Crossing the Ditch Read online

  We thought that was Andrew done for the summer, as the weather window is quite narrow. Ideally, any trans-Tasman voyage is best attempted between November and March, as this is when the water temperature is warmest and gales and storms are least common. Later in the kayaking-to-New-Zealand season, there’s a higher risk in the north Tasman of tropical cyclones making their way down into NZ waters.

  Apart from this initial “trial” having probably freaked him out, we were sure he had too many issues to rectify and not enough time to properly address them before the weather window closed. How wrong we were…

  Andrew worked tirelessly through the festive season in equipping his kayak for the crossing. He added insulation, rigged a hammock kind of set-up to sleep on and took warmer clothing. Before we knew it, he was off on his second attempt.

  We fought just as hard to get ourselves ready for the crossing before the weather window drew to a close, as we were still hoping to get away before the end of January. That was the deadline “Clouds” had set for our departure.

  By now, we’d begun the construction process, with the same crew who’d made the Pittarak kayak. They were based in a small factory near Newcastle where the owner, Graham Chapman, had been making boats for over 20 years. He had a wealth of knowledge, but more importantly, a passion for unique projects.

  As funding still hadn’t come through, we had to throw all our own money at the project to get it off the ground. Within a month of construction starting, our $40,000 worth of life savings had been invested in the project and we saw our credit cards being used more and more. We were sinking and needed some external assistance…quickly. A few small financial backers jumped on, and Justin’s mother – who was still pretty sceptical about the whole thing – provided us with a loan so that we could “just get on with the rest of our lives”. (Thanks, Mrs Jones!)

  Our construction timeline had blown out from a projected eight weeks to over 20 – one-off designs always seem to take much longer than anticipated and our kayak was no exception. We ended up going to Newcastle just before Christmas and staying with the boat builder for two weeks to help get her ready. Each night we lay awake, as shards of fibreglass had splintered themselves all through our bodies from the sanding. This gave us extra time to reflect on the fact that we were slowly falling way behind schedule.

  The day before the shed closed for the festive season, we drove back down to Sydney with resin drying on the hull of the kayak, knowing that we had to get the fit-out completed in a week. Craig Thomsen, our electrical engineer, told us we were dreaming, but we didn’t let this get us down; we “knew” we’d get ready in time.

  Working on the fit-out 16 to 18 hours each day, with help from an army of mates coming round to my parents’ suburban garage – which we’d transformed into a boat-building factory! – was stressful, but fun at the same time. We were drinking way too much coffee, eating fatty greasy food as part of our “bulking up”, only getting six hours a night of interrupted sleep and not getting any decent training in. It wasn’t the best preparation for the Tasman.

  On Christmas Eve 2006, we were ready to put her on the water for the first time. It was a day we’d been waiting for for years – five, to be exact. The night before the first dip, we were up till after midnight working on the wiring inside the cabin. It was important for us to install most of the electrics prior to that first dip, so we could see how the weight of the equipment affected her water line and stability.

  We woke early and drove her down to Bobbin Head, accompanied by a few close mates and family. We were all excited, and to be honest we were expecting to see her blissfully glide through the water. As we reversed her down the ramp and her smooth, shiny hull slid in for the first time, a few bystanders gave a cheer. But when the kayak plunged into the cloudy water, the first thing we noticed was that she was sitting significantly higher than her DWL (Designed Water Line). We were horrified.

  And then it got worse. She toppled onto her side and sat there listing on a 40-degree angle – that was her neutral position. Everyone there to witness the launch was silent, jaws dropped in disbelief. A million thoughts and emotions flooded through me – the most vivid being fear. We’d spent the last two years of our lives on the project (six months of that full-time) and put our life savings into it; we’d attracted a string of sponsors and talked up the expedition with the media and everyone else we knew. And now we had a kayak that didn’t even float properly.

  What was wrong? We took her out for a paddle and each painful stroke hurt us emotionally more than anything else. After getting a feeling for what was going on, we pulled her out and sat down, devastated. Everyone, including Jonesy, turned to me and asked, “So what now?”

  I was in the driver’s seat, but what we’d seen had got me so down I wanted someone else to absorb the responsibility and provide direction. Why couldn’t Jonesy take the proactive step to rectify the situation? All I wanted to do was crawl under a rock and hide – let someone else deal with it.

  Of course, as much as I felt pressured by people looking to me for answers, I knew I enjoyed taking responsibility for things, even though this hadn’t exactly been one of our happiest moments. When we returned home, there was so much doubt running through my mind about what had gone wrong. Was it a design or a construction fault? We uploaded a couple of videos that we’d taken of her performance onto the internet to allow Rob Feloy, over in the UK, Larry Gray and Graham, the boat builder, to see what the problems had been.

  It was Christmas time and understandably it was hard to get hold of these guys. But eventually we tossed some ideas back and forth as to what might be causing the problems, and right from the start opinions differed. It was difficult to manage the conflicting advice coming in from various parties. From Justin’s and my perspective, we weren’t experienced seamen, and we had to rely on logic and reason. The fact that the boat was sitting 8 centimetres above her DWL, fully laden, indicated that we needed to get her lower in the water.

  We took the approach a yachtsman would take (thoroughly sanctioned by the builder) – we began to add ballast. We started lining sheet lead and lead bricks through the hull of the kayak, which helped, but wasn’t enough. Fortunately, there were no occupational health and safety officers around as the backyard lead-smelting production line we had going would have horrified them!

  Taking the boat down to the water, we realised this wasn’t sufficient, so we decided to add a weighted centreboard with a lead bulb down the bottom of it. This finally resulted in her sitting beautifully upright, but she had become hideously heavy: she’d put on 180 kilograms over the festive season. We all seem to gain a little over this time of year – our kayak was no exception.

  Rob maintained right from the start that the stability of a vessel should come from the hull shape. She was now sitting properly in the water, which was a good thing, but we were to find that this led to a whole wad of issues we weren’t expecting; the most noticeable being that she was horribly heavy to paddle through the water. Fully laden we were weighing in at just over 1.2 tonnes, and we had to work hard each stroke to keep her moving.

  Late one evening, I sat in the cabin with tangled red and black wires everywhere. I was blankly staring at the electrical diagram as I tried to make sense of which wire to connect to the PV discharge box (that was the name we gave it, anyway). Justin, myself and a few mates were working on the electrical system a couple of days after Christmas, and we were exhausted. As we hadn’t yet named our trans-Tasman baby, and to take our minds off our fatigue, we started joking about the possibilities:

  “Screamin’ Seaman,” I blurted.

  The boys laughed, and said that our sponsors wouldn’t be too happy with that one. We threw up a few others that seemed to get more and more absurd, before my brother Clary walked into the garage and, half grinning, cockily said, “Call it Lot 41.”

  We stopped working for a second and stared at one another. What the hell was he talking about? Sensing our confusion, he continue
d.

  “Well…” he started. Moving onto the bow of the kayak he paused, crossed his legs like a doctor and leant slightly forward. “Lot 41 was the lot number of a racehorse over in New Zealand back in the 1920s. A Sydney trainer, Harry Telford, was a bit of a battler, and he knew his thoroughbred bloodlines. He saw Lot 41 was up for sale and immediately wanted to get his hands on him to train.

  “He contacted an American businessman, Mr Davis, who agreed to buy him. However, after Harry shipped him across to Australia, Davis was disgusted to find that the horse moved awkwardly and had a face covered in warts, and he refused to pay for the costs of training him.

  “Harry took on all the risk and made an arrangement that he’d receive two-thirds of the takings…that was if there were any. He started training the horse hard, but he lost his first four races. Stable hands laughed at the horse, calling him a donkey. Anyway, he was named Phar Lap and became one of the greatest racehorses of all time.

  “This was around the time of the Great Depression, when unemployment was up around the 30 per cent mark, and Phar Lap’s success was a massive inspiration to people all over Australia. It gave them hope that things would eventually get better.”

  We sat in silence.

  “Ah, you boys like it…don’t you?” Clary smiled.

  It was perfect – we had a name for our kayak. Lot 41 represented so many of the qualities we were trying to promote…and it also had the Australia/New Zealand link. Phar Lap was known to have had a heart two-and-a-half times the size of his peers – that was exactly what we’d need to cross the Tasman.

  Now that we’d named our baby, we could move on to more urgent practical matters. We’d struggled with Lot 41’s newfound weight when we’d paddled inshore, and taking her for a gallop offshore was even worse. The smallest of waves would wash over the pits, which made for uncomfortably wet paddling.

  Both the central point of windage and centre of lateral resistance had been altered by the lead, which saw the nose of our kayak always blowing up into the wind. (The central point of windage (CLW) is that point on a craft where an equal level of surface area is exposed to the wind on either side of that point, when the wind is blowing from the side. The central point of lateral resistance (CLR) is a similar point, but below the water’s surface, taking into account the surface area below.) Offshore, with the CLW being behind the CLR, this meant our nose kept blowing up into the wind, and with the extra lead, New Zealand seemed a long way off.

  On 6 January, we had our official launch down at the Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour, where 400 spectators showed and all the TV stations had crews present. This was committing ourselves – we were due to leave within a few weeks. Because the actual centreboard which would address the stability issue wasn’t ready yet, we craftily engineered a marine ply centreboard with 40 kilograms of weights from the local gym attached to the bottom. We hoped this would prevent Lot 41 embarrassing herself – and us – by flopping on her side once she hit the water. We had our fingers crossed all day that this would keep us upright: we were terrified that the ply would break. Fortunately, it held firm.

  After the launch we had some serious offshore testing to do, and our weather window was running out. Months earlier, we’d plotted an extensive list of offshore trials that we’d need to complete in order to prove both to ourselves and all our stakeholders that we were ready. But with time against us, we compromised and decided that one sea trial from Sydney to Newcastle would suffice.

  We headed out to sea on our big offshore trial, which we expected to take three days, knowing that this was an essential box to tick before we headed east to NZ. If we couldn’t paddle to Newcastle, how could we attempt to cross the Tasman? There was no chance.

  On the big day, Terry Wise helped us crane Lot 41 into the water at the Cruising Yacht Club at Rushcutters Bay. (We’d met Terry a few months earlier, when we’d been trying to find a sailing school to sponsor our Sea Safety Survival training, Marine Radio Course and the like. After beating our head against a brick wall with five other schools, we spoke to Terry, who, without hesitation, said, “Yep, sure – how else can I help?”) The crane enabled us to attach the lead bulb on dry land, which was heaps easier than what we’d been doing – holding our breath and trying to do it under water! Terry then followed us out of the harbour on a yacht – Brindabella – with a crew of students he was teaching.

  The previous couple of days had been quite frantic, doing last-minute prep for offshore. We’d been working long hours, but the quiet optimism the lead bulb had injected was more than enough for us to plough on. Finally, when Lot 41 was in the water and our paddling clothes were on, we were ready to depart.

  We weren’t exactly psyched, though – this sea trial felt like a formality and something we had to do. We still had a million and one things to finish off and spending three days out at sea didn’t feel like it was going to add much value.

  As we set out, we could feel proud that, only a month before, we’d put Lot 41 on the water and she’d flopped on her side – now we were heading out of the harbour on a three-day offshore voyage.

  But from the start, it didn’t feel right. The pressure knotted our stomachs as we made painfully slow progress out of Sydney Harbour into a 20-knot northeaster. We both had a bad feeling about this.

  After paddling for six hours, we reached the heads just after midnight and found ourselves fighting a wind that was threatening to smash us onto the southern headland. At first it didn’t seem to pose too much danger, but as we continued into the darkness we realised that the wind was having more of an effect on our progress than our paddles were.

  To make matters worse, the sciatic nerve in my bum was pulsing pain through my leg and lower back. From all the paddling we’d been doing over the previous couple of months, my pelvis had rotated and had begun to crush a nerve the size of a thin sausage that runs all the way down the back to the feet. My whole left leg went numb – it was frightening not being able to wiggle my toes.

  As we fought to avoid the headland and the surrounding reef, we couldn’t stop and refuel as we needed to keep fighting against being forced onto the rocks. Our bodies began to cramp; we were growing weaker. First, we could hear the waves crashing on the headland and, as we were forced closer to them, the moonlight started dancing with the whitewash of waves. We were within 80 metres of the rocks and were paddling with every desperate ounce of energy we had left. It had seemed an unlikely threat, but it was now much too close.

  I was more worried about losing Lot 41 than I was about drowning. Somehow we managed to turn the bow into the wind, and began to edge away from the rocks at barely a kilometre per hour. By 2am we were finally creating distance between the headland and us. As we escaped land and headed seaward, we were swept south by the strong wind and current. Our plans immediately had to change from paddling north to Newcastle to paddling down to Wollongong. We crawled into the cabin (which, for some reason, had water sloshing around it) to get a couple of hours’ sleep before hitting the sticks again. We were totally exhausted, dehydrated and constantly cramping.

  Ten kilometres off Bondi Beach, throughout the next day the sea built and constantly buffeted us. We realised we were taking on water in nearly all bulkheads (the partitions inside the hull which, in theory, were meant to limit water leakage) – bad news. With the lead that we’d added, she was no longer positively buoyant; that is, if we took on enough water, she was going to sink.

  We pumped and pumped, but it was a losing battle – the deckline had become our new water line, when it should have been 15 centimetres lower. As we pumped water out of the pits, it poured back in through the pits into the bow, as well as the cabin. We fought hard to get her back towards shore, but we were moving painfully slowly in a sinking kayak, 5 kilometres off the coast of Coogee. My mind drifted to those lucky people sunbaking on the beach, blissfully unaware of us out there, about to sink.

  Justin was intent on getting Lot 41 back to land by our own
means, but when a game-fishing vessel came by and asked if we needed a hand, we couldn’t say no. He towed us back into the harbour, and when we finally moored up, the kayak was a sorry sight. She lumbered on her side from the volume of water she had filling her belly – about a foot sloshed above the cabin floor. Both the pits were full of water, as was the bow. We sat in a park, looking at Lot 41, feeling completely shattered. We’d survived, but our hearts had taken another beating.

  After that disastrous offshore trial, on Australia Day 2007 we made the heart-wrenching decision to delay our bid till the following summer. We’d set ourselves a goal, we’d sold our expedition to the world, and then we’d had to delay: we’d failed. At this stage, Andrew was two weeks into his crossing and we assumed that he’d make it to New Zealand.

  7

  Wet, Cold, Scared…Alone

  With our dream to kayak from Australia to New Zealand lying in tatters, never did we think our lives were about to become a whole lot more complicated.

  After we informed our stakeholders, we decided to take a month off the project and re-evaluate our position on our return. We were over kayaking, over the project, but worst of all we were over each other. We’d spent so much time working and training with one another – we just needed some space.

  Justin dealt with the disappointment of the horrendous sea trial by getting blotto in Sydney for a few days, then heading back to Indonesia, thoroughly depressed: less about the kayak not working than about what seemed to be the end of our friendship.

  I took off down the coast to the Croajingalong National Park, on the border between New South Wales and Victoria, for some deep R&R. For the first week, I slept between 14 and 18 hours a day. I started taking small walks along the beach, often finding myself breathless and exhausted after a mere 10 minutes. Initially, I was also utterly depressed. If I ever thought about the project, my stomach would gurgle and I’d feel like puking. Slowly, though, I realised my body – and my mind – was doing what it needed to do to rejuvenate and re-energise itself.