Crossing the Ditch Page 16

  We played Scissor, Paper, Rock and unfortunately I lost (damn Rock). It was cold, windy and my turn to go for a dip. It’s funny how our relationship has developed. In situations like this one, although I’d “lost” I much preferred going in, rather than see my best mate back there. We discussed this later in the journey and realised we both felt much the same way.

  Donning my PFD (personal flotation device) and clipping into the safety line, I slithered into the water like a seal. I gasped as my torso entered the freezing ocean. I knew I didn’t have long to untangle the mess before my hands and mind went numb and I began to suffer from hypothermia: I had to work quickly.

  There was less than a metre between Lot 41 and me, but it suddenly hit home how safe I’d felt cradled on board the kayak and how dependent on her I’d become. I felt so exposed now, suspended in kilometres of nothingness and weeks away from land.

  As I approached the rudder, I tried to assess the situation, with waves continually swamping me. Like a guillotine, the rear of the kayak chopped up and down through the swell, as I bear-hugged the rudder and started my work. I fumbled uselessly with my ever-numbing hands, not making any progress on the knot, feeling more exposed by the minute.

  I pulled out my knife and placed the blade between my teeth – there was no time to waste; I had to find the line that needed to be chopped. Holding onto the kayak with one hand, knife in the other, I looked like a rodeo rider fighting to stay on a bucking bull.

  Hacking the serrated edge of the knife against the retrieval line, I broke through after a couple of attempts. Our retrieval line was now cut. I began to shiver from the cold. Tearing at the remaining knot, I managed to free the rudder. I just had to make sure I brought the cut line back to the kayak so we could bring in the para-anchor.

  Lurching into my pit like a drowning rat, I curled into a ball, shivering violently, and began dry-retching. My lungs were full of water. Jonesy took charge and immediately issued directions like a drill sergeant.

  “Here’s your cag – put it on,” he blasted, knowing that I was close to becoming hypothermic.

  Painfully slowly, my mind tried to process what he was telling me as I gazed at him blankly.

  “Put it on now, Cas,” he said urgently. I responded.

  “Now put on your spray skirt,” he barked.

  Desperately trying to stand to put the skirt on, my legs buckled and I collapsed into my pit. Wiggling like a Bollywood belly dancer, I somehow managed to get the skirt over my head, then fumbled a few times fighting to latch it over the cockpit rim. Despite my vagueness, I knew that once I secured the skirt to the deck, the air trapped inside would instantly begin to warm me.

  Jonesy quickly retrieved the anchor and passed me a warmed-up dehydrated meal – chicken babotjie. Unco-ordinatedly, I stuffed my face with the food. In between bouts of violent shivering, I found it hard to land the spoon in my mouth, let alone chew. By the end of the meal, I had food smeared all over my face but began to feel the warmth radiating inside me from the meal. Once I’d finished, we immediately started to paddle, knowing that I needed to get the blood pumping. Within half an hour, feeling had returned to my fingers and toes.

  Another lesson was learnt: under no circumstances were either of us to be outside the cabin without being attached to the kayak. Our chances of surviving in the water if we were swept away from the kayak were extremely slim. In fact, in a water temperature of 18 degrees – about what it was that day – without a survival suit, you’ve got about 10 hours.

  A survival suit tends to double that time. Spare a thought for Andrew, whose average water temperature was 12 degrees. That would have given him four hours’ total survival time, even with a suit on. We only paddled on for 90 minutes, as the sea was too turbulent for us to make any decent progress.

  DAY 17

  We slept restlessly as we were tossed around through the night. In the morning we did a multimeter check on all our batteries to ensure the readings on the display were accurate. Next to the charge box we’d written a warning: Do not allow batteries to get below 12V. Fore battery, 12.4V – check; aft battery, 12.2V – check; spare battery, 11.37V – oh shit! We spoke to our electrical engineer Craig on the satphone and decided the best course of action to get the spare battery back up was to rewire the aft battery to it in order to get more power from the solar panels. Problem solved.

  Craig had drummed into us prior to departure that crossing the Tasman was all about maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. He hated exercise, and couldn’t understand why you’d want to paddle to NZ, but loved the project. He insisted that if we looked after Lot 41, ourselves and our systems on board – and did a little paddling on the side – we’d make it to New Zealand. This theory would have been great if the prevailing conditions (wind coming from behind) had, in fact, prevailed! Instead, it meant more time paddling than originally planned for.

  As with climbers at altitude, it’s so easy to get lazy and delay maintenance tasks, convincing yourself that “She’ll be right” or “Conditions will be better tomorrow”. Craig’s discipline rubbed off on us a little and we forced ourselves to address each obstacle before it became an issue. One of the many advantages of having the two of us on board was that there was always someone there to say, “C’mon, mate, let’s do this thing now.” (Which usually came from me asking Jonesy to do the work, as the seasickness was still playing games. I felt terrible about it – honest.)

  Doing these running repairs and maintenance at sea took five times as long as on land. At the best of times, Jonesy is painfully slow – but always methodical – doing even the smallest tasks, and the constant rolling swell and pitching kayak made it difficult to rewire the batteries. Initially, watching him fumble around with the wires began to get under my skin, but then I began to admire the precision he was showing in this intricate, electronic, open-heart surgery.

  I’d get annoyed with myself for not being able to help out and take more of a lead role, but often, within minutes of starting a task, I’d find myself needing to lie on my back as vomit would rise and tickle my throat. I mastered the art of knowing exactly when I needed to lie down and push the vomit back before it entered my mouth – the point of no return.

  Deprivation…it’s a funny thing. By stripping life’s luxuries away and pitting myself against nature, my raw needs as a human started to surface. I began to realise how amazing even my most annoying family and friends are (yes, you, Ben!), and how good we’ve got it in Australia. Since our return I can guarantee I’ve never looked at a glass of fresh water the same. That glass of water on the Tasman would take over 10 minutes to pump.

  Out at sea, I started to absorb things that I’d always taken for granted, taking the time to stare into that glass of water – analyse its crystal-clear nature, tap the glass and taste the purity of it. Deprivation had sharpened my awareness of life.

  We had a late start paddling at 10am and soon realised that no salt water was spitting out the reject valve on the side of the cabin. Jonesy instantly stopped paddling and opened up the cabin door in time to witness Derek struggling feebly to stay alive. It coughed, spluttered, then conked out. We were left in silence.

  “Now what?” Jonesy remarked.

  “Aw, maybe she just needs a rest – we’ve been running her hard every day,” I replied optimistically.

  “Let me jump back in the cabin and have a look at it.”

  “Alright, mate, I’ll just keep paddling.”

  Justin gazed blankly at the desal. There was a centimetre of water sloshing round the bottom of the compartment, which he mopped up. Surely that wasn’t enough to get inside the motor and render it useless?

  Jonesy’s quick inspection of the unit didn’t show any signs of the seals having broken and he began to examine the manufacturers’ “trouble-shooting flow chart”. After having his head shoved in the desal compartment for over half an hour, he slithered out of the cabin looking slightly seedy. Derek was out of action for the foreseeable future. We beg
an paddling in silence, feeling angry and frustrated. We’d heard of countless ocean rowing teams who’d had problems with their water makers and we’d been pleading with the desal gods to spare us the same fate. If it wasn’t working the next day we’d be forced to pull out the back-up unit – a hand pump: something we’d hoped was going to stay buried for the entire voyage.

  To help break the gloom, we started joking about the unit: “This desal is as rollable as the New Zealand rugby team in the World Cup.”

  We began to smile as the jokes kept coming. They began to get ruder…and much cruder. They were all completely inappropriate! (So I’ll leave it right there.)

  These jokes cheered us up enormously, and with the energy-sapping desal out of action, we found extra comfort in the fact that we could now charge our iPods without having to worry about draining our batteries.

  At 11.15am we passed the halfway mark – wahoo! Sure, the Tasman had slapped us around a little and Lot 41 had stumbled a few times, but progress had been amazing. We were going to be in New Zealand well before Christmas at this rate.

  “Hey, Jonesy.”

  “Yeah, mate.”

  “Can we not arrive on the 24, 25 or 26 December? Can we arrive just before then – I don’t want to uproot the family for Christmas Day.”

  “It’s still a long way off, Cas, we’ll see how we go.”

  “Okay, but let’s try.”

  Looking back, I can’t believe we had this conversation. We had no idea what the Tasman would have in store for us in the second half of our journey.

  “Hey, Jonesy.”

  “Yeah, mate.”

  “You realise that this is New Zealand water? NZ clouds! The water now tastes more like Mount Cook than Mount Kosciuszko! This is doable, mate…it’s ditchable!”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Thanks, mate – bang! Mate, now that we’re not in a bad mood,” I added, “what is it that you get most frustrated at with me?”

  Without hesitating, he spat out, “Three things. The first – my opinion has less weight than yours. Even though your instincts seem to be better than mine, it really pisses me off. The second is when I’m trying to steer and you say ‘direction’ every five minutes. The third is when you get frustrated at me. That’s about it, really.”

  I was expecting something much more damning than that, but I was still surprised at how quickly he’d replied. “Wow…you must have given that little speech a fair bit of thought.”

  “Not really.”

  “Thanks for telling me, though, J.”

  DAY 18

  For the first time on the journey, a brisk westerly wind had picked up the previous night to 25 kilometres per hour. Prior to departure, we’d planned that once we left the Australian coast (and the EAC), we could expect close to 70 per cent of the wind to come from the west – were we at that boundary already?

  We brought in the para-anchor, which helped suck us 21 precious kilometres closer to NZ overnight (sometimes we could paddle for hours without making that kind of progress, so we almost felt a bit guilty about being handed these kilometres on a plate!). Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on which way you looked at it – at 3am the wind strengthened, agitating the sea into an obnoxiously bumpy state. We tossed and turned, but just couldn’t grab any decent kip.

  Rising just before 5am, I put my wet weather gear on and, in completely miserable conditions, started paddling. May as well make the most of this wind, I thought to myself. The only respite from the ever-worsening weather was listening to my “golden oldies” playlist: good old Billy Joel, Bob Seger and Cold Chisel were always going to lift my spirits. Meanwhile, Jonesy had stayed in the cabin to do a satphone link-up with the Channel Seven Sunrise program and a little “maintenance”.

  After our ill-fated sea trial eight months earlier, we’d installed both electric and manual bilge pumps (to expel any unwanted water) in all compartments of the kayak – up in the bow, both the pits and in the cabin. The electric bilge in the cabin had stopped operating, and after realising the motor had seized, we decided to bin it – why carry extra weight when it’s not providing any use? We knew we could rely on the manual back-up, so overboard she went.

  Our Tasman mistress was beginning to become very adept at stealing what we thought was rightfully ours. The weather was one thing, but after giving it a bit of thought on board, we realised uncomfortably that she was beginning to suck our precious equipment away, item by item. Of course, it isn’t just the ocean that has this effect: sand drifts on deserts and snow drifts in Antarctica inflict the same fate. Nature has a way of crushing our efforts and eventually restoring the landscape to a state that seems as if man has never been there.

  Ploughing along in favourable conditions (albeit rainy) was a welcome change from paddling into headwinds. We began to have a classic chatting session. First, we started on the old days of playing cricket and footy – scratching our heads, trying to remember who was in our teams back to when we were 15 years old. Then it was who was in the school senior footy team, who was in our maths class, etc. These games would go on for hours. As our brains grew tired, we shifted our talk to big nights we’d had out on the town, and then eventually girls.

  In the end, the brain-leeching reflection was too much. Jonesy continued with banter about girls that could have been, but I’d had enough. I stealthily slipped my earphones on and listened to music for the rest of the afternoon, as Justin kept on talking and laughing to himself. Although we were confined to such a small space on board Lot 41, paddling in the front pit with the iPod on, it was easy to convince myself that I was out there alone. It was a feeling of solitude that I needed every now and then.

  13

  Headwinds – Just Deal With It

  DAY 19

  As we crawled, sodden, into the cabin that evening, we received the weather forecast for the next couple of days. Frustratingly, it had shifted from three days of westerlies to southeasterlies. All I said in my diary was: “Bugger – really annoying.”

  We had a late start the following morning, due to the ugly conditions battering us from the southeast. All our months of planning had told us that once we passed the 160 degree longitude we should expect most of the winds from the westerly quadrant. This was based on the last 75 years of historical data and many sessions with Clouds. As the easterly bombardment continued and we started to progress ever more slowly towards NZ, it became routine to plead with Pat to give us some westerlies in his forecast.

  Doubt is a powerful seed. Once planted, the mind can make it explode into a towering forest incredibly quickly. For the first time on the expedition, we questioned the data we’d used in our risk management and the rigorousness of our preparation. And although we knew Pat and Clouds were relaying the best possible info on to us, we started getting angry with them, because they’d begun to change the weather forecasts and waypoints (the points we hoped to reach at different stages of the expedition) we were aiming for. We even questioned why Colin Quincey – the first person to cross the Tasman in a Dory (a small, shallow-drafted type of fishing boat that’s been used for centuries) back in 1978 – had left from NZ, rather than Australia. Did he know something we didn’t?

  Although we knew the forecasts weren’t their fault – Roger was analysing models and giving us the best information available, while Pat was merely a messenger passing on Roger’s analysis – we took our frustration about the weather out on them.

  Didn’t they realise our goal setting was based on how far it was to our next waypoint? Changing our waypoints made it difficult to know how effective our relative progress was. It felt like being a goal-kicker in a game of rugby and having someone moving the goals around on a remote control, as you’re about to kick the ball.

  In desolate landscapes, morale relies on achieving imaginary landmarks. Each day, we paddled towards a waypoint, a longitude, a date. There were different milestones we set and looked forward to; they made us feel we were making a dent on the total
distance. To an outsider these lat and longs we set ourselves were meaningless, but to us they were critical. No way could we have set out counting down the 1.7 million-odd strokes it took to paddle the Tasman, nor could we have said, “Great day today, only 2034 kilometres to go” – it would have been incomprehensible. We had to break it down into segments we could digest. Waypoints were our “short-term goals” that fed to our medium-term goals of “getting halfway across”, “1000 kilometres to go”, “500 kilometres to go”, “200 kilometres to go”…Interestingly, we’d tell ourselves the whole way across that “the next 500 kilometres is the key”. I’m not quite sure what it was about that number, but it always seemed to bring us comfort.

  We made it routine to allow ourselves a treat for reaching these targets. The short-term goals were rewarded with a home-made Anzac biscuit or our favourite dehyd meal like roast chicken (temporarily abandoning our usual “lucky-dip” selections); the longer-term goals with a call to a mutual friend for a chat. The first of these was Ben, the genius behind our initial website and branding (and he was still swigging the beers and hacking away at the cigarettes).

  We joked on the Tasman about the time Ben was our contact to the outside world when we kayaked across Bass Strait. On what was meant to be the penultimate day of our paddle we were graced with glorious conditions. We’d given Ben a call at 9am after being on the water four hours: we couldn’t see land.

  “Morning, Ben, how’s things?” Jonesy asked through the CDMA phone.

  “Yeah, alright,” came a muffled grunt. After a short pause he blurted out, “Do you know what time it is? Why are you calling me so bloody early?”