Profits & passions: Michele Sorensen: Stream of consciousness and the art of kayaking

For Michele Sorensen, kayaking and self-reflection are two ends of the same paddle. "The second your foot comes off the land and both feet are in the boat, it's like Nirvana."

A Norwalk resident, Harvard business school graduate and former investment banker, Sorensen's second chapter of life

She also says she looks 20 years younger today than she did five years ago, The secret to the reversed aging process? An aimable divorce after 24 years, which allowed her to embrace her passion and fully focus on herself.

Sorensen grew up on Long Island as one of nine children. Her family lived on boats during the summer, which nurtured her love of the open water. "The minute you get into the water, your whole body relaxes." Her mother wrote a book called "Nine Boats, Nine Kids," which traced the development of both the children and the boats.

In her professional life, Sorensen was an investment banker. She formed a partnership with her husband and started Vistech Corp. in Westport, helping European and American companies looking for strategic acquisitions and investments in Latin America, as well as Latin American governments seeking to divest in American companies.

"After graduating from Mount Holyoke College, she started working for a small family-owned business and moved from file clerk to managing 3,000 properties in the Boston area within one year, An MBA seemed like a good idea, and Harvard was her only choice. She said the experience was invaluable, teaching her business and leadership skills which were instrumental in her later endeavors.

She discovered kayaking along with the pleasures of owning a small business about 10 years ago while visiting her grandparents who had retired to Maine. She marveled at her grandmother who had started a string of successful small businesses. At around the same time, her youngest daughter "fired" her as a mother, a natural process for a teenager, and the time seemed ripe to embrace her passion for paddling and business.

Her original idea of selling kayaks in Latin America quickly evolved into providing a service as a kayaking instructor. She became certified as an instructor and began her life of transmitting her love of the sport to others.

As an instructor, Sorensen stresses safety above all else. This, however, doesn't mean that she has put a lid on her adventurous spirit. She recalls fondly the time she was paddling around the Branford harbor with a friend. The destination was an island three miles away from the harbor, which is known as a "rock garden," due to the above and below-the-surface rocks which make paddling difficult. A 20-to 25-knot wind was blowing, causing the Coast Guard to post a "smallcraft advisory," which in layman's terms means "if you have a small boat, don't go out in it." A pea-soup fog hung above the harbor, but despite all these factors, Sorensen made the trip in little more than an hour using a global positioning system and a compass.

But being surrounded by peace is the primary objective of kayaking: "When you go out to the Norwalk islands, you don't hear anything. There's no one out there, you don't hear lawnmowers, you could take off all your clothes and just walk around. You are totally in nature."