“We need to get a weather forecast. We’re thinking of pushing all the way to Tassie today.”
Again, another pause.
“Argghhhh…you guys are so annoying, call me back in five minutes…I need to hang a shit first.”
We reminded ourselves of this story out on the Tasman and couldn’t stop laughing. The look on our faces as we sat, dumbfounded (trying to understand his priorities), in the middle of Bass Strait waiting for Ben’s weather forecast to come through must have been comical.
The call to Ben that day on the Tasman at the 500-kilometre mark was the first time we’d ever heard excitement in his voice. (He was a pretty deadpan guy when he wasn’t harassing people about waking him up.) It played a huge role in picking up our spirits on board.
Progress on day 19 was abysmal – at one stage, we paddled 6 kilometres in 4 hours. Considering a normal kayak cruises along at 8 kilometres per hour, adjusting to the speeds of our Tasman turtle was difficult at times. This day, in particular, Justin was frustrated on the rudder. Due to the conditions, paddling and maintaining our easterly bearing was almost impossible. Every time a wave knocked Lot 41, we seemed to career off track, pointing us back towards Australia. Whenever I’d yell “direction” (which was a lot), Jonesy would fume and swear under his breath. Aggravating our frustration was the bitter cold southerly wind spitting from deep in the Southern Ocean. Our hands initially turned red; then, after a few hours, they’d gone white and numb.
When there isn’t too much of a wind-chill factor the air temperature out at sea is essentially the same as the water temperature. But because of the speed of the wind, and it being less than 12 degrees Celsius in the Southern Ocean (where the wind had come from), it wasn’t able to absorb the relative warmth of the surrounding water, and as a result the wind felt like a supercharged air conditioner on rocket fuel.
On tough days like this, our thoughts constantly turned to Andrew and how he’d managed these conditions – by himself – in a kayak much more primitively set up than Lot 41. It was in these brief moments of reflection that we snuck a glimpse of how he must have suffered on that voyage. I’ll always have an incredible level of respect for his strength of mind to have fought so bravely for as long as he did.
Paddling in these less than perfect conditions was particularly hard. During our skeds, we’d tell Pat how we were coping with the expedition by delivering a mark out of 10 in three categories: physical, fatigue and mental state. At the moment, all were terrible. As I mulled over the situation feeling utterly frustrated, my paddle blade whipped up a long stringy thread that wrapped round my face and hand. Aagh! I instantly dropped the paddle and started tearing at my face to pull the bluebottle off. After what felt like an eternity, I managed to rip away the stinging tentacles.
The bluebottle welts on my face were painful, but at least during that evening’s sked, there was better news on the forecast front. It revealed that we’d receive some westerly winds in the next couple of days. It was time. We needed a break.
DAY 20
Stirring at 5am, it was hard to get motivated to face similar conditions to the day before: battling into cold headwinds wasn’t an appealing prospect. Crawling out of the warm and homely cabin, rain spat on my soon-to-be-frigid, naked torso, causing goose bumps to sprout. “Who needs a cafe latte and a slice of raisin toast first thing in the morning when you can have this?” I thought to myself.
As I started to wring my soaking thermals, I saw a flash dance through the water. Then the rough surface erupted in a cauldron of froth. What was it? Initially, I thought it was tuna, but quickly realised it was a school of Mahimahi, also known as dolphin fish. There was a flurry of energy as these meaty, one-and-a-half-metre aggressive carnivores began attacking the small baitfish that had been nibbling on the ever-growing barnacles under the hull.
The water’s surface bubbled and splashed as the Mahimahi took this opportunity to devour a hearty breakfast. We hadn’t paid much attention to the baitfish, but watching them fight for their lives in the clear water reminded me of the scene we’d witnessed under the yellow buoy a week earlier. Actually, it was pretty inspiring. This intimate early-morning encounter cleansed us of some of our anxiety, fear and fatigue – it was infinitely more captivating than eating cornflakes in front of the telly.
As we prepared for the day’s paddle, Lot 41 sat sublimely on the fizzing cauldron. Suddenly, some of our friends launched spectacularly into the air with amazing agility, and then there was silence. The sea was calm and all the fish had disappeared.
We scanned the surface of the ocean for the only thing we imagined could have stirred such a rapid response: a shark. Then, sitting in the pits, we began to paddle in silence, staring deep into the turquoise water, expecting any minute to see the shadow of a graceful predator lurking below.
Often you want to just see something to allay your fears, even if it turns out to be bad news. (Not that we were at all like the Aussie soldiers in Vietnam, but we got a glimpse of how it must have felt not being able to see the well-camouflaged Viet Cong troops.) Nothing appeared, though – Lady Tasman refused us that comfort.
At the end of a pretty average day’s paddle, we were relieved, but still partly terrified. Jumping into the cabin, we wondered what had caused the mass evacuation of the Mahimahi that morning. I sat staring at Jonesy’s fingers scribbling down the weather forecast as he spoke to Pat for our evening sked. His blistered hands were starting to take on the appearance of a gnarled old man’s. Darkly tanned, they were wrinkling from the constant exposure to the sun. With tape protecting several blisters, the pencil sat awkwardly between his fingers.
As Justin scribbled down the forecast for the next few days, I sat breathless, hoping that for tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, he’d write “w-e-s-t-e-r-l-y”. It didn’t happen. For the next week, it was all coming from the east – bloody headwinds. I wrote in my diary, “Huge hit to morale – very quiet, sombre atmosphere on Lot 41 at present.”
We lay in the cabin digesting our meal and chewing over the implications of these headwinds, independently doing the mental calculations – the old “if we only average 20 kilometres a day till the end, it’ll take us another 50 days”; “if we cut back our rations, we can last another 75 days” etc. With different assumptions and parameters, this could go on for hours.
DAY 21
VIDEO DIARY, DAY 21 – JAMES
“The fatigue is definitely starting to take its toll on us. It’s alright when you’re clocking up the kilometres and making good distance, but with these bastard headwinds, we’re really struggling…it’s hard, hard work on the body. We’ve gotta get some westerlies…or else, we’re going to be out here for a really long time.”
Through the night, like a chunk of steel to an overpowering magnet, we were pulled back towards Australia. Our southwest drift was a telltale sign that we weren’t going to make much progress paddling today. In the morning we battled, painfully slowly, towards the east and chucked it in at 1pm. It just wasn’t worth it. We threw out the para-anchor and jumped into the cabin, eager to get on the satellite phone and find out from the horse’s mouth – Roger Badham – what the hell was going on with the weather. Utter frustration was boiling through our veins – we were hungry to know what was going on up above.
“G’day, Roger,” Jonesy made the call. “Justin here from out on the Tasman – how are ya?”
“Probably a lot better than you guys, methinks,” he replied as Jonesy imagined the wry smirk covering Clouds’ face.
Deciding not to waste time on small talk, Justin launched in: “Roger, what’s going on with the weather? When do you think these westerlies are going to arrive?”
“Well…er…there’s a tropical cyclone north of Fiji which is generating these nor’easterly winds. The models say that it’s going to stick around for the next week or so.”
“Great. Is there any risk of it coming towards us?”
“There is a small risk.”
&nb
sp; This was bad – very bad, in fact. Just when we thought morale couldn’t sink much lower, another seed of doubt had been planted. Falling back on the planning work we’d done, Justin said, “We thought the risk of cyclones out here was next to nil at our current longitude and not much higher as we approached the eastern Tasman.
“‘Cyclones require hot, humid air to form,’” he continued to recite a passage from our risk-management document. “‘Generally, the air temperature in the Tasman is too mild for these cyclones to grow.’ Isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Roger conceded. “But already this summer’s weather is proving to be quite abnormal. We’re seeing systems passing through the Tasman that I haven’t seen in the past 30 years.”
We lay in the cabin all afternoon. With not much else to do, we used the opportunity to pump the desal for four hours to build up a reservoir-breaking 12 litres of fresh water. The highlight of a quiet day was a choc-chip cookie each, and some chocolate-flavoured Sustagen. Nibbling away on a biscuit, we were lucky enough to absorb the rays of the fading sun filtering through the cabin door. Sure, it was beautiful, but we couldn’t help but reflect on how nice it would be if we were seeing them at sunrise rather than sunset. That would mean that the wind was finally coming from the west…
DAY 22
VIDEO DIARY, DAY 22 – JUSTIN
“The game plan was to use the currents for the first half of the passage, and the second half use the westerly winds. Now…a massive spanner has been thrown into the pot. It’s now a patience game. We can’t get angry with the ocean, we can’t get angry at each other nor with the situation. We just need to deal with it.”
Because Lot 41 hadn’t been designed to paddle gracefully into head winds, the easterlies beating on her nose were depressing. Now that the solar panels didn’t need to feed the ever-hungry water maker, we had surplus power: there always seems to be a positive in any situation if you look hard enough! And we needed all the positives we could get, after we’d woken to 45-kilometre-per-hour easterly winds battering the cabin. Fortunately, the para-anchor was anchored in a current that the previous night was dragging us south-southeast and was now shifting to the east. Stuck in the cabin all day, we both started to suffer from cabin fever again. We spent the day watching videos on our iPods. Blades of Glory and a documentary on chicken farms (which would have been lucky to screen at 3am on SBS, but which was inexplicably riveting) were favourites for the day.
The frustration of not being able to actively do things in the cabin, like ongoing repairs, pumping the desal indoors and night-time skeds, was driving me mad. I felt like a burden, not contributing to half the work there. Jonesy didn’t complain once – he could see both the pain the seasickness was bringing me and my deep-rooted turmoil at not being able to lead from the front.
All afternoon we were nervous about what news the sked was going to bring. It couldn’t get much worse. Surely?
“Evening, boys.”
“Hi, Pat, should we run though it?” Justin said as usual.
“Go ahead.”
“Scores. Physical: Cas 7, Jonesy 8. Mental: Cas 4, Jonesy 5. Fatigue: Cas 4, Jonesy 4. Lot 41, Health. Batteries, fore, 11.8V; aft, 12.4V. Other: cabin bilge not working, had to rewire battery terminals because of corrosion.”
With both of us begging for westerlies, Pat paused for a moment, then went through an unwelcome forecast: “Tomorrow wind east-northeast 15 knots, increasing later in the afternoon swell southeast. Wednesday: wind east decreasing through the day.”
Obviously, we were disappointed, but we had a job to do: Justin responded with the weather experienced during the day and compared the actual to the forecast.
He then continued: “Activity: stuck in the cabin all day.” (Normally, it would be something like: paddled 0600 to 1900 on 105 degrees. Cas sat on the desal for 1.5 hours and Jonesy 1 hour. Made good progress in the morning, but the wind picked up in the arvo and made conditions difficult to maintain course.)
“RFIs [requests for information]. Can you give Katadyn a call and see if there’s anything we can do with the water maker?”
As he often did, Pat then sent through a small 42-kilobyte file that showed our position in relation to the currents toying with us. In the cabin, we connected our Toughbook to a satellite phone, which gave us similar download speeds to extremely slow dial-up connection. As the kayak pitched and rolled, the connection would regularly drop out, but it provided us with critical information to set our strategy and course for the following day.
Then Pat gave us the information we’d been dreading. “Roger said that you boys should get used to the idea that the prevailing conditions are going to be flowing from the east for the rest of the passage.”
It was like a punch in the guts. My diary entry that night said it all: “What the…?”
My mood picked up a little after the sked when I called home for my weekly phone call. It was quite funny – all I wanted to hear was what each and every person we knew was up to; the intricate details of their lives. How was work? How had they slept the night before? What did they have for breakfast? I sucked comfort out of hearing about day-to-day activities back home. Contrastingly, they didn’t really want to talk about “boring city living” and wanted to hear about our adventures on the high seas.
It was a funny exercise in to-ing and fro-ing as we fought to gain control of the conversation: we settled for a pace where we’d ask one question and they’d ask one. To us, what we were doing felt routine and boring, but to the outsider it seemed riveting. We’d now been at sea for three weeks and they were fascinated about what living at sea in a kayak was really like.
They absorbed every word and you could sense them analysing the tone that might or might not have been hiding what we were really feeling. Then Mum said something that struck a chord.
“My little boy, I’m just so proud of you. You are doing so great – I can’t even begin to imagine how tough you are doing it out there. You know how you wanted to inspire people? Well, you boys are splashed across newspapers in Australia and New Zealand every day and everyone – I mean everyone – knows about you guys. You’re having more of an impact than you can imagine.”
Wow, I thought. I smiled wryly and untactfully replied, “Mum, do you remember what you said to me two years ago?” I paused. “Do you remember saying, ‘Stop wasting your time with this bullshit dream – it’s completely selfish and you won’t inspire anyone’?”
Mum was immediately apologetic. “I do remember that and I’m sorry. I’m just so proud of you now.”
I felt guilty for rubbing Mum’s nose in her own words, but I just couldn’t help it. It was a childish reaction and I was immediately disappointed that I couldn’t show more restraint.
DAY 23
After such a dismal forecast the night before, naturally we were expecting yet another cabin day, so we were excited, and amazed, to be greeted with paddleable conditions. The wind was meant to be 20–30 kilometres per hour from the east, but seemed much calmer. After doing a quick TV interview over the satellite phone, we jumped out into the pits and began paddling. I scribbled in my diary: “This favourable current is the work of God. Thank you.”
After a couple of hours enjoying finally being on the move again, a spurt erupted 100 metres off our port bow, shattering a lengthy period of silent reflection. We eagerly scanned the horizon for another sign of life to confirm that we’d actually seen something, and that we weren’t going crazy. There was nothing.
Then boom, it exploded into the air just 20 metres away, crashing on the water’s surface rather ungracefully. Our first whale sighting! It spouted hundreds of litres of water into the air with each breath. These warm-blooded mammals surface occasionally to fill their lungs with air. Throughout the voyage, we wondered how they slept. Apparently, only one hemisphere of their brain sleeps at a time – that’s why they’re often said to sleep with one eye open!
Caught up in the magic of this intimate encounter, we forgot to pull
the camera out until it was too late. We optimistically comforted each other by saying that we’d see plenty more. The improvement in morale that came with breaking the monotony of our routine never ceased to amaze us. For the rest of the day, we jubilantly paddled eastward, as huge gentle swells rolled beneath Lot 41.
14
Back to the Future
DAY 24
The forecast easterlies hit us hard. Throughout the night, Lot 41 began to buck ever more violently as the wind and sea built aggressively. In a half-dazed state, I battened the hatches as water started pounding us from all sides. The constant bucking created quite an orchestra, as provisions and equipment worked themselves loose inside the cabin as we got tossed from side to side.
The hypnotic rattling had the consistency of a metronome, and it slowly became a kind of Chinese water torture. The ancient Chinese punishment drove its victim insane with the stress of water continually dripping on a part of the forehead, as, supposedly, the desire for the human brain to make a pattern of the timing between the drops caused insanity to eventually set in. Even the most subtle sound had a profound impact on me; Justin, on the other hand, was able to ignore it quite well – unfortunately.
A hanging toothbrush tapping, the inlet valve for the manual desal down the storage sides, or cords inside the charge box: the noise was usually worst when we were being buffeted around and, as a result, at those times I couldn’t get much sleep. I think my mind associated not being able to sleep with the tapping caused by the aggressive sea state. Whenever I could hear even the most gentle sound, I’d search the kayak like a madman determined to find the source. Sometimes I’d go all night without finding it and by morning I’d vent my frustration with Jonesy, who’d often reply, “I couldn’t hear anything.”
Completely snapping on one occasion, I screamed, “F*** this – what’s making that tapping noise?”
Crossing the Ditch Page 17