All the Way Round

by Stuart Trueman

  I was there for a couple of hours and the conversation covered a few subjects which gave me an insight into local life. Although Kate and Wills had just been made a royal couple and Bin Laden had been shot, where the fishermen went to catch 40 barramundi was much more of a hot topic at the Pormpuraaw local. That’s the way it should be out there.

  Next morning, 4 May, I set off from Pormpuraaw to Karumba, 300 kilometres further south.

  I made my target of 50 kilometres a day with little variation in my days. The scenery was the same, a shallow beach broken by occasional stretches of mangroves. From the kayak I couldn’t see anything beyond the first few trees because past the beach the land barely rose above sea level. None of the trees or bushes looked established enough to enjoy a secure future as they waited for the next cyclone season to take its toll, and with no rocks, cliffs, stones or boulders there seemed to be no permanence to the landscape. As well as the view the weather was the same. I woke up at the same time, ate the same breakfast, got on the water at the same time, paddled the same distance in the same time and set up camp the same at the end of each day.

  There were, however, events that convinced me I wasn’t just reliving the same day. On one occasion I saw the fins of a little shark swim by in the murky waters, followed by the strange sight of the fins of a couple of small sharks swimming in formation. It took a few moments to realise I was actually watching one big shark circling the kayak.

  And then there was the beach covered in hermit crabs. They would investigate everywhere and everything they could get into. If you left any food on the ground, there would be a pile of them clambering over each other to get a taste. Their wanderings would take them up and over the tent. They were a little nervous and any noise would send them back into their shells. This meant they tucked their legs away so lost their grip on the tent. The evening’s entertainment was for me to lie still until the tent was covered in adventurous crabs then clap my hands and watch them all roll back down onto the sand.

  One evening was even more exciting. I’d just stripped and lain down when I heard what turned out to be a huge bull. He’d smelt me on his beach and apparently I had set up camp between him and where he wanted to go. The stomping and snorting was magnified by the dark. I felt particularly vulnerable lying in my tent so grabbed essentials and made an escape plan should Mr Grumpy decide to run over my camp. But after seeing my puny form in the dark he just walked right past the tent without a sideways glance. I went back in the tent through necessity as I was being eaten alive by various bugs. Around 3 am I was woken by the same bull doing his best to creep through the bush on the other side of the tent, but it’s hard not to make noise when you weigh several tonnes and have four big feet.

  Next morning I ferried my gear down to the water about 400 metres away and went back for the kayak. It was still pitch-black and my head torch picked up a couple of bright eyes among my pile of gear. A dingo was checking out my bags, but I had a few words for him that he seemed to understand and, as instructed, he ran off down the beach, leaving everything intact.

  There was a subtle change in the water as I progressed further into the gulf. It got muddy and the shore was more often guarded by mangroves that twisted their roots around each other in a timeless knot. The agony of the writhing wood among the mud provided a barrier both psychological and physical. There was no hope of a campsite as low tide revealed deep mud peppered with the upward-growing suckers that allow the mangroves to breathe when submerged. High tide covers the roots with salt water and I conjured up menacing images of crocs and snakes, goblins and serpents, more than enough to spur me on to a better camping spot!

  I tried to get to the beach one evening but it gradually got too shallow to paddle. Because I was only 20 metres from the sand, I jumped out of my kayak to pull it the rest of the way. Bad move. I went up to my thighs in black sticky mud. I couldn’t walk, crawl or swim back or forward. I ended up lying on my kayak and, hand over hand, pulled myself back out to deeper water. I was covered, and the mud put up a great fight before being cleaned off over the next couple of days.

  On 9 May as I approached Karumba the wind started blowing from the south, which was a bit of a wake-up call as to how much harder things could have been if it had blown over the past few days. Because of the wind, a flotilla of small fishing boats, all chockers with tourists, had bunched up in whatever shelter they could behind the mangroves. After seeing nobody for a few days it was a bit of a shock; I noticed crowds of ten or more people. They weren’t interested in me, though; there were fish to be caught, and it’s serious business out there.

  I found the campsite and quickly made myself at home and started my usual list of chores. The caravan park was full of big caravans and the big cars needed to pull them. This was the first wave of ‘grey nomads’ to make it to Karumba since it had started raining six months ago and the roads had been closed. My little tent and kayak didn’t fit in.

  Karumba was a small town and I soon found a group of cyclists who had been on a supported trip from Adelaide to Karumba (gulf to gulf) and had finished the same day as I arrived, which was a good effort. However, the next day I spoke to a 60-year-old man camped next to me who had just done the same trip on his bicycle, unsupported. Now that was a great effort.

  However they get there, everybody who makes it to Karumba ends up at the Sunset Pub. There is a garden out the back with a view over the Gulf of Carpentaria where you can watch the sun set over the ocean with beer in hand. It is obligatory to take copious amounts of photos of this daily event with every possible combination of all the members of your party. After seeing the sunset every day for the past few weeks, I didn’t have an overwhelming desire to pull out my camera, but watching others pose made for a great show each evening. I guess I was desensitised by having just come from the west coast of Cape York and travelling hundreds of kilometres, where each evening I was rewarded with a desert sun setting over the ocean. But most of the visitors at Karumba had just spent weeks or months travelling up the east coast of Australia and to see the sun set over the ocean was a significant milestone.

  The weather turned on me and strong winds kept me at Karumba for a couple of days. That wasn’t too much of a hardship. I spent the time cleaning my corroded tent poles and maintaining and fixing other stuff. Then I learnt that, due to the wet season, one of the food parcels I’d sent from Cairns had not yet arrived at the little town of King Ash Bay because the roads were still closed. This was a worry as I couldn’t get past the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands without a resupply. I really didn’t want to paddle up the McArthur River to King Ash Bay in search of supplies, as it would be very croccy and the flow would be strong just after the rains. Keith Hallett, a fisherman from King Ash Bay, had agreed to take my food parcel out to the Sir Edward Pellew Islands with a fishing tour he was running, but this was subject to the food parcel and his clients being able to get to town on time. There was not much I could do about it, so I sat back to watch the sunset show for one last time.

  I started from Karumba on 12 May and was glad to be heading west at last; I was feeling as though the end was in sight. That’s not to say I wasn’t still enjoying the journey but I was under a bit of pressure as far as time went. The first 45 kilometres were all mangroves with no hope of landing the kayak for the night, but then I spotted a small beach at Spring Creek. As I edged closer I dreaded finding a croc sunning himself on the only stretch of sand, because it would mean another 50-kilometre paddle past more mangroves to find the next beach. All was well, though, and I landed without incident at high tide which meant no long portage to camp. A bonus at the end of another good day.

  The Gulf of Carpentaria has diurnal tides. This means instead of the usual two high tides a day, there was only one. Or put another way, the ocean spends twelve hours running out then twelve hours running in. So when I land at high tide I have to launch at low tide, twelve hours later, making it a bit of a lottery as to what I’d be faced with in the morning. Sometimes
it would be compact sand for 200 metres to the water, or it could be almost half a kilometre with a mixture of hard and soft sand degenerating into bottomless sticky mud—yum.

  I was caught out by the drop in temperature as I left Karumba; it got down to 12°C at night as the cooler months approached. That was quite cool for me; I had been used to lying on top of the sleeping bag and now I was regretting leaving my thermals in Sydney.

  Sweers Island is 140 kilometres from Karumba, north of Burketown. Matthew Flinders stopped here in 1802 during his circumnavigation charting the remaining unexplored coastline of Australia. It’s a small island, 8 kilometres long and less than 1 kilometre wide, but it sports the highest point of the southeast region of the gulf with the 29-metre high Inspection Hill. Matthew Flinders records that he climbed this hill to get a look at the surrounding area.

  Tucked away in one corner is a long-established fishing resort run by Lyn and Tex Battle. I had emailed Lyn from Cairns and she had agreed to get some supplies in for me. I got to Sweers Island on 15 May. It had a mixture of beaches and rocks along the coast, with vegetation that looked like it kept low to avoid the cyclones. I didn’t know what to expect in such a remote spot but I knew there would be drinking water. I paddled towards a radio antenna, landed on a nearby beach where there were a few buildings and quickly got my best clothes on.

  Sweers Island turned out to be an oasis in many ways. Lyn and Tex were very welcoming and put me up for a day of rest while I got myself organised for the next leg across the gulf. They have run the resort since 1987 and have made a paradise for fishermen who fly in from around the country in various small planes or helicopters. Some of their guests had spent days flying from home in helicopters for a couple of weeks fishing the area. I even met a group of American ‘tag-along’ fliers who followed their ‘tour guide’ in borrowed aircraft. They considered aircraft a mode of transport in the same way most people consider cars. They were all interested in my trip and, having seen the coast of this area from the air, had a very good aspect of things. I played on it and got a few beers as a result.

  Although it was about as remote a fishing spot as you could possibly get to, it was quite busy and I soon relaxed among the guests fresh in from their day’s fishing. When not entertaining her guests Lyn is also a radio ham, talking to people all around the world using voice or morse code. It was definitely a great place to recharge, and if you are a serious fisherman it’s a place to get serious about fishing.

  After being well fed and spending a few lazy afternoons hanging around the bar watching those sunsets, it was a real drag to have to face facts and move on. But Lyn had helped establish that my food had arrived at King Ash Bay and that it would be taken to the islands the next week. That fitted nicely with the distance I had to cover to get there, so my excuses dried up. As I was leaving Lyn presented me with a Sweers Island beanie and one of Tex’s thermals, which I gratefully accepted. Lyn was very interested in the trip and did what she could to help me out. Her encouragement sent me on my way in the right frame of mind.

  From Sweers Island I was blessed with a tailwind. It would start around dawn, then pick up until around 9 am then blow 15–20 knots until midday when it would start to die down. I was also lucky with the tides. I’d land when the tide was quite high in the afternoon but, even better, I’d leave in the morning when it was even higher: win–win. So with the wind and tide on my side, things went well.

  On one of my stops I had a walk along the beach and found a barramundi fisherman named David Russel and his two young sons living off their boat up a small creek. It turned out that when David was fourteen he had cooked fish and chips for two kayakers on his dad’s barramundi boat. Those kayakers were Paul Caffyn and Shaun Leyland (Shaun had paddled with Paul on this section of his trip), back in 1983. His sons and I represented the next generation of kayakers and barra fishermen who had met in almost the exact same circumstances, although I doubt very much that David’s boys will remember me in 28 years.

  I crossed the Queensland and Northern Territory border without ceremony. I couldn’t be bothered working out if I had to move my watch forwards or backwards and, if I did, whether whichever time I chose would mean it would be lighter or darker in the mornings. So I decided to leave time alone until I’d rested my rather limited powers of deduction or I met someone with a watch.

  The most outstanding part of this section was the noise at night. There was none. I awoke one night with a start, which usually meant something had triggered my subconscious and being unable to figure out what it was I would wake up. But that night I lay there concentrating, listening for any movement or a call that would have triggered the alert. There was nothing, and that was what woke me—nothing. There was not a single sound; no insects, waves, winds, birds, dingos or splashes. It was the first and last time I can remember where everything in the dead of night was totally silent. It was a little bit spooky but not enough of a concern to stop me falling straight back to sleep once I knew there was nothing to worry about.

  After five days I found myself at a deserted fishing camp on the south point of Vanderlin Island, which is one of the Sir Edward Pellew Islands. I managed to score a bit of drinking water from one of the tanks and, after making use of some chairs and a table in the afternoon shade, had a very pleasant night. I could have stayed for days, or at least until I got sprung.

  Saturday 21 May I landed at Paradise Bay on North Island of Sir Edward Pellew Islands. This was where Keith Hallett had arranged to rendezvous to pass on my food. I had chosen to paddle between Watson and North Island up a channel that got quite narrow. Well, it felt narrow because the mangrove banks closed in to a very scary 500 metres. This meant no room to manoeuvre should a croc decide to give me some attention. I liked a bit of water to move around in, allowing me the option to choose a direction to run, but here I could only turn around and go back to where I’d come from or keep going. In the end I saw nothing to justify my worries and landed at Paradise Bay to find a shelter with two water tanks, but no food parcels and no boats moored in the harbour. It was a nice place but without my food it was hard to give it its due. I was worried as I only had two days’ worth of the scabby food that I always left until last to eat.

  I was in a dilemma. It could take two days to get to the very remote mining site of Bong Bong back on the mainland and then I wasn’t sure what would happen. Where would I get food from? What sort of welcome would I get at Bong Bong? Not all mines are open for people to drop in. Or I could wait another day and hope that the boat with my food would turn up. It sounded like a plan, but with only two days of supplies left, time was not on my side should anything go wrong.

  I decided to put my trust in Keith Hallett and his promise to get my food to Paradise Bay by the weekend. I set up camp and settled in for the evening, treating myself to a yummy meal of two-minute noodles and the last few nuts.

  Next morning I awoke to see a large ship, the Kestrel Bay, moored in the harbour. Boy, was that a welcome sight! I waited until a reasonable hour of the day and paddled over to see if I could attract anyone’s attention. Luckily for me one of the first crew members who spotted me was the cook. There were a few questions asked but the one I liked best was ‘Have you eaten breakfast?’ I didn’t like to admit I’d skipped my morning dried crackers in my haste to catch them. Within twenty minutes I was seated in the ship’s mess, tucking into bacon and eggs and all the trimmings and washing it down with coffee.

  After breakfast I had a shower and was invited to the bridge to meet Captain John Russell. He commanded the Kestrel Bay, which it turned out was a ship that serviced the prawn trawlers operating in the gulf. The trawlers would offload their catch to the Kestrel Bay, where it would be frozen for storage, allowing the trawlers to head back out to sea to continue fishing. The bridge was a collection of everything needed to get a big boat around these waters, so I felt like a kid in a candy store. I was soon making a phone call to Sharon, who I’m sure never really knew where the hell I was call
ing from. I checked out the currents and tides for Cape Arnhem and Groote Eylandt and, best of all, I made radio contact with Keith, who told me he was on his way and due that afternoon. I was stoked; my precarious situation had been turned around with bells on.

  I paddled back to my camp knowing my food was on its way, with a fried breakfast in me and balancing a 5-kilogram box of prawns on my deck. Before I’d made it the 200 metres to shore, the Kestrel Bay had headed back out to sea.

  Later that day Keith Hallett turned up in his boat, a catamaran that can sleep around ten hardcore fishermen. He had a small fleet of runabouts which the fishermen use to get to their fishing spots, returning at the end of the day to the mother ship for a feed and a bit of storytelling. I had a chat and collected my supplies, left about 4.5 kilograms of prawns for Keith, and headed back to my camp to sort things out.

  My situation had changed dramatically over the course of the day. I’d woken up unsure as to where my next meal was coming from, but then found a ship parked by the tent, was able to make a few phone calls, got well fed, had taken delivery of my food parcel and was now preparing to complete the gulf. From my food parcel I selected the food I wanted to take with me, cooked myself a few nice meals and then had to burn what I didn’t need. A shame but there was no way ten fishermen would want a bag of lentils or half a kilo of rice so it went up in flames with all the packaging.

  Sitting with a full belly among a pile of food next to two water tanks, I suddenly felt very weary as I realised I was again fully self-sufficient. It would be hard to explain to somebody who, when hungry, just pops over to the fridge or nearest fast-food outlet to satisfy their stomach, how it feels to toil without that luxury. It’s unlikely that those we know are more than a few minutes from a good supply of food and water with little effort or danger to get there. I didn’t regularly go hungry during the trip either, but I am always mindful that even now there are many in this world who face this uncertainty each day.