My name is Ted Kirkpatrick and I’m from St. Catherines, Ontario.

I’m a deckhand on the Huron’s crew with McKeil. I’ve been working for McKeil for about two and a half years now. My most powerful memory of water would be my first trip ever with McKeil when I sailed up to the Arctic to Baffin Island. I never sailed before, it was pretty rough. It was a rude introduction to the world of sailing for sure. I’ve grown up around water all my life.

I have a cottage in Quebec, it’s on an island. We towed the boat over, obviously. I always grew up fishing and around boats. I always had a long connection with the water and there was a point where I living out in BC and I fell in love with the ocean and I know at that point that I wanted to make my living on the water. So I chose to do so and here I am today.

My first memory of water would’ve been at my cottage just fishing with my dad and with my uncles. We had a cottage on an island so my first memory of water would’ve been boating over to the island every year and bringing a lot of supplies over. Water was very important to us just getting to the cottage. We couldn’t drive over there so boats were an integral part of all of that. Water has been important in my life because it has always been a means to get to my cottage and it’s where I make my living. I fish and wake board and water ski so water is where I work and it’s where I play. It’s important to me for many reasons other that just work or just play. It’s an integral part of my life.

Water is worth protecting because I mean it’s 70% of the world and 90% of all life exists in the oceans and the lakes. The health of the oceans and of lakes is integral to our survival as humans so we must protect it and obviously we see with adverse weather things like global warming and the rising oceans creating more snow in the winter and more rain the summer. It’s important to protect water for one for my job and two for my leisure and three for the survival of us.

My favorite place to swim is where my family cottage is in Lac Brome, QC. It’s where I grew up as a kid and spent all my summers. It’s where my heart is. This is the longitude and the latitude of the end of the dock at my cottage. So if you stand on my dock on my island, that’s what it’ll say. My connection to water is like I said, it’s my life, it’s my leisure, it’s everything about me.

Being from Ontario, as Newfoundlanders call the “flat lander” - a little different from them, it’s kind of odd that a guy from the middle of the country would make his living on the ocean. It’s always been an integral part of my life and it will be so probably until I die.