Jeff Fabiszewski

Jeffrey Fabiszewski is the founding partner of Liquid Rhythm Kayaking.  His goal is to teach water safety courses, ranging in level from beginner to advanced river, inter coastal, to open water as well as rescue workshops for non profit organizations, paddling festivals and kayak symposiums.

Eagle Scout  •  ACA Level 3 Coastal Kayaking Instructor  •  NOLS Wilderness First Responder •  Outdoor Educator  •  Author  •  Expedition Kayaker  •  Youth Mentor  •  Veterans Advocate  •  Florida  •  liquidrhythmkayaking.com  •  floridaoats.wordpress.com   •  LinkedIn

BIOGRAPHY

Early Life & Formative Years

Jeffrey Fabiszewski’s relationship with the outdoors began in the 1970s in western Pennsylvania, shaped by a father who understood that the best classroom had no walls. Together they canoed the rivers and trekked the trails of the Allegheny Mountains as Boy Scouts, cooking over open fires and sleeping under the Milky Way. Those early years built not only skills but a philosophy: that nature is where character is formed.

Jeffrey advanced to Eagle Scout — the highest rank in Boy Scouts of America — and subsequently earned the Vigil Honor through the Order of the Arrow, the BSA’s national honor camping society. He completed BSA Woodbadge (Eagle Patrol), the most advanced adult leadership training in scouting. These are not sequential achievements; they represent a sustained, decades-long commitment to the principles of outdoor education, service, and mentorship.

His academic foundation is a Bachelor of Arts in History, American Studies, and Anthropology — a discipline that runs as a quiet current beneath all of his subsequent work. It informs how he reads a landscape, how he interprets the cultures that paddled Florida’s waterways before him, and how he frames the wilderness experience within the larger arc of American identity.

Florida & the Transition to Kayaking (1994–2001)

In 1994, Jeffrey relocated to Florida, where the flat, intricate waterways of the Gulf Coast offered a fundamentally different kind of wilderness than the Alleghenies. He transitioned from canoeing to sea kayaking in 2001, discovering a vessel that could access the shallow backcountry of Tampa Bay, the mangrove tunnels of the Ten Thousand Islands, and eventually the open water of the Florida Keys. Florida did not simply become his home — it became his subject.

Liquid Rhythm Kayaking & Florida O.A.T.S. (2007–Present)

In 2007, Jeffrey co-founded Liquid Rhythm Kayaking with partner Sean Fitzgibbon, building what became one of Florida’s most-read paddling and outdoor education platforms. Over nearly two decades the site has accumulated more than 166,000 readers and 500+ posts spanning expedition journals, gear reviews, safety instruction, wilderness cooking, and philosophical reflections on the outdoor life. The blog’s longevity is itself a credential: it is a primary-source archive of Florida paddling culture.

He simultaneously developed Florida O.A.T.S. (Florida’s Outdoor Adventure Trail Secrets), a parallel platform covering the full spectrum of Florida backcountry travel — backpacking, bushcraft, overlanding, first aid, and coastal paddling. Together the two platforms represent a sustained, documented body of original outdoor writing accessible to the public.

Jeffrey’s current writing includes a series titled Rekindling Transcendentalist Wilderness, which positions the outdoor experience within the American philosophical tradition of Thoreau and Emerson — signaling a deliberate evolution from instructional content toward literary and cultural non-fiction.

Expedition Record

Jeffrey’s expeditions are not recreational outings. They are documented, purposeful journeys with defined routes, objectives, and public records. His verified Florida expedition record spans more than 480 miles of coastal and river paddling across four major expeditions:

• 2007 — Pinellas County Circumnavigation: 100 miles in 4 days (May 3–6), averaging 25 miles per day, undertaken as a fundraiser for the Extremity Games. The expedition was covered by O&P News and documented publicly.
• 2008–2009 — Florida Keys: 90 miles across two trips through the backcountry of the Keys.
• 2009 — Suwannee River: 100 miles over five days, New Year’s, from Woods Ferry to Adams Tract, camping at designated wilderness river camps.
• 2011 — Great Calusa Blueway Paddling Trail: 190 miles over two weeks in September, from Caloosahatchee Regional Park through Pine Island Sound, Cayo Costa, J.N. Ding Darling, Estero Bay, and the Imperial River.

A fifth expedition is currently in active planning: a 2028 kayak traverse from Ketchikan to Juneau, Alaska, with Sean Fitzgibbon. This multi-week open-water and coastal expedition in the Inside Passage represents a significant escalation in scale and environment from the Florida expeditions and will be documented as a film project.

Published Writing

Jeffrey’s outdoor writing has appeared in five publications:

• Onshore Offshore Magazine — July 2006
• Florida Outdoor Adventures Magazine — July 2006
• Canoe News — Summer 2011
• Paddle.net
• Sea Kayaker Magazine — 2011

He is currently developing three book manuscripts for publication, targeted at outdoor enthusiasts, families, and general readers with a Florida setting. The works span three distinct genres: backcountry and outdoor cooking, family outdoor education (a how-to guide for parents and children), and literary suspense fiction. All three are set in Florida. Working titles are withheld pending publisher commitment.

Adaptive Paddling & Veterans Service

Jeffrey has contributed sustained time and expertise to adaptive paddling programs for recovering wounded veterans, with 14 documented posts under the Team River Runner category on Liquid Rhythm Kayaking. Team River Runner is a nationally recognized program using whitewater kayaking as a rehabilitation modality for injured service members. His involvement is instructional and logistical, not ceremonial.

Youth Education & Scouting

Jeffrey serves as a Scouting America BSA Merit Badge Counselor in seven disciplines: Canoeing, Cooking, Kayaking, Orienteering, Search and Rescue, Weather, and Wilderness Survival. This breadth spans water, land, navigation, emergency response, and field nutrition — a curriculum that maps directly onto his professional certifications and expedition experience. He holds Safe Swim Defense, Safety Afloat, and Scouting America BSA Safeguarding Youth Protection credentials, enabling him to lead youth on both land and water.