Crossing the Ditch Read online

  On the morning of the fifth day, I was sitting in my van eating oats as rain spat on the roof. It seemed as if something was calling me down to the sea. As I made my way to the beach, completely naked, I looked out to the turbulent ocean and thought of Andrew. I’d been feeling deeply resentful about how he’d treated us, but suddenly I felt something completely different.

  I stood, arms by my side, water beading on my nose and fingertips as I stared out to sea. I found myself whispering under my breath, “Go for it, mate, best of luck…” I repeated similar things for a few minutes. As my passion built, I found myself yelling out to sea, arms waving above my head, and – from out of nowhere – for the first time since my dog had died when I was 14, I began to cry. The tears turned to weeping and became lost in the rainwater trickling down my face. I had let go – let go of my feelings of anger, of wanting to prove something to the world. I was beginning to accept myself.

  It must have been quite a sight, with storm clouds frothing the ocean and this loony standing there completely naked, yelling at the ocean and crying! I dropped to my knees and picked up a couple of handfuls of sand, clenching them tight. As other thoughts came flooding through, I realised that over the previous 12 months I’d abandoned the most important reason for being (and I know this might sound clichéd) – love. I’d distanced myself from my family and friends to achieve my goal, forgetting that, as the saying goes, happiness is meant to be shared. I’d found myself alienated with no-one to turn to – I imagined it might have been the same for Andrew. I could picture him having a similar epiphany out there on the Tasman, and it was thinking about this shared isolation that drew me towards him.

  In an instant, I’d gone from hating him to accepting the situation and wanting to bury the hatchet. I looked down at the sand falling between my fingers and – with Andrew due to arrive in New Zealand during the next few days – I knew I had to fly there to congratulate him on a job well done. I hoped we’d be able to move on with our lives with minimal bad blood between us.

  On returning to Sydney, I booked a flight to New Zealand and left two days later. It was a torturous 14-hour bus ride then from Christchurch to Te Anu, where Andrew planned to arrive, and after getting off the bus, I was surprised to get a phone call from his wife, Vicki.

  “I understand that you’ve flown across to New Zealand,” she said.

  “Yep, that’s right,” I told her. “It’s been a phenomenal voyage for Andrew and I want to shake his hand when he gets out of the kayak.”

  “That’s very nice of you, but I don’t want you there,” Vicki replied in a deadpan voice. “This has been the worst six months of my life and you and Justin have contributed to that. I just want this whole thing to be over.”

  Stunned, all I could say was, “I’m sure this has been an emotional time for you…”

  “You have no idea.”

  “But all I want to do is shake his hand and then disappear…”

  “Please don’t make this any more traumatic for me than it already is,” she concluded. “Andrew’s been through a terrible ordeal and we just want family and a few close friends there.”

  I was gutted. I’d flown to New Zealand and spent 14 hours in a bus in an effort to remedy the bad blood between us. I didn’t know what else I could have done. I received a text from Vicki an hour later, reiterating that she didn’t want me to show. I went to the backpackers and mulled over my options.

  Obviously, I didn’t want to be there when Andrew arrived if I wasn’t welcome, so I ended up meeting a German backpacker and going trekking with her on nearby Stuart Island for four days. Returning from our circuit, we got a boat across to Ulva Island, where I remember lying on the ground staring up through the temperate rainforest trees and visualising the scenes at Te Anu. I imagined Andrew paddling through the calm fjords, with a couple of kayaks and a few larger vessels bringing him in. As he got out of the boat, he’d collapse and be helped to shore before being embraced by his family and whispering, “Never again. Never again.”

  The imagery was so vivid, I believed it. There didn’t seem any doubt now that Andrew was going to make it to NZ – I was able to accept that. My compulsion to be the first across the Tasman had vanished and I realised I still had the motivation inside me to finish what I’d started and what Jonesy and I had been preparing ourselves for all these years. A chapter in my life was closed and I was ready to move on.

  Andrew’s expedition, though, had taken a tragic turn for the worse and unfortunately I couldn’t have been more wrong about the arrival scene. When we got back to our B&B later that afternoon, a New Zealand couple who’d done the trek on Ulva with me came running out and screamed, “They found his kayak yesterday – he’s not in it.”

  “What?” I replied, perplexed. Surely they’d been misinformed.

  I ran to the computer in the mess hall of the B&B, logged on to the internet and saw that it was true – Andrew had disappeared. I quickly rang Pat to see what else he knew and he told me the facts. Unspoken, we knew Andrew was in trouble: because his kayak was so small, it would have made it incredibly difficult to get into his survival suit in an emergency, and the chances of finding someone in the water were remote. As each minute passed, the odds of finding him alive were growing ever longer.

  “What can we do to help?” I asked.

  Pat’s response was blunt but realistic. “Not much.”

  “How many planes have they got out looking for him?”

  “Two.”

  “That’s not enough,” I replied, feeling exasperated. “Do you think we can get AMSA [Australian Maritime Safety Authority] involved and send some search and rescue planes across tonight from Australia?”

  “Who’s going to pay for it?” said Pat, practical as ever.

  “No idea. I don’t care. We need to find him before tomorrow evening.”

  “I know, mate.”

  We both knew he was unlikely to survive that first night. He would have been so exhausted and so worn down, he would have resembled a chemo patient rather than a valiant explorer.

  Talking to Larry – who experienced so much in his years of kayaking – he was upset but said, “I knew it was only a matter of time. I warned him that once he ate through his supplies, which provided a substantial part of his ballast, the kayak would become tippy. If he went over in the paddling position, Casper [the lid that he pulled over the cockpit] would fill with water and act like a keel. In his wasted state, he wouldn’t be able to right the kayak in that situation. I suggested to him having an inflatable bag to put in Casper, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  Many people, including Justin and me, have mourned how unfortunate Andrew was to be lost at sea so close to land – 65 kilometres off the coast of New Zealand. However, Larry brought up a point that hadn’t occurred to us – that he was quite lucky to get as far as he did with such a basic design.

  The last 30 days, he would have been mind-numbingly wet, cold, scared…alone. Fatigue could have led to a series of misjudgements and bad decisions, and I can’t help but imagine his final hours, floating in the freezing water without a survival suit, thinking of his wife and son and knowing he was about to die. In fact, I had the recurring, nightmare image – it came to me every day for weeks after Andrew’s disappearance – of a tear running down his face as he gave a last thought to his family.

  Forty-eight hours later, the New Zealand authorities called off the search. The emotional rollercoaster I went on during that time shocked me. Initially, I found it difficult to accept the news; and once I did, I had unrealistic hopes that he’d be found washed up alive on some beach. Later, the overpowering emotion I couldn’t wash away was the dirty feeling of guilt. It was pretty hard to come to terms with the thought that if it hadn’t been for me and Jonesy, this guy might still be alive.

  We were adventurers, and as adventurers you have to ultimately accept responsibility for your actions. At the end of the day, there’s no-one and nothing to blame, natural forces or anything else,
for the outcome of an adventure. It is solely up to the individuals to achieve their objectives and come back alive. But no matter how many close friends told us we shouldn’t feel guilty, I couldn’t let it rest – it wouldn’t sink in. The words Vicki had said constantly reverberated through my mind and I believed that Andrew would never have pushed so hard, and arguably gone out without sufficient testing, if it hadn’t been for Justin and myself planning on crossing the Tasman.

  During this period, I spent a lot of time reflecting on how much I was willing to sacrifice to achieve this target: what it was worth. Through these difficulties, the most pertinent lesson I learnt was that life is an experience to be shared, especially with the people closest to you. It’s a lonely – and in Andrew’s case, a tragic – passage if you do it entirely by yourself. It was this juxtaposition that confused me – I wanted to take people close to me along for the ride, and enjoy the experience with them, but because they loved me and wanted me to be safe, they didn’t want the ride to happen. Where is the balance?

  After I got back from NZ, I knew I needed to move away from home. I wasn’t making any contribution to the family, and I felt that if I did find my own place, I wouldn’t be inflicting my all-consuming Tasman obsession on them. Through visiting them once a week, we’d be able to amicably talk about things, with none of us having to constantly deal with the differences between us. I also wanted to reconnect with the friends I’d forgotten about, and God, who I hadn’t really given much thought to for a good six years. The irony was that, to do this, I had to distance myself from them first.

  Everyone dealt with Andrew’s death differently. Unfortunately, many people close to him started numerous outlandish rumours about us. They needed an outlet to help grieve his loss and we bore the brunt of it, which, untypically, angered Justin more than me.

  One rumour was that Jonesy and I had conducted a media conference when Andrew disappeared – although it wasn’t subsequently mentioned anywhere in the media – to say that he wasn’t the first across the Tasman and that he’d actually sailed across anyway. In other words, that Andrew clearly hadn’t made it to shore so he couldn’t claim that title; also, that his kayak had a sail on, which he’d used from time to time, so his expedition hadn’t even really been by kayak. Another rumour was that when Andrew’s SOS had come over the VHF, it was me making a hoax call – because I was over in NZ at the time.

  I’d always believed that the adventure community was different from the world of office politics. However, as rumours became “fact” among some outdoor enthusiasts, I realised this wasn’t the case. Baffled by the situation, I’d spoken to Larry, who described a history of disputes between adventurers, more or less confirming my thoughts. Justin and I had naively imagined that because we were all connecting with the natural world – our office being the great outdoors – we’d somehow transcend these undesirable human traits. Sadly, though, like all humans, we couldn’t help polluting the landscape.

  In the same way, we’d always thought of adventurers as living the ultimate life – freedom, purity, happiness. But our experiences were showing us that they (and I could probably include us too) were as flawed as anyone else. Because we’re always striving to be stronger, fitter or faster – searching for a bigger mountain, larger ocean, reaching goals with less equipment or higher exposure to danger – our restlessness means that we’re always searching for that elusive “summit”.

  At the time, I was confused about whether or not losing your life doing what Andrew did is, in fact, tragic. Putting aside his shortcomings – and we’ve all got those – here was a bloke who clearly had an intense flame burning inside him, and died doing something he was passionate about. There are other people who spend their whole lives in fear – fear of standing out, fear of failure, fear of success. To me, this seems much more tragic, but in many cases, society looks at this as being “responsible”. Andrew hadn’t let fear hold him back and neither would Justin and I.

  Committing my thoughts to paper helped to cement my motivations for wanting to cross the Tasman and, as our preparations continued, life began to feel more fulfilling. Instead of being driven by anger – the “f*** you, f*** the world” kind of mentality – I started motivating myself by the love of what I was doing, positive thoughts of family and friends and enjoying not beating my body into submission. Interestingly, with this different motivation I began to train harder than ever before – I especially loved the freedom of the pre-dawn training sessions down on the water.

  And for those first few months of 2007, every paddle I did, I couldn’t escape thinking about what had happened to Andrew.

  8

  The Joys of Seasickness

  Jonesy and I had to work on our relationship – we were close to wanting a divorce and there was no way we were going to be able to cross the Tasman if the resentment continued. Things had been strained more than ever due to the amount of time we’d spent together towards the end of 2006, the kayak not working and because of what seemed to me to be Justin’s lack of initiative and drive. The main aspect of the project that I was still enjoying was the training – it provided my escape.

  However, 2007 was a new year, and we had to approach the project with a slightly different tack. We went for an approach where Justin’s responsibility was to co-ordinate the reconstruction of the kayak, and mine was to find another $50,000 of sponsorship. Jonesy really enjoyed immersing himself in the more detailed work, while I seemed to be better at the big picture, conceptual stuff – it was a good combination. We’d spend most of the time apart – including training – and report back at the end of the week on what we’d identified as our weekly targets. This distance revitalised our relationship – it was the only way we could deal with each other.

  Part of the Lot 41 reconstruction process was to fly our designer Rob Feloy across from the UK to spend some time seeing the kayak on the water and help devise a strategy to fix the problems we’d been having. So far, Rob thought it was a construction issue, Graham said it was a design problem, our electrician Craig blamed them both, while they both blamed him – no-one wanted to accept responsibility.

  We didn’t quite know who to trust, so we asked close to 10 different professionals in the marine design world for their advice. Their suggestions ranged from “The design is a dog – start again” to “Put a keel in the bottom and widen her beam”. We weren’t designers and found it difficult to say that one person’s advice was more appropriate than anyone else’s. Drawing up a matrix with all the different ideas, we began a process of eliminating each potential solution based on intuition and common sense.

  There seemed to be three plausible options. For those nautically minded, they were to: add a long keel line through the whole kayak; add a lead bulb; or, finally, widen its beam – that is, make Lot 41 wider. (Generally, the wider a craft, the more stable it will be.) Rob was keen on the latter. We ordered some foam and when he arrived in Australia we began to widen Lot 41. Starting stupidly wide, we began the process of cutting her down to a manageable width – surprisingly, this had a profound impact on her initial stability. It was a time-consuming process – adding foam, then heading down to the water to test it out – but we were finally starting to make some positive steps towards getting Lot 41 seaworthy.

  In May 2007, I organised to crew for a yacht being delivered from Brisbane to the Philippines. We figured it was a great opportunity to gain valuable sea miles and test my seasickness on a lengthy passage. Justin didn’t get round to it, so he found himself short of yet another experience – we’d agreed at the start of the year that he’d have to organise things off his own bat, and if he didn’t he missed out. To be honest, I was more disappointed in not being able to share an amazing journey with him than in his lack of initiative.

  Our departure from the Royal Brisbane Yacht Squadron was delayed by the yacht not being ready – something I was beginning to get used to! Chris, the Kiwi skipper, was meticulous and wouldn’t leave until the yacht was 100 per
cent ready – a great lesson in passage planning. He carefully scrutinised the boat and her safety equipment, and spent the nights before we set sail examining the marine charts through these vibrant black-and-white-striped spectacle frames that would have been invisible on a baby zebra.

  Eventually setting sail, we found ourselves bashing into a 40–45-kilometre-per-hour northeast wind all the way up the coast. We were sailing outside the reef and as soon as I went below deck, my face went green and my stomach churned. The other crew member woke me at 1am for the graveyard shift, and from the moment I sat up in my bunk, I knew I was about to spew. I quickly chucked my harness on and made my way on deck. I held it in for about 10 minutes, but then found myself leaning over the stern, violently spewing every few minutes. Looking up to a blanket of stars, I pleaded to feel better, even just to let me enjoy their beauty. The drugs weren’t working – I began to suffer. I somehow lasted through my three-hour shift, then hit the bunk again.

  Preparing for my next stint on watch I shoved a Stemetil suppository up my bum, which had next to no effect either. In the first 24 hours, I thought I was going to die. Then after 40 hellish hours, I was scared that I wouldn’t:

  From my first night watch I booted and booted and booted. Initially my food, then my liquid, then fluorescent bile. I couldn’t hold down any food, water or tablets. If I moved position off my back I booted. I was unable to do my night watch on the second night and felt terrible – I was letting the others down and was pathetically immobile. I’ve eaten half a bowl of rice and three Vitabrits in four days. So weak – can hardly move. Urine is almost green. Do you call this living the dream?