The 1000 Hour Day

by Chris Bray

  We’ve just set up camp in preparation for my open house party! I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the biggest party for hundreds of kilometres around. We’ve got the Eee PC set up cranking some music, we’ve got a tiny 30-millilitre bottle of vodka, a cup of tea each, some chocolate, some dried trout, and Chris has about 30 more balloons that he’s just filled the tent with—awesome! This party is going to go off with a bang—quite literally—as Chris is about to set off some fireworks in the form of a bear-banger fired from the shotgun. All in all, this would have to be the best birthday ever.

  DAY 40: Puncture midstream!

  After Clark’s birthday party last night, we retired to our tent feeling particularly positive about everything—about the successful day, about the weather, the freshly drying trout, and about the fantastic kilometres that we’d racked up that day. As we lay there, listening to the river gurgling past—coursing endlessly westwards—we couldn’t suppress a nagging feeling that we were in some way wasting this free conveyor belt. What started as a ludicrous idea slowly began to take form, and the concept of 24-hour river travel began to sound more and more achievable. ‘Imagine that …’ we breathed, ‘if we set up properly, we wouldn’t even need to come ashore for nut breaks, dinner, emails, or even to camp. We’d just stay out there on our houseboat, taking it in shifts to steer the raft all day and all night …’ With the river flowing anything from 1.5 to 6 kilometres per hour, the potential kilometres we could rack up in a 24-hour period were simply too astronomical to ignore. ‘I reckon we can do it. Let’s give it a try anyway!’ I said.

  We rugged up with several Icebreaker layers, hopped back into our Gore-Tex drysuits, pulled our Thermarest mattresses out from our tent and lay them across the deck, folded everything else away and rolled HMAS Nugget back into the flow at about 2 am, full of excitement. Would it work? Was this really possible? It was very cold and quiet, but we couldn’t have asked for a more favourable section of river to try it out: wide, deep and relatively slow flowing.

  Warmed by a quick coffee prepared onboard, I took the first two-hour shift and Clark stretched out on his Thermarest. Before long he was sound asleep, and I spent a pleasant two hours gently guiding our mobile home around corners, avoiding back-eddies and linking up channels of slightly faster flowing water. My shift passed drama free, and I handed over to Clark, grinning a big, adventurous boyish grin. This was more like it. By morning we were both dog-tired, but sufficiently rested to ‘begin’ our normal day at 7.30 am, as usual. The awesome thing was, though, that we’d already racked up just over 5 kilometres!

  Brekky on the go worked a treat, and as we lay back sipping our coffee in the golden sunlight, we both agreed that houseboating is the only way to travel the Kuujjua. We spent the first hour or so today refining our systems so everything was within easy reach, re-filling our week’s bag of supplies from various drybags, drying clothes and doing a few other chores as the day slipped on, and the bottom flew past beneath us. Even on a kayak or a canoe it just wouldn’t be the same: on board HMAS Nugget we can stretch out, stand up, walk around, cook, get to all our gear and dangle our feet in the water—it’s perfect.

  As the sun strengthened and the temperatures soared, we gradually stripped off our layers inside our drysuit. The tyres became so hot they were literally painful to touch, but with a gentle breeze blowing, we were absolutely loving it.

  As always though, Victoria Island sensed our smugness and lashed out.

  We were merrily drifting down the middle of the river when beside me I suddenly heard a horrible noise: ‘psssssSSSSSSSS’. It grew louder and louder, and was coming from the wheel right behind me. I whipped around and instantly saw what was happening—a small hole had appeared in the puncture-repair patch we’d put on yesterday, and air was rushing out of the tyre, tearing the hole bigger and bigger even as I reached out towards it. ‘TO SHORE! PADDLE!! GO!! GO!!’ I shouted, holding my thumb over the burning hot hole, feeling it gradually spread, while my mind raced ahead visualising what was about to happen. If this wheel deflated, HMAS Nugget would start to sink around us until this whole side would be underwater, while still being carried downstream. ‘We’re getting there!’ Clark reassured me, as I smeared puncture repair glue around the rubber on all sides of my finger and—hoping against hope—whisked my thumb away and slapped on the biggest repair patch we have. It held. For about ten seconds, and then it too stretched out in the heat and burst its boundaries. ‘PSSSSS!!!!’

  Somehow, we got to shore just in time, and propping the corner of HMAS Nugget up on our Manfrotto tripod, we pulled off the deflated tube and replaced it with one of our two spares. While Clark pumped it up—requiring a mere 1004 pumps from our large stand-up pump—I tried to repair the punctured tube. The tear was now too big for our commercial bike tube patches, so I cut out a large section of bike inner tube rubber we brought, and smeared it with some horrible rubber-to-rubber glue, the packaging for which bore endless warnings about not getting this stuff on your hands, as your body will absorb powerful neurotoxins right through your skin and into your brain. Trying not to breathe, I patched up the tube, folded it away for later and we re-launched HMAS Nugget, just as a rain squall closed in, cooling things down nicely. Another crisis averted.

  With the rain came wind, and we were blown firmly against the far bank of the river, having to repeatedly punt ourselves off the shallows with our paddle, while the wheels resonated with nerve-racking sounds as they grazed and bumped their way along the bottom. The wind calmed, and as we passed a few more rivers that fed into ours, the Kuujjua became stronger, deeper, and more dependable. We lay back, plugged my iPod into our little Eee PC laptop speakers, and actually relaxed—sipping hot chocolate, listening to some Angus and Julia Stone and even some Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D Minor’ (a famous piece of irresistibly calming and reflective classical music) as we spun serenely onwards, past the ever more beautiful scenery of the Shaler Mountains. It was a moment we’ll never forget.

  At one stage, Clark pointed ahead and I rolled over to watch a bull caribou prance down to the bank, stand for a second in the shallows mentally steeling himself for the task ahead, and then stride confidently into the icy water, and swim all the way across the Kuujjua—well out of his depth—as we bore down upon him, cameras blazing. Once out on the far side he shook himself dry, did a few energetic leaps to warm himself up, and then paused to regard us as we passed silently by, the water dripping from his shaggy goatee sparkling in the golden sunlight.

  Starting to get a little fancy with our raft, I managed to pump some more air into one of our tyres en route to level out HMAS Nugget a little. It feels like such a self-contained houseboat now, we have no need for the shore. The river has burst its banks in a few places, spreading out into bays and fields that are not marked on the map, indicating that through pure luck, we have managed to get here pretty much slap-bang at the time of maximum flow. The mosquito plague has just begun in earnest, and whenever we dare set foot ashore great humming clouds descend upon us. Thankfully we are covered head to toe in our mozzie-proof drysuits, and remaining out in the middle of the river seems to help reduce mosquito numbers.

  By 6 pm—our arbitrary end of the day—we’d managed 22.3 kilometres, despite only starting this whole 24-hour rafting adventure in the wee hours of the morning after the party died down. Tomorrow—which just started a few minutes ago—we’re really going to see what’s possible.

  DAY 41: The wind and the wolves

  Today’s progress was nothing short of unbelievable, and that’s only half the story—it was a day of contrasts, hard work and high adventure on the river. Our ‘day’ started at 6 pm last night when we reset out daily kilometreage and continued our unstoppable magic carpet ride down the Kuujjua, adjusting to life permanently within a drysuit. The night was cold, but we had extra Icebreaker layers on under our drysuits in preparation, and that kept us warm during the (brilliantly sunny) ‘night’ (we still have more than two weeks to go before the sun fir
st dips even slightly below the horizon).

  I must admit, having not slept properly in several days, we were soon struggling to stay awake, and there was one embarrassing moment when we both suddenly woke to find HMAS Nugget docked against the river bank, with a caribou looking at us. We sat bolt upright. ‘How long have we been like this?’ I asked, looking at Clark, who was evidently about to ask me the same question. We didn’t even know who was supposed to be on watch. After this, we decided to administer a steady drip of coffee into our systems, which helped.

  As the river widens it’s becoming shallower, and invariably we scrunch or bang to a halt every half an hour or so on random shoals. If whoever’s on watch spots them early enough, he can usually paddle around them, but if he doesn’t, there’s nothing for it but to hurriedly shake the other awake, and both instantly plunge into freezing, rushing, knee-deep water to try to push around to avoid collision. ‘To the left! Look out!’ It’s a very rude awakening to find yourself slipping around in an icy river and being shouted at before your eyes have even adjusted to the sunlight!

  The wind has been increasing too, and eventually it became impossible for one person to keep HMAS Nugget midstream on their own. We really are at the mercy of any real wind other than a following breeze; the windage of our houseboat is such that we simply get blown sideways against the downwind bank. If we’re lucky then we’ll just grind to a noisy, juddering halt in the shallows, but more often than not we come to a somewhat more abrupt halt with the wheel rim smashing against a submerged rock.

  Progress in these conditions is an arduous process requiring we both paddle for all we’re worth for perhaps an hour, trying to lift ourselves free from the clutch of the downwind bank. Once back out in the flow, we then have to keep paddling to try and hold our ground against the wind, until eventually, exhausted, we have to give up, and enjoy a brief period of rest while we’re blown back again. Leapfrogging along the riverbank in this way, neither of us got a wink of sleep all day.

  ‘Oh, no! Stop!’ I suddenly heard Clark shout, and turning, saw him leaping off into the waist-deep water, staring wildly at the bottom. ‘I dropped my iPod!’

  This was no laughing matter. The iPod is literally what keeps us going out here—especially when hauling—our sanctuary when all around is unbearable. I felt terrible for Clark, and pulled HMAS Nugget to the bank and stood silently watching his frantic searching, not sure what to say.

  ‘Got it!’ Plunging down, Clark triumphantly held it aloft, dripping. He immediately switched it off, and it’s been sitting on deck drying ever since. We’re both silently praying it’ll still work.

  Genuinely large mountains slid into view and towered over us as we snaked past—great raised plateaus with perfectly flat tops, rimmed all around by sheer cliff walls—a real ‘Lost World’ or ‘Land Before Time’ kinda place. Soon the wind picked up so stiffly that it formed whitecaps on the river, and we were helplessly pinned against the shore—unable to go anywhere. Deciding to make the most of it, we managed to get about an hour’s sleep while it blew over.

  Chewing on some now wonderfully dried trout after we woke, the big excitement of the day came as we pushed off and once again fought to paddle back out into the main flow. I spotted two white blobs moving around a big black blob on the far bank, above which flitted several much smaller black dots. Scale, is—as I’ve said many times—non-existent out here, so we could just as easily have been looking at two white mice scurrying around a small black chicken with black flies buzzing overhead, as watching two arctic wolves gorging themselves on the freshly killed carcass of a muskox, with black crows circling and waiting their turn. As it happened on this particular day, it was the latter—confirmed by taking a quick photo using my 400-millimetre telephoto lens. Pumped with adrenalin and excitement, we redoubled our efforts to paddle to that far windward bank to get a look before the current whisked us past.

  We were churning the water perhaps two-thirds of the way across—and still a good way upstream—when one of the wolves stopped eating and looked right at us. We stopped paddling, only to be instantly blown backwards again, so we hurriedly continued our vicious paddling while trying to maintain a passive, non-threatening atmosphere. The wolf then started trotting up the side of the river to meet us. She was in no hurry, and just loped gracefully to the exact point at which it looked like—if our arms didn’t drop off from exhaustion first—we’d finally reach her side. There, the wolf simply sat down and waited, staring fixedly at us, fresh bloodstains down her chest, with a look that said more plainly than words: ‘Mmm, very nice, and here comes dessert … ’

  Cameras ready, we nervously paddled on. When we were only perhaps 20 metres away she got up and trotted a little further up the bank and lay down, evidently happier to keep her distance but clearly burning with curiosity about us and our unwieldy craft. Then the other, larger wolf—his white face dirty with blood—left the carcass too and trotted over, fixing us with an unforgettable wolf-stare from those incredibly piercing eyes. He came perhaps within 10 metres, sniffing, watching, listening, inspecting, then joined his mate, and together they trotted off into the distance.

  As 6 pm ticked past, we huddled around the GPS waiting for it to show us how far we’d come. Any moment now. Beep. We let out a cheer. A whopping 46 kilometres in just 24 hours!

  DAY 42: Speed and distance records smashed!

  The night was bitterly cold. Try as we did—while we drifted along—we just could not sleep, and we both lay curled in the foetal position on our sides, balaclava and beanie pulled down tightly over our heads, feeling chilled to the core. Even the constant flow of hot drinks we administered only provided temporary relief, and in the end Clark took to sitting up and padding one side of the raft in pointless circles for hours just to try and generate a bit of body warmth, while I—apparently too worn out to shiver—had to resort to deliberately convulsing, repetitively tightening and releasing every muscle that my numb brain could command.

  The hours seemed like days and while the kilometres were going well, it was a long, hard night, filled with multiple episodes of getting out and easing HMAS Nugget over ground so shallow it threatened to rip the tyres off. At about 3 am we found an excuse to heat up a full-on dehydrated meal, and that seemed to kick-start our day at last. As our rumbling stomachs were warmed by Chicken Tikka Masala, the sun—which since midnight had been rising in perfect synchrony behind a bank of cloud rising with it—finally started to pull clear. The sunlight leapt over the landscape ahead of us, visibly spreading from hill to hill towards us as the curtain of depression was withdrawn, until finally it was upon us, and we realised that perhaps we were going to survive the night after all. Having lost a few hours wind-bound at the start of ‘today’, the idea of trying to better yesterday’s 46-kilometre effort seemed remote, but still we gave it everything we had.

  We heard—even before we spotted—a rapid coming up around the corner a bit after lunch, and hurried to align HMAS Nugget as best we could with the chute of water funnelling through it. It looked like the height of the whole river had dropped by a good half-metre or more, and we certainly felt it. Half staring at the speed-over-ground reading on the GPS, and half watching the submerged boulders streak past horribly close beneath the wheel rims, we held on as we broke our PAC speed record, screaming along at 10.2 kilometres per hour, bouncing from one standing wave to the next. Beyond the rapid, the river became more contained, deeper and faster.

  Losing sight of the bottom, sometimes it feels like we’re only sluggishly drifting along but a glance at the GPS often reveals we are in fact scorching along at 6, 7 or even 8 kilometres per hour for minutes at a time. As 6 pm came and went, we again held our breaths looking at the GPS: 54.2 kilometres!! Not only did we break the 50-kilometres-a-day barrier, but we’ve also managed just over 100 kilometres in the last two days alone! At this rate, we’ll get to our exit lake and strike out for the west side of the island around lunchtime tomorrow!

  DAY 43: The Kuujju
a strikes back

  So it seems the first half of the river was all sunshine and lazy drifting, purely to lull us into a false sense of security so that the last section—which we just travelled—would seem all the more traumatic. Day 43 started with us pinned, once again, to the side of the river by the wind, and so after yesterday’s dinner we climbed the hill beside us to take a look at an ancient stone inukshuk (a stone cairn built by Inuit, often in the shape of a man) on the skyline, and to gaze down upon the upcoming quite serious rapid. In front of us, a branch river gushed into the main Kuujjua, sending the whole churning mess down through a rocky chute. It didn’t look friendly, and, staring down upon it, I was starting to feel a little anxious. Unfortunately with the valley walls here far too steep to haul, we had little choice but to attempt the rapid. We couldn’t even line it down on a rope as HMAS Nugget is anything but streamlined and there’s no holding her back in a current. It looked like if we managed to keep ourselves in the very middle of the flow, we’d be okay. It looked deep enough that we shouldn’t hit any boulders and none poked through the surface in view.

  As soon as the wind died enough, we lashed the video camera to the bow to capture our experience, and pushed off. Critically, first we had to battle our way into the wind and try to get to the far bank where the chute started, otherwise the current would carry us past, right into the branch river’s cascading flow.