Waking in the morning, I said to Jonesy, “I’m over this, mate, I need to get some rest. I don’t give a rat’s any more. I just don’t care.”
We drifted in and out of sleep for another half hour until Justin began to stir and get himself ready to paddle. I lay motionless, pretending not to be aware of his movements. He crawled over me, then said, “You had a really bad night last night, mate, try and get some more rest.” My reply was a garbled groan.
He retrieved the para-anchor, and as he took his first couple of strokes an overwhelming sense of guilt juddered through me. I reflected on how we’d connected during the sleep deprivation training we’d done with the army. They’d tried to break us. They’d tried to pit us against each other and tear us apart. They’d failed. We were always there for one another, taking the other person’s push-ups if they were battling, giving them a push when they needed it. But now I was letting Jonesy down – I was relying on him to carry us on. I wasn’t contributing to morale or progress. I was becoming a whining burden.
“Get up, you fat shit,” I yelled at myself. “Get up now. Your best mate is out there fighting for you, and what are you doing?”
I was angry for allowing this situation to occur. I swore to myself then that would be the last time I’d put the pressure on Jonesy to shoulder the brunt of the work. I rose and poked my head out of the cabin.
“Morning, mate,” came his nonchalant greeting. “Wasn’t expecting you out here till lunchtime.”
Still disappointed about how I’d acted, I replied, “Sorry about last night, mate, I won’t let that happen again.”
Considering Jonesy must have been really worried about me – even wondered whether the expedition was going to continue – he was amazingly calm about me coming to my senses. Perhaps he just knew that, despite my outburst, I wouldn’t let him down; not after what we’d been through to make it this far. We paddled on, plugged into our iPods.
Listening to some tunes, I thought about Colin Quincey’s lone voyage across the Tasman. I remembered reading about how, during that expedition, he’d thrown vital equipment off the vessel, sworn at the ocean and kicked things. When I read this alarming detail, I vividly recall thinking that would never be me. Embarrassingly, though, I’d done the same – I’d “chucked a Quincey”. I’d allowed the ocean to creep under my skin and infect my outlook. For the second time that day, I resolved to have the discipline to stay strong: “Kia kaha”, as the Maori (and the All Blacks) would say.
During the afternoon, the wind turned south-southwest, which caught us off-guard. As I put it quite bluntly in my diary, “This inconsistent wind is really starting to screw us up.” Our strategy to paddle backwards, to go forwards in the long run, was somewhat dependent on the weather forecast remaining static. We were planning on using the northeast winds to drive us southwest, then in a calm period that was to follow driving south, then southeast, to break free from the current. A combination of this odd wind direction and the current had us drifting northeast. Damn.
Normally, these westerlies would have been great but the last thing we wanted was to return to where we’d come from: back into the dreaded whirlpool. This confusion in the weather led to Jonesy’s low point of the expedition. We were now in the same spot as we’d been 11 days ago.
As we continued south-southeast, surfing down 6-metre waves, we’d thought we were flying along – it felt fast and the paddling was truly exhilarating. Looking at the GPS each hour, though, we were horrified at the low mileage we were clocking up. How were we going to reach NZ – or, more pertinently, get out of the whirlpool – when even when we were using the wind and the current, we were plodding along like a fish through mud? Once again, we began questioning everything from our fatigue levels to our muscle atrophy. What was slowing us down? Indecision and uncertainty is what drives people mad at sea. It is one of the most powerful mind games that the ocean can play. Here was the Tasman once again testing our fortitude and resolve: if she was fighting us individually we would have been defeated long ago, but the two of us held strong and just kept plugging.
We slogged through the afternoon rain in the 6-metre seas that continued to pelt down on us. Water was everywhere: below us, above us, all around us. It felt like it was seeping into our bones. The incessant bullet spray on our Gore-Tex anoraks sounded like rain on a corrugated iron roof and instantly brought me back to Australia. Imagery of shearing sheds I’d slept in and mountain huts high up in the Snowy flooded through me. I wished I was tucked up in my sleeping bag, with my fingers curled around a nice warm mug of tea, my fleece jacket over my shoulders for extra warmth. I visualised sitting by the dirty window there, hypnotically staring at the water drops beading, then falling off the window sill.
A wave crashing over the top of us quickly brought me back to reality, prisoners fighting to break free of this god-awful whirlpool.
At the end of the day’s paddle, I limply sat staring at the GPS, waiting for Jonesy to get inside the cabin. I examined the back of my hand: to be more precise, the knuckle of the middle finger on my left hand. It looked like the skin of a lychee. The dimples had been forming on the knuckle for days and they now completely engulfed it. They seemed to be spreading and we didn’t know what they were. It appeared that they’d soon spread to the knuckle of my forefinger.
It was time for action. We took a photo and emailed it to Dr Glenn – who’d honed our suturing and IV drip skills before the expedition – for his analysis. Our email connection out on the Tasman was via a satellite phone that sent and received emails at 6 kilobytes per second. A mere 10 years earlier, every household had been jumping on the internet at these speeds. With the advances of modern technology, we not only expect transfer rates a thousand times faster, but we “need” them. At 6 kilobytes per second, it would take 10 minutes to transfer one image the size of a postcard. Due to the pitching and rolling of the kayak, we’d often find this connection dropping out as a “large” file was coming in or we were sending a photo. Some days, we could send five photos in 30 minutes without a glitch; other days we struggled to get a single photo through in less than two hours. The quality of our reception depended on where the satellites were sitting in their geostationary orbit. Fortunately, only once on the entire crossing did the phone not have enough satellites for us to make a call to land.
Dr Glenn got back to us shortly afterwards. His prognosis was that my skin condition was either genital herpes or warts – I was pleased it turned out to be the latter!
In the cabin that evening after another day’s paddle towards Australia, we scoffed down our dehydrated meals and tried to raise Pat; but no reply. This was odd. For 32 days now he’d religiously been there to answer our 6am and 8pm skeds, and this was the first time he’d been AWOL.
Throughout the night we drifted another 20 kilometres northwest. Finally, as the piss-stained pillow had stopped worrying me so much and the seas were behaving, we caught up on some quality rest. More importantly, we had a strategy – a goal to work towards. Our scheduled westerly winds had been delayed a day, which bought us more time to paddle in that direction and get out of the whirlpool.
I’d had enough of rogue waves creeping through the open door and soaking me, so that night I spent a good couple of hours rigging our emergency canvas door cover, making sure it allowed a flow of fresh air into the cabin but still kept the ocean out. After a number of failures and design issues, I triumphantly showed off my rigging job to Jonesy, who was busy sending some emails off to Pat.
Unfortunately, he seemed only slightly impressed. “You know you’re going to have to disassemble it in the morning, don’t you, mate?”
I proudly sat there showing him the features of my amazing invention: the ventilation flaps, its incredible robustness. I must have sounded like a dodgy car salesman gone mad.
“Yeah, great, mate,” he replied, like he was talking to someone with “special needs”.
As I drifted off to sleep, still with a proud little smirk hidden under
my bum-fluffy beard, I got kind of emotional about the prospect of destroying my masterpiece.
DAY 33
Not one wave entered the cabin all night. Tearing the cover away in the morning, I chuckled at the thought of what an alien looking down on us might have made of the scene – a naked hairy baby breaking the embryotic sac of Lot 41 and crawling out of her womb. The constant spitting rain made sure I didn’t laugh for too long as I fumbled to wring my thermals and lurch into them as quickly as possible.
Once we were in the pits, Jonesy and I talked about the next important decision facing us. With the loss of speed and paddling backwards, we had the potential to be out on the Tasman longer than we’d ever envisaged. So we didn’t really have any choice: we decided to halve our food rations on paddling days, leaving us with one pack of food each day for the two of us.
It would take our bodies a few days to adjust to the new rationing, but we were determined to get to New Zealand with no outside assistance, and any food dropped to us would have compromised our voyage’s “unsupported” integrity. Throughout the next few days our stomachs grumbled constantly, with every meal leaving us still half famished.
Justin is someone who loves his food. As a child, he acquired the nickname “Jaws” for his insatiable appetite for biting people, and although I’m not sure if there’s a link, by his early 20s Jonesy had an undefeated record in eating competitions. He once challenged a mate to a 21-piece KFC feed-off (that’s 250 grams of saturated fat), and won. In 2005, he ate 2½ kilograms of lamb shanks at a restaurant in Coffs Harbour and he smashed a 2-kilo roast for an afternoon snack prior to crossing the Tasman. As I said, the bloke doesn’t mind his food.
Justin has always said the best part of any expedition is the breaks, and I honestly believe out on the Tasman he spent 60 per cent of his time dreaming about food, thinking about food, or talking about it. He designed numerous courses, made up dishes in his head and wrote four pages of cravings that he was determined to indulge in once we reached the shores of NZ. This was understandably a trying time for him, and he really had to fight over the next few days as his starving limbs became accustomed to less fuel.
With the reduced rations, we were much less selective – and much less fussy – about what we ate. By day 33, food that we’d dismissed at the beginning of the voyage as “disgusting” was in just as high demand as our favourite meals: choc-fudge protein bars and dehydrated curries were now shoved down our mouths without much thought. Taste was a luxury compared to the calories.
Just as fighter pilots have their name on the outside of their cockpits, we had our nicknames on the side of our pits – both were quite self-explanatory. The names our mates had given us were “Pieguts” – for Justin, of course – and “Boofhead”. Our mates would joke: “Pieguts and Boofhead are off on their most excellent adventure!”
We were adapting to life at sea. Little discomforts – rain, chafe points, foggy sunglasses – all became part of the routine. However, one of the little niggles that drove me mental was losing sound in one of my waterproof earphones. Having sound blaring into one ear and a chaotic crackle piercing the other eardrum was mind-blowingly frustrating. It was an absolute privilege to have music out on the Tasman, but as is so often the case with “life privileges” they have the habit of becoming needs, and our iPods were no exception. By spending time in some of the most remote places on earth, Jonesy and I have been fortunate enough to learn valuable lessons about what’s meaningful in life and what isn’t…but I still would have loved that other earpiece to work.
In the past, Justin had always seemed to listen to music more than me – like when we’d run the Sydney Marathon. Ethically, I thought it was “weaker” to do exercise listening to music, and it was much more “pure” to do without. This was one of an endless list of things that changed on the Tasman. I found myself listening to music twice as often as Justin. Typically, I’d listen between 7am and 9am, have a one-hour break when we’d often talk, and then between 11am and 2pm most days, I’d listen to podcasts.
Paddling along at an agonisingly slow pace with a dud earphone, my frustration with the situation was increasing by the minute. Once again I broke. As I wrote in my diary: “F*** this rain, f*** the wind and f*** this stupid kayak!”
What could possibly be slowing us down? I asked Jonesy to grab the goggles from the cabin and pass them to me to take a look under the kayak. I thought the rudder might have snagged some seaweed and we might have been towing a string behind us. But I was wrong. Sticking my head under water, I was horrified to see the hull completely covered in barnacles the size of golf balls, measled on the underbelly of Lot 41.
“Mate, you’re never going to believe what her belly looks like.”
I passed Jonesy the goggles and he was equally staggered. “No wonder we’re going so slow…”
Right at the last minute before we’d left Forster, I’d bought a pink-handled scrubbing brush from the local Woolworths to clean our foil eating bags; and also for the minute possibility of us needing to scrub the hull. I remembered Justin saying prior to us leaving: “There’s no way we’re ever going to need that – I’m not planning on going for a swim out there.”
Well (not that I’m gloating or anything), now we desperately needed that brush that had been dangling dormant from the ceiling for the previous month.
“Scissor, Paper, Rock,” I blurted out. “And the loser has to go in and scrub the hull.”
“Yeah, alright,” Jonesy conceded, “that seems fair. Best of three? Or one round and whoever loses…loses?”
“One-shot rule.”
“Okay, let’s go. Scissor…paper…rock.”
Imagining taking a dip with a hungry shark or two, our hands moved up and down like jackhammers as we contemplated the dire implications. To be fair, as when the para-anchor line got tangled, I secretly wanted to lose. I would have much preferred to be in the water myself than have my best mate in there.
I chose rock – which I seem to do about 70 per cent of the time (but don’t tell Jonesy) – and Justin called paper. I lost and was ceremoniously handed the scrubbing brush: it was time to go in. Leaving all my clothes in the cockpit, I tied two safety lines around my belly as Jonesy nervously sat on both shark watch and camera duty. Slithering into the ocean, the warmth of the sea and the stunning clarity of the water were completely overwhelming.
Sunlight shimmered off small fish darting around the place in all directions as I got to work. Inhaling short, nervous breaths, I dived under the kayak and started scrubbing from midship, then made my way to the stern. I was somewhat comforted by having Justin nearby and being able to jump into the nearby pit in a second if I had to. The exposure was surreal, though, and with the translucent sea it was like floating through space in zero gravity. Dazzlingly blue, the water seemed to belong to some remote tropical island. If only there were bikini-clad girls and pina coladas waiting on the beach!
It had actually turned into a really pleasant afternoon. The sun was now shining for the first time in days, the sea had abated and the joy of going for a swim broke the monotony of our routine and was actually pretty enjoyable. Justin sensed how much fun I was having, and before long he left shark patrol and was in the water taking some amazing photos. For a short time we escaped the Tasman and felt like kids playing in a pool.
There were not only barnacles on the hull, but a decent smattering of algae as well; however, after about an hour in the balmy water we’d managed to remove all the major growth. The last job we did while in the water was to check the rudder lines and we observed that the port side had been quite badly chafed near the actual rudder, so Jonesy retied it past the chafe point. It took a lot longer than expected. But try to picture a 90-kilogram bloke straddling the back of a kayak, attempting to tie a knot with numb hands (naked too!). I think his fumbling display was understandable.
This maintenance on the Tasman had to happen when the weather gave us a chance – trying to fix a problem once it arose was nev
er part of our strategy.
Drying quickly in the afternoon sun, we put our thermals on and resumed paddling. We were anxious about what difference having a barnacle-free hull would make. To our absolute delight, our speed doubled to 5 kilometres per hour. We were stoked. A combination of great hull speed, balmy weather and changing our routine by jumping in the water made our spirits the highest they’d been in weeks. For the rest of the afternoon, we merrily sang Christmas carols and a marching song we used to sing on bushwalks when we were kids.
DAY 34
We woke to a school of Mahimahi darting under the belly of Lot 41, feeding on baitfish tucked up under the kayak. Marine life seems to be attracted to any object in the water – whether it be a log, vessel or merely some debris – and Lot 41 had adopted quite a maternal role in providing protection to these little fish. Her two favourite ocean children were Bruce and Larry, who soon became our best (and only) friends at sea. These two slimy mackerel had joined us in the second week of our voyage and were still “on board”. As we progressed across the Tasman, these guys grew quite noticeably. By the end of the passage they’d reached such a size that they often bullied and ate other baitfish seeking refuge under Lot 41. Incredibly, these two intrepid baitfish stayed with us for over 1400 kilometres, providing many hours of company and companionship.
As the baitfish under the kayak were under attack by the Mahimahi, different emotions churned through my mind. We were excited by the frenzy but worried that Bruce and Larry might be taken by the onslaught. They were completely outnumbered, outsized and really didn’t seem to have any chance of surviving the intentions of these hungry predators. As the sea bubbled and churned, we tried in vain to get a glimpse of our mates, but we couldn’t see anything through the tangle of metre-long Mahimahi, who were executing perfectly timed fly-bys under the hull.
Crossing the Ditch Page 19