Diogo Aguiar had never really kayaked before he pushed off from Barra do Chui, Brazil's southernmost tip, in June 2025 with a fishing kayak, almost no money and a plan to paddle the country's entire coastline — roughly 8,200km — to Oiapoque on the French Guiana border. Locals in the southern paddling scene gave him weeks. Nearly two years on, he's still going.
The former bus and truck driver grew up far from the sea in the Brazilian interior and was working in the beach town of Ubatuba when rental kayaks sparked the idea. A little research turned up an inspiring precedent: a decade earlier, Adelson Carneiro had paddled the same coast, but north to south. Aguiar chose the harder direction, south to north, straight into the prevailing northeasterly winds. His first launch ended with a capsize in rough water and a wait for calmer seas he couldn't afford to sit out — he had no money for a room. Small donations from strangers who'd heard about the trip kept him afloat, literally and otherwise.
The turning point came when he crossed paths with Carneiro himself, who advised him to thread the interior lagoons rather than risk a notoriously exposed stretch of open southern coastline. The sceptical paddling community gradually came around too, offering gear, advice and eventually sponsorship. He now paddles a proper sea kayak.
Progress is deliberately slow and interrupted. Aguiar paddled from early June to early December 2025, then went back to Ubatuba to sell ice cream on the beach until he'd banked enough to resume in mid-February 2026. He has logged around 2,000km over roughly 80 days on the water, averaging 30-40km a day depending on conditions. His target for reaching Oiapoque is 2028, with about 300 paddling days needed in total. He frames the trip as more than an athletic feat — he wants to meet the fishing villages and coastal communities along the way and get to what he calls the essence of Brazil.
For travellers, the story doubles as an unusually honest portrait of Brazil's coastline — a 8,000km-plus sweep that runs from windswept southern beaches through the surf towns of Santa Catarina and São Paulo state, past Rio, up theBahian coast of dunes and reefs, and into the remote mangroves of the Amazonian north. Most of us won't paddle it, but Aguiar's route reads like a master list of under-visited coastal Brazil. You can sample it in fragments: the lagoons of Rio Grande do Sul, the island-studded shore around Paraty and Ubatuba, the whale-watching bays of the south, or the far northern stretch near Oiapoque that few international visitors ever see. It's also a reminder that some of the best travel stories start with very little planning — though a bit more than a fishing kayak and a dollar is recommended.
