Crossing the Ditch

by Castrission, James

  Glimpses from the entire journey flashed through my mind as we surfed down the side for what seemed like hours. Then as we slowed down and approached the trough of the wave, the surrounding white water dissipated and we were gasping for a breath of air. Lot 41 was flung violently back upright and we sat in the calm water of this trough between two giant walls of water.

  I turned round to Justin, his face pale with fear, and said, “Mate, this would be so much fun if it wasn’t so bloody scary.”

  “Touche,” he replied, then repeated it for extra emphasis. “Touche.”

  After emptying the water that had filled our cag hoods and all our pockets, we resumed paddling, with 10 pounds of adrenaline stabbed straight into our arteries. We might have been exhausted, but there was no need for caffeine for the rest of the afternoon, or the rest of the expedition, really – we were completely wired!

  On day 44, we’d just had the ride of our lives; but I’ll also remember it for the furry nut disaster. Opening up our nut rations for the day, we realised most of them were covered with mould. After a quick debate about the feasibility of chucking them, we realised that our bodies needed the calories. For the rest of the voyage, a lot of the nuts were furry, and instead of that nice white flesh on the inside they were yellow. We had to dust the fur off on our shoulders, then toss the nuts in our mouths. Delicious. But food was fuel – without the calories from these fur balls, there’d be no reaching the elusive shores of New Zealand.

  Once we entered the cabin, there was no escaping the violent bucking. It shook us hard, making sleep impossible. Embarrassingly, even though I’d promised Jonesy I wouldn’t “lose it” again, at 1am I started punching the walls, screaming hysterically, “I want this f***ing kayak to sink – I’m going to sink it.”

  Justin was once again scared I was going to do something dangerous and irrational. At the time, I didn’t care.

  DAY 45

  Finally, as the wind abated, we were able to get some sleep. We woke at 6am to calm seas gently rocking Lot 41 like a baby – the abruptness of the change in conditions amazed us every time. As I started passing Jonesy back the dry bags from the pits, I saw a plume of water erupt less than 50 metres from the kayak.

  “Jonesy, there’s a whale out here.”

  “Whatever, mate.”

  “No seriously,” I insisted. “Stick your head out and take a look.”

  Justin peered out the window and was instantly dumbfounded. I was too – I couldn’t have been more awestruck if I’d run into Wolfgang Gullich at the local milk bar. (Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the greatest rock climber of all time?!) The whale cruised by, passing a mere 20 metres to our port side. It was so close, we could feel it breathing.

  The water around the body of the whale moved in perfect rhythm with this magnificent creature. In fact, for that brief moment it was as if the breathing of the whale was the lungs of the Tasman. As its ribcage expanded and contracted, we were mesmerised by being in the shadow of a mammal the size of an aircraft carrier with the grace of a dolphin. Seeing sharks, tuna, albatrosses – and dolphins – had all been cool, but this intimate encounter was almost spiritual. It glided through the water, exuding an aura of supreme confidence and grandeur – we were just stunned by how beautiful it was.

  Captivated by our whale experience, we had the slightly more mundane task of rewiring the electric bilge pump in the rear pit. The previous week since it had malfunctioned, it had been really frustrating manually pumping the pit as we got ourselves ready for the cabin each night. Justin did a great job cutting out the float and switch to simplify the system, and we were quite chuffed with ourselves after successfully combating this frustrating niggle.

  We paddled on in calm conditions quite silently for the day, mulling over our humbling encounter with the whale. Towards the end of the day we saw the first container ship we’d seen on the horizon while out on the Tasman. It was there one moment, gone the next.

  Before jumping into the cabin, Justin started recording something for the video diary: “End of day 46 today.”

  Just as he was about to review the day’s events, I interrupted, “No it’s not, mate, it’s day 45.”

  We continued to argue the point for several minutes, until finally we had the common sense to open one of our diaries and take a look. Day 45 had drawn to a close. Even though each day had its own unique challenges, in our exhaustion they’d begun to fuse together. We’d both truly believed the other was dead wrong.

  DAY 46

  For the first time on the expedition (or our lives, for that matter), we started taking sleeping tablets the previous night. In all my previous adventures I’d never been a fan of anti-inflammatory drugs, sleeping tablets, caffeine tablets or the like. I felt it detracted from the experience and clouded your judgement in understanding how your body was dealing with the stress of expedition life. It was now different – we were taking our bodies to places they’d never been before. My daily dose was two No-Doz, two Nurofen, two Anzemet (the anti-nausea medication given to chemo patients), two Phenergan (also anti-nausea) and, now, one sleeping tablet. We often speculated about how many caffeine tablets were needed to cancel out the effects of a sleeping tablet.

  We gradually began to see our mental aptitude fade as we progressed – slowly – towards the Land of the Long White Cloud. Each extra day we were out there, the worse our alertness became. We were now at the level where we couldn’t recall the details from the previous evening’s sked or weather forecasts. More worryingly, neither of us was able to remember hourly mileages. Every day we’d been playing a game of guessing how far we’d travelled by turning the GPS on each hour. But we couldn’t play it any more, as we could never remember what the distance we’d travelled was an hour earlier.

  We now constantly confused east and west, kilometres travelled – amazingly, we’d paddled 450 kilometres in the last five days (I think!) – versus kilometres to go, port and starboard, left and right, and people’s names: the list went on. We tried to stay patient with each other, though, often laughing off the confusion. Our saving grace was having a waterproof notebook tied round our necks at all times. The salt-encrusted lanyard rubbed viciously on our skin causing quite bad chafing, but at least we were able to write down anything that needed remembering.

  And with the absence of bowel movements, it wasn’t just our minds that seemed to be drying up. This was caused by the gnawing hunger in our empty stomachs. Our bodies were trying to suck every last calorie out of our dwindling food supplies.

  Crawling out of the cabin that morning, I stupidly made a comment to Justin: “Mate, we’ve just about ticked every ‘box’ in terms of experiencing life at sea. I mean, we’ve seen storms, we’ve seen the ocean at its best and worst, we’ve seen almost all the sea creatures we were expecting to see out here – heaps of whales, dolphins, Mahimahi, tuna and baitfish. The one box left to tick is to see a shark – I guess we’ll probably see them as we approach the coast of New Zealand.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Justin replied cautiously “but didn’t want to say it in case it jinxed us.”

  It was a good point. “I must admit, I’ve been thinking it for a few days but haven’t said so for that very reason.”

  “Just don’t bring it up again until we reach shore.”

  “Alright, mate.”

  Throughout the day we got increasingly frustrated at our apparent slow speed. Like a couple of weeks earlier, we pulled the goggles out and took a look at the hull. Sure enough, it was measled once again with barnacles and algae – one of us would have to go in.

  We both knew the routine. “Scissor, Paper, Rock.” This time, though, we realised the implications were a little more serious, as the water was now much colder than the temperatures experienced in the EAC. Whoever went in would come out almost hypothermic.

  Justin lost and again I wished I could take his place out there. He plunged over the side and began scrubbing the hull. As soon as he entered the wa
ter his head shot up and he shouted out, “It’s f***ing freezing in here, mate; I don’t think I’m going to last long.” His skin instantly goose-bumped and went vibrant red.

  With the ample layer of fat on his body of one who had rarely said “no” to second helpings, Justin had always been able to handle the cold water of canyons and the like quite well. During his later school days, he hadn’t been nicknamed “the Dugong” – a sea cow – for nothing. For him to complain so quickly about the temperature, it really must have been freezing.

  After he’d vigorously scrubbed the rear half of the kayak, he swam towards the pits and lumbered out of the water. “I just need a couple of minutes to warm up,” he chattered between his quivering lips.

  He was shivering violently and I thought that might be my cue to complete the task. “You’ve done a great job, mate, I’ll finish her off,” I said hesitantly, knowing that if I went in, I’d come out frozen too.

  But Justin was adamant. “No way, Cas, I lost – it’s my responsibility to finish what I started.”

  “But, Jonesy, you’re almost hypothermic – I’ll do it.”

  “I said no. I just need five minutes.”

  End of discussion. I knew there was no stopping him – that’s why I was out here with Justin; for his ability to endure amazing punishment and keep fronting up for more. True to his word, after five minutes he re-entered the water and finished the hull off. After the job was done, we immediately began paddling to try to warm him up. His teeth continued to chatter for another half hour as his body vibrated like a tuning fork.

  At 7pm we stopped paddling and started preparing Her Majesty – our latest nickname for Lot 41 – for the evening. Justin washed himself and jumped in the cabin, and as I was packing the pits, I noticed something unfamiliar. It looked like a fin. A shark fin. It couldn’t be – could it? It disappeared and I assumed it was my mind playing tricks on me; but suddenly, it reappeared.

  Hardly believing my eyes, I yelled out, “Jonesy, there’s a bloody shark out here, mate.”

  “Bullshit, Cas.”

  Bam. It torpedoed into the side of the cabin and Lot 41 lurched to one side. I scampered back to the rear cockpit, stripped my clothes off – part of my daily routine – and leapt inside. We sat staring out the door in utter amazement at this giant predator as it continued to circle us. It was hard to take it in; there was a shark out there.

  After a while, though, we calmed down a bit, and as our familiarity with the situation grew, Justin said playfully, “Hey, mate, I dare you to touch its fin.”

  A mad glint entered my eye. For a brief moment, I thought that would have been kind of cool. After all, it was this type of inquisitiveness that had us out here in the first place. Then, fortunately, I came to my senses. “Jonesy, how could we ring our parents up and say that we lost a hand because we were trying to pat a shark?”

  On the off-chance the victim didn’t bleed to death, the grief our mates would have given us for our stupidity – as we returned to Australia missing a finger or two, if not much worse – would have left us wishing that the shark had killed us…

  Justin didn’t have the chance to reply before we realised simultaneously that there wasn’t one, but two fins out there. Oh God, two sharks – were we the aquatic version of meals on wheels? We kept staring out the wide-open door, eyes fixed, completely naked and…well, it was difficult trying to pinpoint the exact emotion we were feeling. Was it fear or excitement? Or both?

  As the sharks continued to circle us – and the second one was about two-thirds the length of Lot 41 – we were becoming more blasé about their company, as we felt safe inside the kayak. We both remembered that when she was being constructed, our boat builder Graham had given us a hammer and a cut-out of the hull laminates, saying, “Bet you can’t put a hole in it.” On either side of an 8-millimetre foam core sandwich were two layers of fibreglass and Kevlar (the stuff they use in bulletproof vests). We’d gone to work beating this panel and it didn’t even fracture.

  The sharks seemed pretty curious about Graham’s handiwork. Every now and then, they’d rub themselves against the length of the kayak. Their skin both sounded and felt like sandpaper – it was surprisingly rough and textured. Going to sleep that night was bizarre, to say the least. Having the teeth of a couple of sharks barely a centimetre away as the two of them continued to swim underneath us was unforgettable.

  18

  Aching Joints and Grumbling Stomachs

  DAY 47

  DIARY, DAY 47 – JAMES

  “Woke 0600 [6am]. Sharks now gone. Each morning is getting harder and harder, both constantly hungry; bum very sore today, can’t do squats any more – legs can no longer support body weight.”

  Talking to the two cameras on board – Mr Camera (okay, so it’s a slightly Play School-ish name) – became like talking to a third person. Each camera had its own personality, and although it didn’t ever talk back to us (obviously), we enjoyed the one-way dialogue with these inanimate objects.

  Mr Camera became one of those friends you could trust completely and spill the beans about exactly what you were thinking. It was a private conversation, though, and even if Justin was well within earshot, I’d talk to Mr Camera as if he wasn’t there. Occasionally, we’d be whining about the other person, but it was unspoken etiquette not to interrupt a conversation with our quiet mate. Funnily enough, I’d sometimes say something directed at Jonesy, but he wasn’t allowed to blow up at me because he knew I wasn’t talking to him!

  Pushing another westerly current, we found Lot 41 making pitifully slow progress on a calm sea, which had us wanting to tear our hair out. In these conditions, we should have been making great progress. It felt like the Tasman’s long delicate fingers were clawing at us from the depths of the sea. She wanted to keep us out there for a little longer – it seemed she was enjoying our company.

  Once again, we found ourselves increasingly frustrated at Pat, Roger and the whirling currents we couldn’t understand. With the data our support team were receiving, they were providing the best possible information that they had access to, but unfortunately we were now finding the current charts on the eastern side of the Tasman painfully inaccurate. Our support team was seeing one thing and we were experiencing currents doing the exact opposite.

  After a few very slow hours, we called Clouds on the satphone to see if he had any idea about what was going on. After some to-ing and fro-ing, we decided to head south and see if we could punch out of the current. Roger’s only advice was: “Whenever you find yourselves pushing a current, the only way you can make any progress is to head perpendicular to it.” In other words, stubbornly beating your head against a wall often gets you nowhere.

  Paddling in that direction took us further from our initial goal of Manukau Harbour – Auckland – and was drawing us away from our closest landfall, the northern tip of the North Island – Hokianga Harbour (a mere 400 kilometres away). Our speed didn’t seem to improve, though, which baffled us completely. Once again we felt trapped – we couldn’t head east or south – and yet again we found ourselves questioning Roger, Pat, the weather bureau etc. And for the first time we began to wonder how much fight we had left.

  After another hour of futile paddling, we retired to the cabin and enjoyed a relatively calm afternoon. Later, I sat in pit 2 and desalinated a good 10 litres of water, while Justin was inside reading some forum posts out loud. Obviously we were feeling pretty dispirited, but these boosted our morale enormously:

  Sergio: “Come on, boys, you are the strongest guys I know. If anyone is capable of this, it’s you. Push on, push on, paddle and paddle, and a break will come.”

  DAY 48

  Sleeping through our alarms, we were greeted by our GPS telling us we’d drifted south-southwest through the night. We continued to push on south-southeast through this fortress of swirling currents around the NZ coast which seemed hell-bent on barring our entry. Progressing a painfully slow 8.5 kilometres in seven hours’ paddling, we
again stopped early afternoon, immersing ourselves in one of the most serious chats we’d had in the voyage so far, asking the straightforward, but incredibly complex, question: “Why are we still out here? What’s motivating us to go on?”

  Our situation was starting to feel desperate. We were now far more exhausted than we’d ever been (both during the expedition and in our whole lives), our bodies were constantly aching, our food supplies were dwindling and we were, of course, once again stuck in some god-awful current. So what was at the core of this adventure?

  We discovered that afternoon that there was far more to us being out there than to be the first people to cross the Tasman Sea by kayak. We realised that we’d wanted to prove something to ourselves and the world. Mediocrity and conformity freaked us out: we wanted to be different. It might sound a bit dramatic, but we wanted to explore the extremities of our being and define what we were capable of. It was like those people who live in the suburbs, driving massive 4WDs around the city that never see an unsealed road. We didn’t want our lives to be like that. We wanted to push our minds and bodies down those dirt tracks; to take our 4WD and see if we could redefine its limits.

  The danger of playing this game is going beyond your limits and ending up dead; but for us, adventure has never been about playing Russian roulette with the objective dangers of nature. Crossing the ditch was an exercise in setting up Lot 41 and all our processes so we could take our souls to undiscovered places – to expose those inner demons. We’d now done this. So again, we prodded – why go on?

  Were we being motivated by the fear of failure or the fact that we hadn’t given the Tasman our all? Maybe a bit of both. The bottom line, though, was that for all the pain it brought, we knew we could still take one more paddle stroke.

  Our insurance policy against being out there forever was our food running out – we’d then have to be rescued. We calculated that with further rationing, and supplementing our diet with fish, we could last out close to 90 days unsupported. At that point I felt it would be time to abort the mission, but Justin, on the other hand, was keen to make it to NZ regardless of needing a food drop. I saw a drop as completely destroying our mission of an unsupported crossing and thought that if we needed that kind of help, we might as well have taken a support boat the whole way across and paddled the ditch in our regular kayaks. But Jonesy saw it as something we’d started and needed to finish, however long it took.