Crossing the Ditch Page 8

  As we started across Franklin Sound the next day – a stretch of ocean renowned for more vessels lost than anywhere else in the Bass Strait region – we were blessed with lake-like conditions.

  “Hey, Jonesy,” I yelled. “How’d you like to push to Tassie today?”

  This was wildly optimistic compared to our original plans. Was I suffering from summit fever, where mountaineers – forgetting their basic safety buffers – recklessly push on to the summit? Did Jonesy think I’d been out on the water too long? No wonder there was silence…

  “Let’s see how we feel in a couple of hours,” he replied cautiously.

  Hours went by and we found ourselves at a crossroads: head for land or go direct to Tassie? As conditions remained idle we called our friend Ben – who’d been giving us our weather forecasts – to make sure the weather bureau didn’t expect any adverse weather shifts. Good news – we were given the go-ahead and on we went.

  Soon, though, the tide shifted direction and our speed dropped. We considered worst-case scenarios (it’s amazing how your head can compute a seemingly infinite number of different speed, distance and time possibilities). The slog continued across Banks Strait – a stretch of ocean renowned for sinking ships and epic misadventures – and as Tassie drew closer, the number of birds and penguins in the water grew. So did our singing, and they were treated to Jonesy and I bashing out “Amazing Grace” and “Waltzing Matilda” – Andre Rieu would have been jealous. Then, 5 kilometres out, we knew our judgement had paid off; the tide swept us towards Tasmania like a landing jet. Touchdown!

  After over nine hours on the water we arrived at our destination – well, sort of. We’d found Tasmania, but had absolutely no idea where we’d landed! Unfortunately, there were no waving flags or cheering girls in mini-skirts waving pom-poms; just a deep glow of self-satisfaction. We’d paddled 350 kilometres across Bass Strait over nine days: it was a special moment, reflecting on how we’d set a goal we believed in and we’d achieved it. Considering Jonesy’s illness prior to the event, and the fact that we’d never attempted anything remotely like this before, crossing Bass Strait was an amazing stepping stone.

  6

  Getting Ugly

  Although we returned to Sydney full of vigour and enthusiasm, I found readjusting to being around people incredibly difficult – I just wanted to be out there again. It was now early May 2006 and we had six months left – that was when the weather conditions would be optimal – to get all our funding in place and get the kayak built. We were now totally committed to the expedition. We worked part time here and there for cash to get us through the week – Justin doing a bit of bar work, me doing some consulting – but we spent every waking hour thinking, doing, eating or shitting crossing the ditch. Any activity that didn’t add value to our crossing was off the agenda – dinners with friends and dates with girls had to wait.

  There were so many different facets of the Tasman crossing that we needed to think about and organise – sponsorship, construction, seamanship skills, and, of course, training. At about this time, an army bloke by the name of Patrick Brothers got in contact with us. At first, we didn’t know who he was, or where he was coming from. He gave us a brief description of himself over a few emails. It was just your typical resume really – paratrooper, special forces unit (with a multitude of HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) and LALO (Low Altitude Low Opening) jumps), many operations overseas in hostile territories, several Ironmans completed in less than 10 hours: the list went on and on. He sounded more machine than man.

  We invited Pat round to Jonesy’s place one night and had no idea what to expect. But instead of a six-foot-five, exoskeletal automaton entering the room, a relatively slight, computerish geek opened the door. We carried out a little idle chit-chat for a while; not the normal icebreakers about weather or footy scores, though, but about what it’s like jumping out of a plane at night into enemy territory weighed down by 50 kilograms of gunnery. As he sat on the chair, both feet planted flat on the ground, knees forming a perfect right angle, and with an erect back so straight that you could do your ironing on it, I couldn’t help but stare at his elegant hands. How many men had those hands killed? Had he ever strangled someone with them?

  Pat was one of those people we instantly trusted. He was overzealously focused, but at the end of the day was a bloody good bloke. There were multiple layers to his personality that we’d never see nor understand, but at the core of it he was a straight shooter. Pat was in a transitional period, where he was about to leave the army and embark on the next phase of his civilian life. In his final year of an MBA at the University of New South Wales, he created a “paper business” called Race Recon – a theoretical business as part of his studies. The plan was to set up an international media and technology company focused on supporting world-class expeditions, action sports and environmental research. Pat saw our Tasman bid as a great tool to test out a number of his business ideas. He’d had many years of managing soldiers in extreme operations and brought plenty to the table – planning, authority management, expedition communications etc. Jonesy and I were to be his guinea pigs; taking the business from paper to reality. We soon formed a strong bond with him.

  We were training close to 30 hours each week, consisting of a heap of paddling – both inshore and offshore – weights sessions and plenty of cardio. The aim was to make ourselves as indestructible as possible and to bulk up both fat and muscle stores, which we knew would melt off us on the Tasman. We just didn’t know how much.

  Part of preparing mentally for the challenge was to do a series of “getting ugly” training sessions. One of these was a food and sleep deprivation exercise, designed by Pat and a few of his army mates. It was important to know how our bodies would react to these stresses in a relatively controlled environment. In hindsight, this was some of the best training we did, as we pushed our boundaries to the point of hallucination and reached fatigue levels that prepared us for similar experiences out on the Tasman. It would’ve been scary to go through it for the first time alone at sea in a kayak.

  We arrived at Victoria Barracks in Paddington not quite knowing what to expect. The sun was just beginning to set as Pat and his fellow pain inflictors gave us three unlabelled tins of food, not telling us how long these tins were supposed to last us. The only briefing we had was that they were going to subject us to extreme sleep deprivation and make it their mission to break us. At the time, this phrase seemed somewhat ambiguous, but we were to learn quickly that the whole exercise wouldn’t stop until we were squirming like a newborn child, crying, “We give up!”

  We started with some physical training (army blokes called it PT), night running and paddling. Believe it or not, Justin and I were actually enjoying ourselves. At the end of each exercise, we’d thank Pat and his colleagues, then eagerly want to dive into the next challenge. In the past, we’d be out bush and do this to ourselves; now we had a team of army blokes pushing right through the night – it was awesome fun!

  As dawn broke they continued pushing us, yelling from time to time “boot-camp” style (it was starting to be slightly less fun by now), eventually allowing us a 10-minute break to smash the first tin of food – coconut milk. They pushed us through the day; then on our second night, after 35 hours of activity, we opened our second tin – peaches. This fuel would have to last us through our second night.

  As the exercise wore on, they constantly evaluated our mental awareness by getting us to learn Morse Code. On the first night, we’d been able to memorise up to five codes in five minutes, but over the following days recalling even one became difficult.

  On the second night, Pat barked at me, “What’s the letter ‘l’, Cas?”

  “Er…dash, dash, dot, dot?”

  “Get down and give me 10 push-ups – it’s dot, dash, dot, dot.”

  After my push-ups, I stood up and he asked again, “What’s ‘l’, Cas?”

  “Um…dot, dash, dash, dot?” (D’oh.)

  “No
! Another 10.”

  This went on six times. I just couldn’t remember – the fatigue was finally starting to get to me.

  “Right. If you can’t remember now, Jonesy’s going to have to do the push-ups for you until you get it.”

  After Justin took 40 push-ups for me, I finally got it right! To this day, he reckons the last couple I “forgot” on purpose – sorry, mate.

  Then the hallucinations started. I saw a seven-foot-two baby in nappies sucking its thumb and Jonesy saw equally surreal objects. The imagery was so vivid, yet there was still some reason within me saying it was an illusion. They continued to punish us, often trying to break the bond that Justin and I had with one another – pitting us against each other and trying to cause tension between us. In this, at least, they failed miserably.

  We were a united unit throughout the exercise, which played a huge role in us getting through the regime. We constantly encouraged each other, took push-ups for the other one when one of us was going through a rough patch, and we kept close. This was to be one of the key factors that got us across the Tasman. Together, we were a team 10 times harder to break than if there’d only been one of us.

  We made it through to 70 hours, then the trainers pulled the plug. “You bastards are ready for the Tasman – you’re as tough as nails,” Pat told us as we sat at Coogee Beach, eating fish and chips that he’d shouted us. It was the first sign of affection any of them had shown us in three days. As the first greasy chip (with chicken salt) touched my tongue, it seemed to wake me up from a trance. For the first time in days, I looked around at the “civilians” playing and sunbaking on the beach; at 3am, we’d been doing sprints and push-ups, about to puke where they now lay. Unfortunately, I’ll never quite be able to look at Coogee the same way again. Still, we were deeply satisfied that we’d got through the training, as we hadn’t had any idea how we were going to react.

  After a few days R&R, we returned to reality – construction delays and financial pressures. In October 2006, we learnt that Andrew McAuley had been putting together a bid to get across the Tasman before us. It wasn’t the fact that he was attempting to cross the Tasman that we found disappointing and frustrating, it was how he’d gone about it so secretively. We’d been to a lecture of his in August on a recent Antarctic paddle he’d done and he’d mentioned that his next expedition was to be a kite-sled trip to the South Pole (a kite-sled being exactly that – a kite-powered sled that would be able to charge across Antarctica at speeds up to 150 kilometres per hour). Imagine our surprise, then, when we were told by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and a couple of other people that he was planning to “beat them [i.e. us] across the Tasman”.

  We were confused. Why hadn’t he told us of his plans? There was plenty of scope for us to still work together and showcase the differences between our expeditions – he’d be paddling solo in a stock-standard kayak, and he’d be leaving from Tasmania.

  When we heard this news, we once again confronted him to ask what the story was. He responded: “I’ll update my website when I get around to it – should answer your other questions.” This was when things started getting really messy. Both Justin and I had stopped trying to make excuses on his behalf and started deeply resenting him. There’s nothing worse than feeling misled by someone you look up to and respect. After all, he was Australian Geographic Adventurer of the Year and we just couldn’t make sense of this behaviour. We weren’t Scott and Amundsen fighting to be the first to the South Pole; nor were we Edward Whymper and Jean-Antoine Carrel fighting for the crown of the Matterhorn.

  While both Andrew and ourselves were setting out with the same destination in mind, right from the beginning we had incredibly different approaches to the expedition. After assessing the risks, Justin and I decided – for a few reasons – that there was no way we were going to leave from Tasmania.

  First was the water temperature. On the route we took across the Tasman, the average water temperature was 17–22 degrees Celsius. Leaving from Tasmania bound for southern New Zealand, according to CSIRO data the maximum water temperature would have been 12 degrees. Away from the coast, the air temperature in a kayak is a reflection of the water temperature, and the cooler water down south would have meant we’d have had to consume more calories, as our bodies would’ve had to work harder to stay warm. And if we’d had an abandon-ship scenario, it would have meant decreased survival times in the water. Andrew accepted these risks because the distance from Tassie to NZ is 600 kilometres shorter than the route we were aiming for.

  But although the route further south is significantly shorter, the storms you encounter are much more intense. Being below the 40th parallel – a circle of latitude 40 degrees south of the earth’s equatorial plane – low-pressure systems come out of the Southern Ocean with ruthless ferocity. One storm we experienced out on the Tasman maxed out at 90 kilometres per hour (with gusts every now and then far exceeding that). A thousand kilometres further south, that same low-pressure system was blowing above 150 kilometres per hour!

  Another, more subjective goal was that Justin and I felt we had to paddle from mainland Australia rather than an “island”. We both love Tasmania, but this was one of the goals we set ourselves. Also, we didn’t want to use a sail. Originating from our discussion with the kayaking legend Larry about what constitutes a kayak, we passionately believed that by adding a sail, it became a sail boat. These were self-imposed rules and in no way were they meant to detract from what we thought of Andrew’s expedition.

  Falling back on the risk-management work that we’d done, there was also no way we were heading out onto the Tasman without being prepared in a similar fashion to a yacht making the same journey. There are stringent safety guidelines for yachts and fellow ocean rowers, and this ruled out us taking a stock-standard kayak, as we simply couldn’t fit the gear in it that we’d need.

  Andrew advertised on his website that his approach was to “reach for big, bold goals on a shoestring budget”. Our approach was different, in that right from the start, budget constraints were never even a factor we considered. During climbing trips I’ve slept in parks and inner-city gardens, and scavenged for food from bins to let me extend my budget for a few more weeks on the rock. To us, though, there was a time and a place for shoestring-budget adventures – the Tasman wasn’t one of them.

  Around this time, I was also surprised and disappointed to hear that Andrew had phoned several of our stakeholders, apparently trying to gather information about our expedition. He’d called my accounting firm to find out what my exact work situation was (I’d taken extended leave of absence from there, but they were still technically my employer), our major sponsor Unwired, attempting to discover what our sponsorship agreement included, and finally the Australian National Maritime Museum to ask why they were allowing us to launch from their docks.

  We were finding ourselves in the middle of this “race to cross the Tasman”; only, we didn’t see it as a race. There was no room on the Tasman for ego and we were only going to leave if we were 100 per cent ready.

  As we struggled to understand how Andrew could get himself ready in time, Justin and I had the difficult task of informing our sponsors of his bid. At this stage we had close to 30 sponsors investing in a project that they believed would be the first successful kayak crossing of the Tasman. Obviously, that’s how we sold it to them. But as Andrew started attracting some media attention, our stakeholders were getting increasingly concerned that we hadn’t been up front with them.

  This left us in a difficult situation. We felt the most proactive way to deal with this pressure was to send Andrew a final plea, so we wrote him a letter, essentially asking him to delay his departure. We explained that we’d attracted sponsorship based largely on our expedition being the first crossing of the Tasman. And from what Andrew had told us of his plans, we’d been happy to sell our expedition to investors along these lines. Now all this was potentially in jeopardy. As well as sending the letter to Andrew, we for
warded a copy to all our sponsors, showing them that we were indeed looking out for their interests.

  However, Andrew didn’t want a compromise, he didn’t want to meet up and discuss our dilemma – he was going and that was that. He left from the east coast of Tasmania on his first attempt to cross the Tasman on 2 December 2006.

  I felt sick. I wrote in my diary that day: “I’ve got a deep hollow sensation within – it’s a gut-churning reaction right under the ribs. My legs feel weak. I can’t believe he’s actually left. The wheels are set in motion – all we can do is sit back and watch.”

  Regardless of everything else, we thought Andrew had done incredibly well to mobilise his expedition so quickly. It wasn’t long, though, before his first setback. Within two days, he was back in Tasmania. It had been too cold for him and he hadn’t been able to sleep. I was surprised to hear that he’d paddled for 20 hours straight on his first day. I thought he should have followed the example of people like Jim Shekkadar and John Muir. Shekkadar, who rowed across the Pacific, and Muir, an incredible Aussie adventurer who’d hauled sleds to both poles, walked across Australia and climbed Everest, had averaged three hours per day in the first week of their expeditions to allow their bodies to adapt to the stress of expedition life.

  It must have been tough for Andrew to turn back once he’d made the decision to head out to sea, especially as he’d obviously been racing the clock to get out there before us. We heard that he’d only done one overnight sea trial off the coast of Terrigal, on the New South Wales Central Coast, hundreds of kilometres from his trans-Tasman route; if he’d done more offshore trials and more trials in the Southern Ocean, he could have rectified issues such as the cold and not being able to sleep. As I’ve mentioned, the average water temperature was one of the main reasons we weren’t leaving from that far down south. Andrew had seen our risk-management document, so he would have known this.