Crossing the Ditch Page 11

  With none of the medication working, I had now become well accustomed to the steps of getting sick. First, my whole body would go cold, leaving my hands and feet clammy and sweaty. Then, the extremities would get pins and needles, leading to coughing and burping. When my stomach dropped like an elevator, I knew it was time to find a bucket, because the vomit wasn’t far behind. Uncomfortably – to say the least – I’d find myself shitting my pants as I spewed – part and parcel of being seasick. The pain and discomfort continued for the next week and I prayed for it to be over. I couldn’t eat, I was horribly dehydrated and every time I lifted my head from the horizontal, I wanted to puke.

  Eight days after leaving Brisbane, miraculously we reached the calmer waters closer to Papua New Guinea. I began to return to normal and found the sailing around the north coast of PNG stunning, as the water was as calm as a millpond. But although it was such a relief, it didn’t mask the bigger issue. I was starting to think that the chances of me crossing the Tasman were becoming slim to nil. I was getting over putting myself through such brutal punishment: “I think this is going to be my last sea adventure for a very long time,” I wrote.

  Motoring along the north coast of PNG, we had our first glimpse of the unreliability of the engine – the trouble we had starting it and our failure to get the boat to reverse were early hints. At this time, we received news that a couple of typhoons had ripped through the area in which we were meant to sail between there and the Philippines and that the Australian embassy had issued a travel warning because of political unrest – basically, “Do not travel into the southern Philippines”. Combined with what I’d learnt about my seasickness – not to mention the fact that neither the other crewmate nor myself was getting paid for all this – continuing the delivery didn’t seem all that appealing. I felt horrible telling Chris, but hoped he’d respect my decision. No such luck – he was pissed. Unfortunately, he felt stranded in PNG and cornered.

  “I’ll stay with you for a few days and help get the yacht properly provisioned,” I told him. “After that, I plan on getting off.”

  “No, you won’t,” he replied bluntly.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.

  “You said you’d crew all the way to the Philippines – you can’t leave me. Besides, I’ve got your passport.”

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “What are you saying, Chris?”

  “I’m saying that I have your passport and I’m not giving it back till we get to the Philippines.”

  We argued for a few more minutes, but there was no middle ground. Although I could understand his predicament, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my safety to keep him happy. But as the standoff continued for a few more days, it seemed that he wasn’t going to hand my passport over. I was going to have to get it myself.

  The other crewmate was keen to leave the boat as well, and I volunteered to grab her passport too. So that evening, I stealthily crept into Chris’s cabin while he was asleep. His earplugs were in and he was snoring as loudly as a freight train. I was petrified that he was going to wake up as I was reaching over him – he always slept half awake. It never ceased to amaze me how, if the sails were flapping or the sea was hitting the hull from a different angle, he’d suddenly be wide awake and up on deck to see what was going on. As I leant over to get the passports my heart throbbed. I was sure he could hear my heart beating as its bellowing seemed to fill the cabin. I snatched the bag, took it into another room, searched through it there, grabbed the passports, and then took the bag back to Chris’s room without him noticing. I made it back to bed: but with my heart racing, it took me ages to get back to sleep.

  The following morning I told Chris I was leaving the day after next. He said, “But I still have your passport.”

  “Not any more – I’m out of here.”

  It was a shame to leave on such bad terms. I really respected Chris and understood why he was acting the way he was. It’s that pigheaded stubbornness that keeps you alive when you’re an adventurer – you have to listen to your gut, whether you’re up just below the summit or out at sea.

  Choosing to fly, rather than sail, back to Sydney, I struggled with motivation for the Tasman project, as the seasickness cloud seemed to darken my entire outlook. Justin and I started having serious chats about me not going; something Jonesy didn’t even think was an option. For the first time, he was showing determination and drive. He believed in us as a team. The problem for me was: was it too late? I’d almost convinced myself that the expedition was over for me. “Can I satisfy myself by saying I gave it my best shot – gave it everything?” I wrote. “Or will it gnaw at me forever?”

  To my complete bewilderment, a few weeks after I got back to Australia, Pat received an interesting email from my crewmate, describing my condition on the trip to the Philippines. She wrote about how I hadn’t even made it 24 hours before coming down with severe seasickness and for 10 days she’d nursed me with hydration fluid packs. Apparently, I was the worst she’d seen in 20 years at sea. She finished by scoffing at my ability to cross the ditch in a kayak when I couldn’t handle the going on a 40-foot yacht.

  While I felt betrayed by her email, it only motivated me all the more to win the battle with seasickness. This wasn’t the only hurdle at the time, though – I was hugely disappointed with the work Jonesy had done while I was at sea. Without holding him accountable each week, nothing seemed to have got done: no training, and no work on the kayak. As I wrote in my diary, getting stuck into my best mate (just for a change):

  This past month he was meant to finish the steering, footwells and bow bulkhead – but the pits have been cut and that’s it. He’s been for one paddle, doing weights a couple of times each week, and weighs 98kg…

  I was now on a desperate quest to find an anti-nausea medication that worked on me. Deep down, I thought I’d tried everything, but we kept on trucking along with the sponsorship and reconstruction assuming we’d find a solution. In mid-June, two weeks after returning from PNG, I had an appointment with two professionals in the one day – a navy doctor and a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioner. Classic East versus West mentality.

  The navy doctor took the hardline approach with drugs they give chemotherapy patients. When I went to the pharmacy to get my prescription, they said it’d take a few days as I’d need “drug committee approval”. These were pretty hardcore, something that didn’t worry me in the slightest – as long as they worked.

  Approaching the TCM practitioner, she examined my issue from a more holistic approach and immediately started me boiling a concoction of herbs – cicada shells and a whole lot of other stuff – and acupuncture twice a week. It seemed a little “hocus pocus” compared to what I was used to, but who was I to disrespect 3000 years of accumulated knowledge?

  Within a few weeks, sciatic problems I’d been having had disappeared and I was starting to feel my overall health becoming much more robust. There had to be something to this TCM stuff that I had no idea about. The combination of drugs from Western culture – “drug committee approval” had taken three days – and the acupuncture seemed to be working, but I needed to trial them inside the cabin tossing round at sea.

  It was my responsibility to conjure $50,000 out of nowhere. I thought long and hard about how to go about doing this. We had to offer something different – something unique. Our 2006 sponsorship proposal had followed quite a traditional model, and while Olivia Donohue, the brand manager at Unwired, had been highly impressed by it, it wasn’t delivering the money we needed. We had to show that if someone sponsored our expedition, we could provide “products” that would directly increase revenue. Whacking a sticker on the side of the kayak and wearing a T-shirt with a sponsor’s logo just didn’t cut it.

  We developed a number of advertising campaigns for both our current sponsors (to encourage them to beef up their investment) and potential sponsors. Justin and I basically devised several ads for our investors – including orga
nising our own photo shoots and graphic design and coming up with campaign slogans. As a result, we had advertising material that was pretty much ready to slap into a newspaper or web page. After over a hundred rejections from companies we’d approached, this slight change of tack helped deliver the funding we were after.

  Around that time, Brad Gordon – the owner of one of our sponsors, Activate Outdoors in Sydney – started calling us the Tasman Rats. Slightly confused, we asked him one day why he was referring to us as a rodent that’s pretty low on the whole animal social hierarchy.

  “Simple. Given how tough you guys are, it’ll be even more difficult to drown you than to drown a rat. Have you ever tried drowning a rat?”

  Justin and I looked blankly at each other. “Can’t say we have, Brad.”

  “Well, they’re bloody impossible.”

  Of course, we still had plenty of actual training to do. That August, we headed down to Melbourne to deliver a Bavaria 32 yacht up to Sydney for a stockbroker who’d just bought it. This would be a great test of how my concoction of anti-nausea remedies was coming along. The result was – not good.

  Back on land. The last day got pretty rough – 5m seas and 35 knots of wind. Got hammered by rain/hail etc. Jonesy did great. I booted again and felt like shit. Being up at the helm was alright, but as soon as I went below deck I got belted. The sea is brutal, man, so unforgiving – relentless. Gym work, interval sessions, training…all seem pathetically inadequate for preparing us for the Tasman. All strength is completely sapped when crippled by seasickness – all you have left is your mind. That’s the question – is my mind strong enough? I’m afraid. No, I’m shit scared.

  Back on land, another doctor suggested I try hypnotherapy. Why not? This began a series of sessions for the next four months that I prayed would work. As the hypnotherapist I was referred to pointed out, the drugs I was now taking were some of the most hardcore on earth for anti-nausea. They cost $40 per tablet: for them not to be working, my mind must have been getting in the way. Her reasoning made sense. During the months of therapy we reprogrammed my mind in the “anchors” that I had around being at sea.

  She provided me with meditation tapes which I began to religiously listen to each day leading up to and out on the Tasman. It became routine at sea that as soon as I jumped in the cabin, I’d put my earphones on and listen to half an hour of hypnotherapy. It sounds a bit hippyish, but with soft music in the background – similar to what I imagine you’d hear in a Buddhist temple (not that I’ve been to one) – a voice talks you through some breathing exercises, then paints a picture in words of pleasant surroundings. On a number of different levels this helped me deal with the motion. It trained me to enjoy getting into the cabin instead of dreading it, relaxed both my mind and body after a tough day’s paddle and provided a much-needed escape from the ocean.

  While I was trying to find a remedy for my seasickness, Justin had his own silent battle raging. From when he was a little boy, he struggled immensely with confined spaces and was badly claustrophobic, to the point where he had uncontrollable panic attacks – he used to hate playing hide and seek and dreaded his older brother locking him in a cupboard.

  In between puffs of cigarette smoke, Ben, our website expert and philosophical consultant, gave him a number of breathing exercises and logic to channel his nervous energy: “The situation is not good, it’s not bad – it just is.” And another, as he swigged down a beer: “It’s much worse out of the cabin than it is in here.”

  During our expedition, I’d often look down the tight end of our cocoon and see Justin’s lips repeating this logic over and over. This mantra allowed him to rationalise his suffocating fear and desire to throw himself out the cabin door. There was no room to panic out there, and he did a great job of containing himself.

  But on the day before our first proper overnight sea trial, we weren’t focusing on seasickness or claustrophobia: we were thinking about pigs. Up at the local hospital, we were schooled by our expedition doctor Glenn Singleman in how to suture and put IV drips into our veins. The former on pigs’ feet, the latter we practised on each other.

  On the first couple of sea trials we learnt heaps. Our first overnighter we paddled 20 kilometres seaward and cast the para-anchor – a parachute that secured us to the current, rather than to the ocean floor – then paddled back the next day. (This anchor kept the kayak perpendicular to the prevailing conditions and stopped us from tumbling sideways down the face of large waves. As a result, the cabin door was also sheltered.) During this trial, we identified some critical issues that needed remedying: the rudderstock – a rod attached to the rudder – was leaking 10 litres of water into the cabin per hour; the need for a new rudder; and the tangling of our sea anchor lines, both on deployment and retrieval. More importantly, the anti-nausea remedies still weren’t working.

  By the time we drove three hours north to Port Stephens in early September for a three-day offshore trial down to Sydney, we were feeling anxious but ready. Mum and Dad took us up – it was great for them to be part of our “mini-ex”, as they could get more of a hands-on appreciation for the amount of work that went into preparing Lot 41 for offshore.

  Preparing to leave the boat ramp, we slipped the kayak into the water, put the rudder on, got into our paddling gear – all seemed great until we fired up our electrics. The power went on, but our Comar Unit (a thingy that allowed big ships to see us on their radar and us to see them on our Toughbook laptop) wouldn’t transmit or receive. After fumbling with it for a few hours, there was no getting it ready. There was no way we were going to paddle past all the container ships at Port Newcastle if they couldn’t see us. Frustrated, we packed up and headed down to Sydney.

  Two days later, with the transponder fixed, we did the 180-kilometre paddle from Port Stephens to Sydney. We were out for three days and two nights. This was the first time I’d been out at sea overnight and not spewed – you beauty! A “simple” (why hadn’t I thought of it before?!) combination of the acupuncture, 80 bucks a day of chemo drugs, and hypnotherapy was the key. I’ve often wondered which one had the most impact. I’d have to say I was dependent on all three. We were incredibly relieved to have made this little discovery. On the final day, we rendezvoused with the NSW Water Police some 15 kilometres northeast of Pittwater, for some practice drills and to instil confidence in the authorities that we were covering all bases.

  Working through the safety exercises, they received news over the VHF that there was a strong front expected to hit from the south. Immediately, they cut the tow lines away and said they had to get back to the harbour to rescue some much larger vessels that were already in trouble. “You boys will be right – you’re obviously well prepared” were their parting words as a dark, heavy cloud bank began to roll in from the south.

  We tried to leg it as fast as possible to get into protected waters before the front hit. As we paddled towards Barrenjoey Headland a fleet of yachts zoomed past our bow, rounded Lion Island and began to head back down south. Within half an hour, we could hear the wind approaching, foam and white horses formed everywhere – then bam. Forty-five knots from the south…and we were still 4 kilometres out to sea. The entire fleet turned round and limped into the leeward side of the Barrenjoey Headland.

  In these kinds of conditions on the Tasman we would have chucked out the drogue (similar to a para-anchor, but designed for heavier weather) and bunked down. Being so close to the shore, we couldn’t do that, as we would have been beached on the coast. Flashbacks of our ill-fated sea trial eight months earlier floated through my mind. We finally got into the calm waters protected by the headland, and the yachties looked on in disbelief. Some shook their heads, while others muttered, “You crazy bastards.”

  In the longer trials to come, we actually learnt less, as we’d refined our systems on board by that stage. Rectifying the big issues was obviously imperative, but learning how to manage the simple things made life much more comfortable: things like hanging our toothb
rushes from the ceiling, which encouraged us to brush our teeth – without them there, we might have conveniently forgotten about it. We learnt the best way to clean our bodies with 200 millilitres of freshwater each day and how best to arrange our beanbag seats to prevent chafing. Padding was added to all parts of our body that came in contact with the kayak. Any hot spots during these sea trials would saw right through us by the end of the crossing.

  Lot 41 had performed beautifully, but more importantly, my seasickness was under control. Our caution with the transponder had been a clear sign to our parents and all our stakeholders that we weren’t going to get out on the ditch if everything wasn’t 100 per cent right to go. It seemed to instil a lot of confidence in them. We were now ready for the Tasman.

  In the days before we set off on the expedition, my diary showed how many different thoughts were racing around my head:

  It’s real. We’re about to cross the Tasman. How do you prepare yourself for such a long, arduous, hazardous journey? Do you constantly think and analyse the emotions that your body is churning through or do you just do it? The systems are set up, Lot 41 is ready – we just need to do it now.

  The meditation and positive visualisation has been amazingly powerful. Now meditating an hour each day. Two weeks to go. I’m so proud of who we’ve become and what we’ve achieved.

  I was restless last night. Why…I keep asking myself. I’m confident in our training, our systems and our risk management. I know we’re not going to get killed, so what am I scared of? Once we’re out there doing it, we’ll have fun most of the time – we’ll be in a groove. What else? Seasickness? Nah…I’ve dealt with that. Sciatic? The Unknown? That’s it. What does a 15m breaking swell actually look like? How will it feel? How bad are salt sores? How much weight will we lose? What will be the physical toll?”“I cried and cried and cried this morning – was it fear or was it a culmination of this dream finally being realised? I think both.