Sea Kayaking in Nova Scotia

LOWER PROSPECT, N.S. - Shandi Bludreau has stick-straight brown hair, a skeptical squint and black marker printing on her shoulders: "Flirt" on the right, "I love peanut butter" on the left.

"My dumb friend did that," she explains, smiling in a way that makes you doubt she'll be washing off the writing any time soon. After calculating the number of days until her next birthday, Shandi decides she is "basically 13" -- a good age to be in Lower Prospect, Nova Scotia, a tiny fishing village that no longer has fish.

Nor does it have kitschy Victorian inns, overpriced coffee shops, or ye olde souvenir shops. In fact, there are no stores at all, not even a grocery store. The village consists of a handful of modest and tidy homes, a white church and a narrow road lined with sea roses.

About 200 people live in Lower Prospect, 30 minutes from Halifax, where the closest thing to a local attraction is Charles Norris's front yard, which is done up with brightly painted models of rustic houses, fishing boats and a few toy cars driven by Barbie and others of her ilk.

All of which makes it sound like your basic nightmare for an almost-13-year-old, but here's the thing: At that age, you have pretty much unlimited access to Dave. You can borrow his sea kayaks, scamper around his dock, giggle in his boathouse, eat his burgers, and yell, "Sure, Dave," in your most sarcastic voice when he reminds you to take a pump in your kayak. You can also hang around his girlfriend, Jillian, who is totally nice, plus, she's pretty and actually talks to you, unlike some people you could name.

Dave Adler came to town as a renter in 1997, while working on an MA in oceanography at Dalhousie University, and fairly quickly decided to ditch the degree and start a kayaking club for the kids of Lower Prospect. Why, exactly, he did this is both obvious and obscure: Dave is a good person, the kind who volunteers at the local school because he gets off on making the world a better place. But his virtue is not the guilt-inducing variety, because he has no problem with fun. Fun is the point, in fact.

Before Dave, "there was nothing to do here," says Tiffany Morash, a 12-year-old with a chestnut ponytail and skin the colour of honey. Well, not quite nothing, Shandi interjects, rather severely. "Sardines," she reminds Tiffany. "We played sardines, which is like hide-and-seek except when you find the person, you get in the hiding spot with them, and the game is over when everyone's in there."

Tiffany nods. Life was, well, lame.

"Now, we can swim off the float he built for us," says Tiffany. "And we get to go places we never went before, in the kayaks."

"One time?" interrupts Shandi, fastening the skirt over a kayak and pushing off into the water. "One time he took us camping? And he forgot the spoons? So in the morning we got to eat cereal with these Styrofoam things. It was a new adventure for us."

On paper, Dave Adler seems an unlikely hero in a province where a resident of 20 years' standing is still dismissed as a CFA, a come-from-away. He is not just a CFA but a 29-year-old American with a fancy college degree and blindingly white teeth. He's also a bit of a hot-shot in the world of water sports -- one of Canada's most highly qualified instructors in whitewater kayaking, whitewater canoeing and sea kayaking.

But none of that captures his essential Dave-ness, the way his long, wiry hair puffs out from the sides of a baseball hat, or his willingness to take as many as 28 local kids on a paddling trip once a week, or the fact that in a kayak he looks like a waterbug, skimming effortlessly across the surface of the ocean. In him, the physical prowess of the elite athlete is forgiveable, because he makes you feel, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you, too, have some talent as a paddler.

Which pretty much explains why the people of Lower Prospect have taken to Dave. That, and his conviction that the village could be -- should be -- something of a tourist mecca. There's the beautiful scenery, of course, but there are also the people themselves, who deserve to make a living.

So last year, Dave opened East Coast Outfitters. ECO specializes in adventure tourism, mostly sea kayaking packages that range from guided tours through the maze of austerely beautiful granite islands around Lower Prospect to strenuous two-day adventures complete with hiking, lobster binges and minions pitching your tent. But unlike the sea kayaking outfits based in Halifax, which bring tourists in and take them out again without contributing anything to the community except garbage and traffic, ECO employs locals and its boathouse has become the de facto community centre.

"There's no more big cod near to shore. The seals ate 'em all," says Tommy Norris, a former fisherman who now captains the rehabilitated 22-foot fishing boat ECO uses to ferry food, equipment and, occasionally, tourists, from one island to the next. "You have to go six hours out, past the container ships, to catch anything, then you have to call in to log it. Fifty dollars a call. There's just two boats now that go out."

You get the feeling Tommy has got over any grief he had about this state of affairs, and is just as happy fishing for tourists as for cod. Ditto Courtney Blackburn, a soft-spoken 18-year-old who helps out in the ECO office and is training to be a guide next year. As of September, she will be the first person in the community to attend university.

Last Saturday, a perfectly warm and sunny day in Lower Prospect, ECO was busy. Courtney was helping settle small groups of tourists into their kayaks, while guides explained the finer points of paddling.

An English family returned to the dock to report that they had seen a whale (their guide, Becky, reported later to widespread outrage that their 18-year-old son had at one point required towing). Up in the boathouse, a large group that called itself OWL -- Old, Wise Lesbians -- was filling out liability waivers and debating whether they'd be just as happy being ferried around by Tommy and skipping the paddling.

In the end, most of the OWLs piled into Tommy's boat to fish for mackerel and only four novices braved the kayaks, led by Scott Sanford, a partner in ECO. Within minutes, they were gliding smoothly through the water, breeze in their faces, winding past one island after another and watching seals bob up out of the water, while Scott called, "Remember, press the left pedal to go left, right to go right."

It's really that easy, and that exhilarating, though more experienced kayakers can tackle waves in the open ocean with Dave. He's one of those people who makes you feel safe, not least because he's an experienced wilderness Emergency Medical Technician.

But it's more than that: You get the sense he's earned some luck in life. At one point last year, he sold one of his kayaks to pay for materials to build the boathouse, and promptly lost $100 of his earnings. It was a lot of money to him, and he retraced his steps with mounting panic to Lower Prospect's closest store, White's Lake General Store and John's Eatery, about 15 minutes away. There, on the bulletin board, someone had tacked up Dave's $100 bill. Dave thinks this is a story about the community, but I suspect it is just as much a story about Dave.

On Saturday evening, after all the tourists were gone and the mosquitoes had begun to bite, some of the village kids got back in the kayaks, just fooling around, enjoying the freedom of it and retrieving the floatable golf balls that a friend of Dave's was driving off the dock. Some of their parents were standing on the porch outside the boathouse, eating hot dogs and admiring the pink and orange streaks left behind by the sunset. Dave and his girlfriend, Jillian Brown, were on the dock, sitting down for the first time in 12 hours, watching the kids.

"My main message I'm trying to get out is pick something, set up a coffee cart or a little business retrieving golf balls, whatever," Dave says. "You can make money at it. And these kids get it. They will be our guides. They will --"

But just then, Tyler, Tiffany's three-year-old cousin, howled, "Dave! 'Anoe! Wanna go 'anoe!" And Dave leapt out of his chair to get the canoe ready.