The 1000 Hour Day

by Chris Bray

  ‘The ocean looks rather a long way down, doesn’t it,’ I said quietly. It certainly did. We unclipped and walked tentatively forward, our disbelieving gaze tracking downwards as we advanced towards the edge of … a cliff. A 10-metre cliff. Right at our end point, stretching in both directions as far as we could see, a 10-metre drop down onto a narrow, pebbly, rock-strewn coastline—our end point.

  In complete exasperation, we threw a mock tantrum, water beading and flinging off us as we vented our frustration, and then at last we stood there, looking at each other in the rain, wet through, not wanting to move a muscle from our semi-hunched posture else wet, cold fabric would adhere to our clammy skin. Once again, we laughed at ourselves. What else could we do? The three of us started this trip together—Clark and I, and the PAC—and all three of us were going to finish it. There was no question about it, the PAC—good ol’ HMAS Nugget—was going to celebrate with us, standing in the waves of the ocean. The question was: how to get it down there?

  We eventually found an unlikely erosion gully running down to the shore—a near-45-degree slope comprised solely of slipping boulders. This would have to do. We unloaded some of the heavier items, set the video camera up, and began lowering the PAC down this boulder-avalanche-chute-of-death. As we accelerated down, realisation dawned. Even if we now broke all our legs, and tumbled head over heels downhill—even if we both had heart attacks or if Victoria Island struck us both simultaneously with lightning (I wouldn’t put it past her)—it suddenly didn’t matter anymore, because no matter what, we were now assured of reaching the far side, even if we fell the last couple of metres. This sense of inescapable destiny flooded us with euphoria, and with the PAC increasingly eager to get to the water too, we began running along behind it—more hanging onto it than lowering it—as the wheels finally scrunched onto the pebbles and burst against an incoming wave.

  We’d done it. We were standing in the water, on the most extreme westerly tip of Victoria Island, after 70 days (128 if you count the first 58—that’s more than a third of a year), not only with the PAC, but with all four wheels. We could not believe it.

  It was pretty cool to think that three years ago we were standing across the other side of this, the ninth-largest island on the planet, about to try and walk across it at its widest point, with virtually no idea of what we’d face. And now, here we are … It’s been a long-held dream, and it’s become our lives. All the many things we’ve learned, experienced, feared, overcome and enjoyed between these two coastlines since Clark was 21 and I was 22 have made us who we are—they’ve shaped our personalities and values; taught us how to overcome, and if necessary, endure; and—above all—formed one hell of a friendship between us.

  We had to wait a while down the bottom of the cliff for the rain to ease enough to grab some belated photos of ‘the moment’, and then we harnessed back up for ‘definitely’ the last time, and grunted our way back up the boulder-avalanche-chute-of-death to the flat, grassy tundra top, where we set up camp just as the rain set in again.

  We enjoyed a celebratory mug of coffee (our last coffee ration!), and then dug into various other rations at random—not that we were particularly hungry, but just because we could. It was awesome.

  As the drizzle continued, Clark had the ingenious idea of setting up the little blue tarp as a shelter, propped out from the side of the tent by our paddles (the tent itself was just too wet and manky to crawl into without totally killing the mood). We ate a few blocks of chocolate (yes, as opposed to ‘squares’ of chocolate), and then after a brief wander along the shoreline we came back and enjoyed our final Back Country Cuisine ‘Mexican Chicken’ dehydrated meal that we have been saving for this moment. Then, feeling at last content and secretly rather proud, we unwound the protective bubble-wrap from around our tiny little hotel minbar-sized bottle of Grand Marnier liqueur that we lugged all this way—just as we did in 2005. And—just as it did back then—having not had an alcoholic drink in so long, and with next to no body fat left (we shall remedy these issues in Vancouver), we both felt the effects of sharing this microscopic bottle. Good times. Good times. And still it rained.

  ‘Do your worst, Victoria Island!’ we jeered merrily. ‘You’re too late. We got there!’ Let’s readjust the scores now. Victoria Island: 0, Clark and Chris: 1.

  Just before going to sleep, we gave our man in Holman a call, and to our delight, he had some good news. ‘Call my friend,’ he said. ‘He has one of the biggest boats in Holman. He’ll come and get you.’

  I did just that, and after I’d explained our predicament, the man didn’t hesitate: ‘Oh, yes, sure. No problems.’

  Even the clammy insides of our sleeping bags can’t dampen our spirits tonight, and having set up the bear alarm and turned off our watch alarms, we’re about to enjoy a very long and very well-deserved sleep.

  Days 70 to 76: The great escape!

  Only in the North could this happen. The last five days have been quite the experience. ‘It’s not over till it’s over’—a truer phrase has never been uttered—and so the adventure continues from where we presumed it had ended: perched smugly on the most westerly tip of Victoria Island, glowing with satisfaction and Grand Marnier …

  The following day (Day 70 + 1) brought with it equally unappealing weather, and we spent much of the day in the manky tent or huddled underneath the tarp shelter, enjoying forbidden pleasures like triple-ration servings, grinning all the while as we tried to shake the feeling of guilt at not hauling anywhere. But for the weather, it would have been perfect.

  I kept calling our man with the boat in Holman, and each time I hung up with the news that, no, the waves were still too rough for him to attempt a pickup. We passed the time (Day 70 + 2) building a stone cairn propping up a small driftwood log into which we carved ‘1000 Hour Day Expedition—1000 km E > W—Chris + Clark—2008’.

  We also explored several kilometres north and south along the coastline to look for a suitable place for a dinghy to land, and to our delight, about 3 kilometres south stretched a long pebbly beach. It looked perfect. When I called our man on the following morning (Day 70 + 3), he was already loading his boat with extra fuel for the twelve-hour, 300-kilometre return trip. We gave him the location of the beach, and after packing our campsite up, shouldered our harnesses for the last time ‘definitely’, and hauled south.

  Re-energised by our two full days of food and rest, we basically ran all the way, covering the 3 kilometres in well under an hour. As we did, the sun burst through the clouds that had been smothering it since we arrived, and we were blessed with a perfect summer’s day. The blue ocean sparkled, terns and seagulls wheeled and cried in the increasingly cloudless sky, and as we rolled The Nugget down onto the pebbles just metres from the lapping water, we unbuckled our harnesses and ceremoniously cast them aside and enjoyed the blissful sunny ‘ending moment’ that Victoria Island had denied us originally.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon dismantling our PAC, reducing everything we had into a long line of yellow Ortlieb drybags, a few lengths of aluminium extrusion, and our carbon wheel rims—all stacked neatly inside each other. That was it. We were done. There was nothing to do now but kick back and twiddle our thumbs.

  About an hour after our saviour’s estimated arrival time, we grew bored of thumb-twiddling and I called his home to see if he’d radioed back any news. He had. In fact, he’d done more than radio it back; he brought it back in person: ‘No, the weather out there was too rough. I had to turn back … I’m sorry.’ Where we were, our coastline was protected by Banks Island (just visible on the horizon), whereas the first part of his boat trip from Holman would have been open sea. Having built ourselves up to the pickup all day, this news came as a bit of a letdown, but I guess there’s no arguing with the weather when it comes to small boats, so we managed to laugh it off as just another classic Victoria Island moment.

  ‘No worries,’ I replied, grinning at Clark’s comic eye-rolling, ‘tomorrow?’ I crossed my fi
ngers.

  ‘The weather is supposed to be better in the morning, yes. Call me in the morning.’

  Unwilling to search through our sixteen identical yellow drybags for our tent, we set up our bear alarm and lofted our sleeping bags directly onto the tundra inside our newly formed paddock, rigged up a bit of a windbreak using the tarp and paddles, collected a pile of age-old driftwood from the shore and lit our first fire of the expedition. The sun skimmed lower and lower over the water, highlighting the clouds first pink, then orange, before painting the entire sky a spectacular mixture of reds, pinks and purples. It was just beautiful, and combined with the radiating warmth of our fire—and several curious arctic foxes that bounced right up to us and even played chasings with us—was the perfect evening.

  As I peered idly through the super-telephoto zoom lens on my camera, scanning our surroundings, I paused on a tiny white dot on the far, far coastline—just where it curled around the horizon. I took a photo, and digitally zoomed right in. As I thought—just four white pixels—a rock. Scanning the horizon again, I trained the lens back on the microscopic white dot, and hesitated. Surely it was slightly to the left before? I took a second photo, more carefully this time, and again zoomed in. The group of white pixels now looked somewhat bulkier, and had four stocky white legs.

  ‘Better get our act together,’ I said, passing the camera to Clark. ‘Looks to me like there’s a polar bear headed our way!’

  The next photo confirmed it, and we swung into action. The bear was downwind of us and was pacing towards us along the shoreline, getting bigger and bigger. We surrounded ourselves with shotguns, bear-bangers, bear spray, flares and a stockpile of extra ammunition—and waited.

  Still the bear lumbered closer, and closer. We were both shaking with adrenalin. It was a huge bear, and having him pacing directly towards us without any kind of zoo fence in between was definitely ‘one of those moments’. Then the bear made eye contact. Although he had been sniffing the air repeatedly as he ambled along, it was as though he suddenly realised we were there. Now looking directly at us he kept advancing, although more cautiously.

  ‘Look at that …’ I breathed, pulling myself away from my camera’s viewfinder. ‘He’s just there …’

  We both stared in awe across at him, absorbing the full experience without a lens in the way for once. It was incredibly humbling. About 250 metres away, he reared up, towering on his hind legs—well over twice my height—curiously trying to work out what we were. Arching his huge neck this way and that sniffing the air, he tried again to catch our scent. Considering neither of us had showered in 73 days, when he finally did cop a noseful, the effect was electric. In an instant he flung himself down and around, and with one horror-struck stare back over his shoulder, he began bounding away, back along the shore in a blind panic, his back legs flinging out sideways in what looked a rather awkward (yet alarmingly efficient) gait. He was terrified. After another petrified glance over his shoulder he promptly plunged into the icy water and began swimming powerfully away out to sea. Hiding as low as he could in the water, only the tip of his nose and eyes protruded above the surface. Occasionally he’d lift his head around well clear to glance back at us before resuming his frightened retreat.

  It was a little sad, actually—not just because he’d fled before we’d got the photos we’d been hoping for—but because we felt a little offended and even slightly embarrassed by the depth of his terror. We certainly wished him no harm—we’d have been extremely reluctant to have even used our non-lethal deterrents—but seeing that moment of recognition in his eyes, and his blatant correlation between our being human, and therefore likely about to open fire on him, made me feel ashamed.

  We spent another lovely day (Day 70 + 4) waiting for the dinghy to materialise, exploring our surrounds, and trying not to drink too much of the local supply of ‘fresh’ water. Every saucepanful looked like an illustration from a textbook on water-borne biological pathogens and toxic larvae. Once or twice I inadvertently scooped up a little character that looked like it belonged in the film Aliens—had I placed it on my hand, I’m pretty sure it’d have instantly buried itself under my skin and scuttled as a twitching lump all the way up to my neck.

  At about 3 pm, I caught sight of a small dinghy motoring towards us. We were saved! I leapt into my drysuit and stood knee-deep in the water, ready to help welcome the boat in to shore, but they wouldn’t come any closer than about 25 metres.

  Perplexed, in the end I had to walk back ashore as I was shivering too much, and from there, it was eventually communicated that the waves were too rough on the beach, and they didn’t want to come in. Fair enough. But as all our gear was in Ortlieb drybags anyway, I proposed that I’d just walk each bag out to them—swim if I had to. It was impossible to hold a conversation at that distance, but it became clear that they were going to head south to wait for better weather. With that, they waved, and took off back the way they’d come.

  Hours passed, the weather got steadily worse, and then it started to rain. We found and erected our miserable little tent, and lay inside, feeling rather empty. How long were we to wait? While we had ample ‘food’ to last for over a week, much of our staples were running out: we had almost no milk powder, no peanut butter, sugar; hell, even toilet paper was thin on the ground. I kept checking the horizon every time I imagined hearing an outboard, but I checked less and less as the hours dragged on, and eventually—past midnight—we both fell asleep, utterly dispirited.

  The next morning (Day 70 + 5), after a bowl of oats without milk, as much as I dreaded that they might be home to pick up the phone, I called their home.

  ‘Hello, Chris!’ They had indeed gone all the way home. ‘The weather is bad again today …’ We knew what was coming next. ‘Give me a call, maybe, tomorrow?’

  After organising payment for the fuel already expended trying to reach us, I called Doug instead—a contact I’d got through Diamonds North Resources—who was managing some mine cleanup work on Banks Island. We knew he had Twin Otter planes scheduled, and if they had tundra tyres, they could perhaps land somewhere nearby.

  At the other end of the phone Doug pored over a map trying to work out where we were. ‘We saw a big tugboat a few days ago towing three enormous barges past on the horizon,’ I added in conversation.

  ‘Oh, yes, that was ours, collecting a heap of mining gear and bringing it back to the mainland. Let me see now—Twin Otters …’

  It turned out he was actually chartering a plane that would pass nearby tomorrow, but it wasn’t a Twin Otter. ‘Let me see if I can change my booking to a Twin, then maybe you could do a side charter from us, and we could come and grab you guys. Call me back at three.’ A faint flicker of hope rekindled inside us, only to be extinguished at 3 pm on the dot when I called him back.

  Clark watched my eager expression fall. ‘He couldn’t change the booking,’ I mumbled. The very next possible Twin Otter in the area wouldn’t be for another three days, and might not have enough room to squeeze us in.

  We stared glumly around for a while, and then Clark voiced what we were both wondering. ‘What about the barge?’

  It was a ludicrous idea, but we didn’t have much to lose. I called Doug back. ‘Sorry to pester you again, but that barge—is there any possibility of maybe, well, you know, could they maybe …’

  ‘They cost $40,000 a day,’ Doug said as an answer. ‘A side trip from that just isn’t possible.’

  ‘But if it’s coming past anyway?’

  To cut a long story short, Doug said that if I called the company that owned the barge, and they agreed, then fine.

  I called them right away. ‘You want to what? I don’t understand. How did you get there?’ It was quite a strange conversation, but in the end I was given the satellite phone number for the captain of the barge. And so I called Steve—the skipper of the Jock McNiven—and everything just fell into place.

  ‘Sure, that won’t be a problem. We’re leaving here tonight, actuall
y, just one more barge to load up … give me a call about 9 pm and I’ll give you an update on our departure.’

  We couldn’t believe our luck. ‘We’re going to Tuktoyaktuk, though,’ he said, ‘is that okay?’

  My contagious grin spread to Clark beside me. ‘Tuktoyaktuk? Sure. Wherever. Anywhere’s better than the middle of nowhere.’ Laughing, Steve agreed.

  We spent the afternoon re-packing all our gear, our excitement mounting, filling in the time until 9 pm with servings of chocolate. I called Steve on the dot.

  ‘We’re already on our way,’ he said. ‘We should be near you guys about 3.30 am … we’ll start slowing her down a bit at, say, 3 am, as slow as we can, but it’s hard with the tow. We’ll come in as close as we can, maybe a mile off, lower an inflatable and nip in and grab you guys and just keep going.’

  How’s that for pure luck and timing, and good ol’ Northern friendliness! Can you imagine standing on a beach near Sydney Harbour, calling the captain of a big ship heading out, and saying, ‘Hi, I … erm … was wondering if you could take me to Melbourne? I’m standing on a beach …’

  As scheduled, at about 3 am (Day 70 + 6)—we were unable to get to sleep in any case after a second polar bear encounter—our campsite was lit up by an enormous floodlight streaming from a speck on the horizon. The Jock McNiven had seen our campfire. It was quite dark, and it was some time before we could see the looming outline of the enormous twin-smoke-stack tugboat (44 metres long, weighing 777 tons, with four engines totalling 4500 horsepower, and a crew of thirteen), towing the three huge, heavily loaded barges (each one 75 metres long, 17 metres wide and loaded with 1500 tons). We stood there on the beach watching as Steve orchestrated the entire thing into a 360-degree circle to slow it down without the barges running into each other, then veered in closer and lowered a little black dot into the water which came rocketing in towards us. It was one of those moments in life when you feel very small, and totally in awe of the magnitude of something that is going on around you—let alone because of you.