Crossing the Ditch Page 15

  Justin prepared the meals, and I was responsible for the “cooking”. He did all the work – fishing out a cryo-vacked meal, emptying the contents into a foil bag, adding water and a sachet of olive oil (and for the first 10 days we had a small supply of fresh garlic and lemon), then passing it out to me, to add the salt water into the bucket. We often joked that he was the slave-driven housewife meticulously preparing the entire meal and I was the beer-swilling husband lazily turning the steaks over on the barbie and claiming the credit for a culinary masterpiece.

  As I stirred the meals occasionally in the rear pit, I caught glimpses of a gorgeous white fish with longitudinal black stripes. Each time I called Jonesy to come and have a look, the fish would dart deep into the water and disappear into the darkness. This happened four or five times; by the final time, Justin thought I’d gone mad and gave me plenty of grief about the imaginary “tiger fish”.

  That night, tragically, our most prized meal was rancid, and a small negative voice surfaced for the second time that day: “Boys, it’s only day 11, your water maker is playing up, now some of your meals are going off,” it quietly whispered. The voices were hastily squashed – we weren’t too concerned. Our progress appeared to be great and we thought we were going to arrive in New Zealand with plenty of rations to spare.

  Most nights, we’d either deploy the sea anchor or drift without it. On this particular evening we found that we were drifting southwest with it deployed, and north with it not deployed. As a result we had it out for half the night, then at 12.30am I got up to bring it in. This resulted in a neutral drift through the night. I yawned, in a half-dazed state, my fingers running over the retrieval line as I coiled it in the bottom of a dry bag. It felt like I was back climbing again – pulling a rope down after the final abseil, ending a big day’s climb. I said to myself in the brisk night air: “I can’t wait to be back climbing again…it’s just so good for the soul.”

  DAY 12

  Bumbling along at 6.30am our paddles seemed to be getting stuck in mud. I peered down, and realised we were paddling through seaweed. This change in texture was almost as exciting as seeing the yellow buoy a couple of days earlier! We were now 700 kilometres away from Forster, causing us to mull over where on earth the seaweed could have come from. As we pondered, I thought I saw something on the horizon off our starboard beam.

  “Jonesy, there’s a sail over there,” I casually blurted out as if we were on a day’s paddle along Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

  “Are you sure it’s not a tiger fish?” he replied, feeling pretty pleased with himself.

  “No seriously, there’s a yacht over there.” My tone was beginning to crescendo as the sail got closer.

  “Shit, there is too!” Jonesy yelled, finally seeing the boat in the middle distance. “Let’s try and raise them on the radio.”

  I leant forward and pulled out the handheld VHF. “What should I say?” I asked uncertainly. (We’d both obtained our marine radio operator licences prior to departing and we’d been trained in how to communicate on the radio. Although the shock of stumbling onto another boat out here on the Tasman had thrown me a bit.)

  “Unknown vessel, Unknown vessel, Unknown vessel,” I began. “This is Lot 41, Lot 41, Lot 41, do you read me…over.” I sheepishly turned to Jonesy, seeking assurance that what I’d said made sense.

  He nodded in encouragement and we silently waited for a reply. There was nothing for a while, then suddenly the silence was broken by a short-wave crackle. “Lot 41, Lot 41, Lot 41, this is yacht Aquarelle, Aquarelle, Aquarelle, reading you loud and clear.”

  This was fantastic. “Aquarelle, this is Lot 41, Lot 41, Lot 41. We’re currently en route to NZ in a kayak.”

  “Lot 41, this is Aquarelle,” the voice replied. “We heard about you two crazy bastards the day you left Forster – it was all over the news in New Zealand. How are you doing?”

  “Brilliantly.”

  He told us they’d like to come and say hello, so they changed course and made their way towards us. Over the radio we helped guide them: “20 degrees to port”, “too much – 30 degrees to starboard” etc. Soberingly, they’d only spotted us when they were a mere 30 metres away. For some reason, the Comar Unit (the same one that wouldn’t turn on during our Port Stephens sea trial) had begun pulsing our position rather irregularly. We’d heard horror stories of other vessels being run over at sea, and it isn’t surprising that ships like the Danish Emma Mærsk, weighing in at just over 150,000 tonnes, don’t even feel the bump when they hit sailing vessels, let alone a 1-tonne kayak!

  At night-time, we displayed Max the tri-colour nav light, but our experience with Aquarelle indicated how useless this weak navigation aid was so close to the water – it was only a metre above the surface and waves would often cover the line of sight. If a seaman on another vessel saw Max while on watch, we’d be crushed before they had any chance to avoid us. Nevertheless, we religiously left Max on each night; more to comfort us than to avert oncoming traffic. It was just one of the risks we had to absorb while on the Tasman.

  It was a stunningly glassy day and the bow of the Aquarelle sliced through the water like a fighter plane through clouds. We couldn’t stop giggling and staring in utter bewilderment at the immaculate detail of this dazzling yacht, as sunlight beamed off the stainless steel stanchions and winches, creating reflections dancing on the sails.

  Aquarelle approached with two sailors on board. They came upwind of us and a powerful, pleasant aroma engulfed Lot 41, diesel fumes giving way to the smell of bacon cooking. “How are you guys?” they asked.

  “Absolutely fantastic,” we said again. We weren’t sure if they were expecting a different response from when they’d asked us over the radio.

  “Can we offer you anything? Do you need some fresh water? Bacon and egg roll or a beer?” they asked, possibly examining us for signs of madness.

  Each query hit home like a dagger. Yes, we’d like all of the above, we thought instantly. Unfortunately, the “rules” of doing an unsupported journey don’t allow any provisions to be taken on board. If we’d taken as little as a piece of fresh bread, our crossing wouldn’t have been classified as “unsupported”. (Back in 1996, a 17 year old named David Dicks set out on an unassisted, solo circumnavigation of the world and broke a rigging bolt in the mast near Cape Horn. A replacement bolt was flown out to him and there went his voyage’s “unsupported” status.)

  From our point of view, we were in the middle of nowhere, and applying these harsh regulations just seemed so completely out of place. Who were the people who made these rules?

  As the skipper, Graeme Templeton, prepared to sail off, we took a few photos of each other. I’m not sure who was more taken aback – him or us. When we got back to Australia, we saw a photo on the front page of a local newspaper and we looked like two stunned, zinc-creamed mullets!

  Then, as quickly as they’d entered our little Tasman bubble, they were gone and we were alone. With the sun setting and the memory of our encounter with Aquarelle slowly beginning to fade, I reflected on the absurdity of our situation. Aquarelle and Lot 41 shared cutting-edge composites, technologies etc, but although in recent centuries the wheel had been invented, then cars, then planes, for our own obscure reasons we’d saddled ourselves with the ancient technology of the kayak and a simple paddle, rather than harnessing the power of the wind with a sail – talk about a backwards step in evolution!

  The ocean had become almost eerily calm as we paddled on in deafening silence. Justin had never experienced silence like this before; my mind drifted to the last time I had. It had been on a mountaineering trip in the New Zealand Alps, high up on the west ridge of Malte Brun – with a Snickers in my hand. There were no birds, no wind: just snow, ice and rock. The silence begins to pulsate in your mind. I can now see how people go mad at sea when a boat is becalmed. The mind begins to crave a sound – any sound – to tickle the eardrum and ignite a nerve impulse to the brain.

  I wasn’t
going mad (at least I didn’t think I was) but I did have something on my mind. Breaking the silence, I said to Justin in one big breath: “Mate, I feel so retarded having to rely on you so heavily in the cabin…it’s doing my head in.” I breathed in deeply, as though it was alleviating a weight I’d been carrying for the whole journey.

  “Don’t feel bad about it at all,” Jonesy replied. “I can see how much it pisses you off. But if it wasn’t for the huge amount of work you did for both of us when we were getting ready, we’d never be out here. I’m going to do all I can to give something back to the team.”

  “Thanks, Jonesy…that means a lot.”

  There was a pause, then Justin was quick to change the topic and we talked about how amazingly silent the ocean was. “It’s almost oppressive,” he said. “You could easily feel the world has forgotten about us and that time has stopped. The water looks like velvet…like silk.”

  I continued our rambling out loud. “It doesn’t feel like we saw two other people earlier today, does it? It feels surreal – did we actually see another boat?”

  Back in Australia, it was the day of the Federal election. We’d lodged absentee votes (in case anyone from the Electoral Commission is reading this). It was bizarre to think that ballots were being counted, and our mates would be at election parties and probably watching the cricket. We seemed just so far away from all that.

  As Jonesy passed me my dehydrated mush that night, I couldn’t help jealously reflecting on seeing Graeme Templeton sipping from a ceramic mug, and eating a slice of toast off a plate. All of a sudden, our meals took on the appearance of fuel for a car, rather than a delicious motivational tool.

  To take advantage of the great conditions, we decided to paddle through the night. I was rostered to the 7–11pm shift, and Jonesy to the 11pm–3am. That resulted in me paddling 17 hours straight, which took its toll on us the following morning. At 1am, I had a hallucination, convinced I saw a UFO – so much so that I woke Justin up to see it (I didn’t want him to miss out!). After staring blankly at the sky for a few minutes, clearly unimpressed, he said, “Can I go back to bed now?”

  Pleasant paddling that evening took us further away from the Australian coastline. The cabin door creaked open and I broke the evening’s silence to wake Jonesy for his shift. “Hey, Jonesy.”

  “Yeah, man.”

  “Time for you to go for a paddle…How you feeling?”

  “Mmmm…sleeeeeepppppppyyyyyy.”

  “Did you get any sleep?”

  “’Bout half an hour.”

  “Time to get up, mate. The current still seems to be against us…little bastard.”

  12

  Rock and a Hard Place

  DAY 13

  VIDEO DIARY, DAY 13 – JAMES

  “I’m feeling completely haggard. That 17-hour paddle yesterday really took it out of me.”

  We woke up feeling absolutely shattered. Jonesy was as stiff as a board, and for him to sit upright in the morning, he had to crane his neck awkwardly to one side to avoid hitting his head on the cabin, a mere 150 millimetres above him, as his body contorted the other way. It reminded me of a move that belonged as a Houdini act in Cirque du Soleil, rather than someone carrying out a menial task like sitting up.

  Sure, we’d put on a few kilometres during the night, but now we felt like we’d been mowed down by a bus. Was it worth it? A dilemma we were to struggle with the entire way across the Tasman was whether to use calm conditions to eat up some kilometres or get some decent, uninterrupted sleep.

  I got angry about us each having paddled 17 hours the previous day, because we’d identified fatigue as one of the major threats that could stop us from reaching New Zealand alive. We mulled over the 19 hours Andrew McAuley had paddled straight on his first attempt to cross the Tasman. Honourably, he’d retreated, unassisted, on the second day of his paddle after identifying that he was too cold and not able to sleep at night. Andrew had taken a vastly different approach to the expedition to us. We identified sleep as a critical factor in our risk management work and, as such, designed the cabin of Lot 41 to ensure we could get maximum rest.

  Fatigue leads to bad judgement, and out at sea bad judgement has caused numerous deaths. Here we were, drifting away from the strategy that would keep us alive on the Tasman. Mother Tasman, or for that matter Mother Nature, would slam down on any complacency.

  Climbing had taught me these lessons. A famous quote by the American mountaineering legend Ed Viesturs, “Mountains don’t kill people, they just sit there,” has always wafted in the back of my mind when pushing boundaries in the outdoors. Simple lessons, like sticking to your turnaround time, not being bullied into doing things beyond your abilities, and not placing the importance of the summit above the objective dangers you’re willing to assume, can often be clouded when you’re out there. From an armchair, it’s always easier to say what people should have done.

  Although Jonesy and I had made some great progress overnight, throughout the day every little thing he did annoyed me, and me him. Fatigue was malignantly growing within us, impairing our judgement and darkening our outlook. That afternoon, after another chat, we sternly agreed that the previous night was the last time on the expedition we’d prioritise mileage over managing fatigue. And as I wrote in my diary, that night we got a “wonderful nine hours’ sleep – the most on the expedition so far”.

  In the late afternoon, a nasty squall blew through, ruining the tranquillity, but it soon passed by, leaving us paddling for a few hours towards a vibrant rainbow.

  DAY 14

  VIDEO DIARY, DAY 14 – JUSTIN

  “Sleep is the key to the Tasman. It keeps us from making irrational decisions, keeps us from getting angry with the situation…everything seems so much smoother. Even the protein bars and nuts tasted good today.”

  Waking to calm conditions, we jovially paddled due east, naked. To a passing albatross, our white, wrinkled skin might have reminded it of plucked chickens. Feeling well rested, our morale had picked up, our speed was 6–7 kilometres per hour and we chattered like cockatoos on coke. Life on the Tasman couldn’t have been better.

  DAY 15

  The Tasman had spoilt us during the previous few days, and we woke to a stiff 35-kilometre-per-hour southeasterly headwind. We just couldn’t make any progress. The para-anchor was chucked out and we bunkered down in the cabin for a bumpy ride.

  Lying there, we began discussing the direction our friendship had taken. “Why have we drifted apart the last years, Cas?” Jonesy asked.

  It was a good question. We spoke about the fact that we’ve got different values and different approaches to tackling life, and that our friendship was strongest out in the bush, where the differences between us didn’t seem important. We’d sometimes find it difficult to see eye to eye in the city, but often, as soon as we slip on the paddling thermals, or bushwalking boots and guitars, we instantly began to resonate on the same frequency.

  I’d also always thought that Justin had a vastly different personality in the big smoke. He loves going out, enjoying the nightlife, picking up girls, and I guess…being somewhat smug…we also have a vastly different work ethic. At times I’m psychotically driven and motivated, while Justin is often the complete opposite. This difference was one of the most challenging hurdles we had to overcome in preparing for the Tasman.

  We both knew that when we were out there on the expedition, it’d be difficult for us not to arrive better mates than when we left – we’d already seen each other at our deepest, darkest moments, our highest points of elation and everything in between. It was in the three-year preparation phase, when Lot 41 wasn’t performing, we were struggling to raise finances and our families were telling us to give it away, that we sometimes found it difficult to maintain our respect for one another.

  “It’s not like we’re on the Murray,” I remember saying, “where we talked with each other – now we talk at each other. There was a three-year gap in our thinking. We don’t seem to h
ave the same innocence – we seem to bombard each other with our own values and opinions rather than work through together.” It was obvious that as we’d got older, we’d both become more opinionated, so our views clashed more.

  Then there was the fact that we were business partners as well as friends, which only added to the confusion and occasional tension.

  Justin was also frustrated by me not cutting him enough slack, given that we’re best mates, while I suggested that seeing as we’re best mates, surely he’d want to go the extra mile. He agreed, adding that that was why he didn’t mind taking the extra burden in the cabin.

  Later, as I lay reflecting on our conversation, I stared at the A3 photo collage stuck to the cabin roof above my head. I chuckled quietly as I realised the stark contrast in my photos with those above Justin, who had a similar collage.

  Mine were a compilation of mates from climbing, canyoning and bushwalking. The only ones from “city life” were those of my family and our dog, Max. Jonesy had a handful of photos from sailing, a few walks and a couple of paddles, but the majority were of big nights out on the town.

  It summed up our personalities and what turned our dial. With such contrasting images playing a role in motivating us, it’s a wonder we could remain best mates. It was definitely the time we spent “out there” that really brought our friendship together.

  DAY 16

  The wind had begun to abate and we were keen to get some paddling in, but crawling out of the cabin that morning, I noticed the retrieval line for the para-anchor had fouled around the rudder tiller bar in the previous day’s bad weather. In much the same way as a stockman cracks his leather whip, we made a string of futile attempts to untangle the knot from the rear pit. It was soon pretty clear, though: one of us was going to have to go in and sort it out.