It was also brutally difficult to move when high tide pushed us off the hard-packed sand and into the deep stuff, or when there was a headwind, which was pretty much all the time. On these occasions, we'd switch from a one-man engine, which worked nicely with a guy between the bamboo poles pushing a connecting bar forward, to a three-man team. We'd yoke the rickshaw to our back-packs with a carabiner and about eight feet of nylon rope and attempt to push/pull in unison. Everyone took their turn, but it seemed more often than not that the duty fell to me and my good friend Troy Rodriguez, 38, a pharmaceutical sales rep from San Diego. This was not awesome.

The best adventures are hatched in the oddest places.
I first met Pat in October 2007, in a village on the Qiantang River, in southeast China. The Qiantang experiences regular tidal bores—waves pushed upstream by powerful ocean tides—and I was scouting for a surf expedition on behalf of a team of American pros. Pat and a 30-year-old professional Brazilian longboarder named Eduardo Bagé were there to ride the bore, one of about a dozen in the world that's surfable. We got to talking surf trips, and I mentioned that I'd done some walking expeditions in California and Costa Rica, carrying my board for a week or more to reach tough-to-access—and thus empty—breaks. Next on my list, I told them, was France.

Pat lit a cigarette and stared at me with a huge grin. "I also do these trips," he said. "I had never met anyone else who does it, until you."

He told me that he'd been using homemade rickshaws since he was a teenager to carry boards to empty breaks near Bordeaux. But he'd never attempted anything as ambitious as what I had in mind. We decided right there to do a trip together.

After China, we slowly began planning over e-mail. The waves north of Bordeaux spill over shifting sandbars, Pat wrote, and surfing is best in the fall, when offshore winds groom overhead waves into glassy faces. We invited Bagé and Troy, and later welcomed Martin Hartley, a hardy 40-year-old British photographer who's shot over a dozen Arctic expeditions. Pat also insisted we time the trek to coincide with a September mascaret (French for "tidal bore") on the Dordogne River, which we could ride before setting off on our trek.

It wasn't until we joined Pat on a foggy early evening in the tiny harbor of St. Pardon, about 100 miles upstream of the Atlantic, that I realized he was something of a big kahuna in France. Some 30 locals on longboards and kayaks were there to ride the bore, and they treated him like their bro king, calling out his name and reaching for handshakes while making sure not to get in his way. As sunset turned to dusk, we all followed Pat into the water to wait for the wave. It began as a distant hiss, then escalated into a roar as a waist-high wall of water appeared from around a tree-lined bend and lifted us howling up the half-mile-wide river. We rode at first as a massive party, but soon guys started falling off. Two minutes in, it was just Pat, a kayaker friend of his, and me. My legs burned, but Pat coached me over the rumble of the wave: "Steer to the left! A little to the right! Move to the nose of your board!"

After about five minutes, I relaxed and, in the fading light, took notice of the passing countryside—rolling vineyards, clapboard farmhouses, ramshackle fishing camps, white marble mansions, and the castle of Vayres. Twenty minutes and three miles later, the mascaret finally petered out. I was completely exhausted.

"Great ride," Pat said as we clawed our way up the steep, muddy riverbank. "Only ten surfers have ever ridden the bore this far."