foveaux Strait was beckoning.
Foveaux Strait is one of the hardest paddles I have done, but despite this, it attracted little publicity. It took 5.5 hours to do the 40kms from Half Moon Bay to Bluff, the last 10kms against the tide. That was in 2007. Last year, I decided to kayak the tough 40kms around Raoul Island, 1000kms north of New Zealand, to raise money for the Starship Hospital Air Ambulance Retrieval Service. This was a world first.
This time TV programme 20:20 featured my expedition, with a most unexpected result. Being adopted, I had always wanted to find my birth father. His sister, from Auckland, saw the 20:20 programme and thought I looked very like her brother. She contacted 20:20 and within a week, Dad had flown over from Australia to visit me. I found out he had had my photo on his wall all that time. We have been in regular contact ever since.
My latest project is challenging because of the distance involved. I’m planning to kayak 814kms from Paris down the Seine, to London, on the Thames River, probably in February next year. Brian Froggatt from Dargaville, in whose gym I have trained off and on for years, will accompany me. Brian had his leg amputated when he was three, so he knows what disability is like. I don’t see him sitting on the sideline watching, so I think there will be two disabled kayakers on the water. We are raising money for the Northland Emergency Services Trust rescue helicopter service. There is huge interest already in the United Kingdom. We expect about six million hits on a website we are setting up. Info: crayzeekayaker@gmail.com
