All the Way Round (14 page)

But all that was behind me as I headed for Misery Bay, Cape Catastrophe, Avoid Bay and various islands named after lost sailors, all named as reminders of past tragedies. While paddling through these areas, everyone I met took time out to mention I was in an area well known for great white sharks! Although I never saw one I’m sure that they saw me and decided I wasn’t worth the bother.

It was my birthday on 12 October. I celebrated on Thistle Island with the usual helping of pasta and lentils after having a hard day’s paddling in strong side winds. I was feeling good after finding a shelter with a water tank, chairs and a table, and realising I was going to make Adelaide in time to meet the family.

My plan was to bounce across to Kangaroo Island then down to Victor Harbor, where I would get a lift to Adelaide. But strong southwest winds when I got to Marion Bay meant I had to change my plans. I lost a day due to 30–40 knots ripping up the sea and decided to head straight for Adelaide to save time. I crossed the Gulf of St Vincent from Edithburgh to Glenelg on the day the winds died down. When I landed at Glenelg on 18 October, Phil Doddridge from Adventure Kayaking South Australia came to my rescue and took the kayak off my hands. The next day Tony, my father-in-law, and I met my family as they got off the plane.

5

Adelaide to Sydney

W
e had a good week in Adelaide. One of the breakthroughs for me was I could demonstrate to the kids that this was not just another of Dad’s regular paddles.

I was asked to do an interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio station and the family tagged along. The kids were impressed with the ABC, having never given any thought to where the little voice in the radio came from. But during a tour of the building we were led to the floor where the kids’ favourite ABC TV programs were recorded, they met the stars and it made their day.

The ABC also arranged for a TV camera crew to come down to the beach and film me leaving for the next leg. It took a few goes and the staged goodbyes from the family got less sincere with each take until the kids just made sandcastles and Sharon was telling me not to come back. I never really found out why they wanted the footage, but have a nasty suspicion they put it aside for a news story should I not make it.

After that we drove around the corner for a barbecue at Phil’s place where the Adelaide sea kayakers made me feel like the guest of honour. All this combined to convince the kids that what I was doing was well regarded outside our circle of close friends and family and it was a significant event. Before this Dad was just on a paddle, but now he was on a paddle that was of interest to people at the barbecue, people on the radio and TV. From that point they talked about Dad’s trip with their school friends and it was seen in a whole new light.

I decided to take Phil up on his offer of a lift to Victor Harbor to get me back on track. The paddle along the shore of the Fleurieu Peninsula from Adelaide to Victor Harbor would have meant missing the Victorian Sea Kayak Club (VSKC) AGM in Anglesea on 13 November (in just over two weeks’ time). I’d promised the club I would try to get there if at all possible. The guest speaker was Paul Caffyn, and it would be cool to meet the first person to have kayaked around Australia while I was repeating the trip, all in the company of the biggest annual gathering of sea kayakers in Victoria.

My original plans to paddle directly to Victor Harbor had to be adjusted so I could meet the family at Adelaide airport on time; I had no problem adjusting back again. The only reason I would consider compromising the integrity of the trip was for my family. Without the pressure to meet them I would have waited and continued to Victor Harbor, so I was just equalising the domestic pressure with a lift.

I set off from Victor Harbor on 26 October and my first challenge was Australia’s longest beach. The Coorong is 194 kilometres of continuous sand, running from Cape Jaffa to the mouth of the Murray River. It is said there are only three rocks on the entire beach. As well as being the longest, it would have to be one of the most dangerous beaches on the coast of Australia. Its length means you can’t avoid landing on it at least once, and there are often strong winds. It offers no shelter as it faces the southwest swell, which ends its journey as big surf after the long trip over the Southern Ocean. All that water hits the beach then runs back as rivers of seaward-flowing currents. The seabed is very shallow, which means the surf picks up a long way out, with multiple lines of breakers made unpredictable by the out-running currents.

Even though the forecast was for a 2–3 metre swell, there was little wind and it looked as calm as it gets out there, so I paddled along for ten hours on a flat ocean and wasn’t worried about landing on the dreaded Coorong beach. At the end of the day, at a place thoughtfully named ‘Hells Gate’, I started heading towards the beach. A kilometre offshore I felt an unnerving swell build up beneath me; the ocean was coming alive. The swell, although less than a metre high, was very wide, so wide that the rise and fall I had been feeling was so gradual I hadn’t noticed it while cruising through the day. This low, wide swell held a large amount of water, which was getting aggravated by the shallow water as it compressed and built up. There seemed to be no order to the waves, no defined rips running out, and multiple breakers a long way from the shore that were hard to predict. I made my call and made a run for the beach, knowing I’d get caught by at least one wave.

I paddled as fast as I could while the waves were regrouping below me. I covered a lot of water to the beach but there were just too many breakers to get all the way without being hit. When my turn came, the wave lifted the stern and I picked up speed during the downhill. It didn’t last too long before I was thrown sideways as the wave broke. I braced into the avalanche of whitewater on my left. With my head under the foam I couldn’t see what was happening. All I could do was hold my breath and grip the paddle tight while the wave played with the kayak. Once the wave died I raised my head out of the whitewater towards daylight and fresh air to have a quick look around. The beach had gone! A quick head swivel and I found it again, over to my left. While underwater I’d been swung 180 degrees. Whatever, I now had a clean run to the beach and salvation.

As far as I could see up and down the beach the view was lines of breaking waves. I put any thought of trying to launch in the morning to the back of my mind as I went about my usual evening tasks. Mornings are usually a bit calmer as the winds haven’t blown during the night, causing the waves to die down, so there was no reason for me to stress.

In the morning the first thing I did was to poke my head out of the tent and check out the surf. It was disappointing. The surf had grown as a weather system many kilometres over the horizon was throwing a big swell towards me.

I ate my breakfast with one eye on the morning’s obstacle. I still had a long way to paddle to the end of the beach and a good start would be appreciated, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen. I counted seven lines of breaking surf over a distance of about 700 metres. No point pretending I was going to get involved in any science of timing sets. I just picked my line, snapped the spray skirt closed, grabbed my paddle and, grim-faced, launched into them. I managed to get over the first one, got hit by the second which knocked me off line and stopped my momentum, then was picked up, rolled over and thrown back on the third. I rolled up, and spying a lull as the sets regrouped, set off for open water immediately.

My arms were burning but my window of opportunity didn’t allow for a rest. I headed back out over lumps of sea that were building into breakers, then a monster grew up before me. I’m not sure what kept me going headlong into the thing, perhaps it was because at that stage it was the only chance I had. To give up and sit there would mean I would be subject to the full violence of the wave, and then I would be beaten back to the beach by the breakers I’d already passed. I’d worked hard to get this far and didn’t want to start all over again. If I carried on and mistimed it, I would find myself vertical on the wave as it broke, then get pitch-poled backwards and lose control, while the kayak would probably be damaged. There would follow a long dangerous swim back to the shore through surf and rips and then I’d find myself on a deserted beach with my kit unlikely to be intact.

So I kept going. The kayak climbed the face of the wave, reaching for the sky at an impossible angle before breaking through the green, watery wall and falling through thin air onto the back of the wave. It was a close call. The next day when I looked in a mirror, I saw the marks where the join of my two-piece paddle had scraped across my face as I forced myself through the wave.

Even then I couldn’t rest; there was still some hard paddling needed to get to deeper, predictable waters away from the beach. I was exhausted by my efforts to break through and swore that I wouldn’t land on this beach again if it was at all possible to avoid.

The result was that I chose to paddle the 100 kilometres to Kingston SE into a steady headwind rather than land on the Coorong again. I started to paddle south at 8 am and landed at a windy, cold boat ramp at 3 am the next day. Exhausted, I just put on some dry clothes, got my sleeping bag out and lay on the concrete for a couple of hours before dawn. With daylight came the dog walkers and fishermen. I picked one that was easy to catch as he dragged his old dog past me. It was a big disappointment to learn that the campsite was at the other end of town, but the look on my face must have been enough for my dog walker. He offered to take me and my gear to the campground and, after hearing my story as I wheeled the kayak across town, he also arranged for the local newspaper to interview me. I settled into the caravan park and spent the next three days recovering.

To give some idea of how spent I was, the 1-kilometre walk from the caravan park to the shops was too far for me to manage without a good rest halfway. I was in such a state that I had to stop and curl up out of the wind in a disused shopfront. A little while later someone who had seen me pull my kayak to the caravan park took pity on me and gave me a lift 500 metres back to my tent.

On 31 October I had recovered enough to set off into a strong headwind. I had only set myself a goal of Cape Jaffa, 20 kilometres away, which was more than far enough in those conditions. And that was how it was for the 200 kilometres from Kingston SE to Port Macdonnell, making any gain I could into relentless headwinds. I would wake up with the tent shaking, and be on the water within an hour, motivated by the knowledge the wind would only get stronger throughout the day. The paddling would start with aching muscles being forced to plug into the chop and winds, with spray stinging my face. After a while the aching would be replaced by numbness as I mechanically went through the motions of paddling. The effort was unrewarding and the slow progress demoralising.

After six days I got to Port Macdonnell. I desperately needed a rest, both physically and mentally, but a change in the weather took away the headwinds and left calm seas. Knowing the southeasterly winds would soon return I decided to make a break for it and forced myself to paddle over 70 kilometres each day for the next four days to get round Cape Otway and make Apollo Bay on 10 November.

I have kept diaries on previous trips but my notes were so difficult to read that I almost qualified as a doctor purely on the strength of my handwriting. Even I can’t read my few lines of scrawl that explain what happened after a long day. So this time I embraced technology and took a voice recorder; this worked really well for almost the whole trip. But somewhere between Melbourne and Sydney my recorder got wet and I lost my log from Adelaide to Sydney and with it much of the detail of this leg.

It’s not always my aim to paddle as far as I can each day, as it often means I miss poking around some great bit of coast. Over those four days I paddled past the limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles, Bay of Islands and the coast of Cape Otway. I was close enough to see the amazing coastline but in too much of a rush to explore. I would soon meet many Victorian kayakers who knew the area from Port Macdonnell and there were two points of view about this part of my journey: one was an appreciation of the distance I’d paddled over the four days; the other was regret I hadn’t seen the best of their coast.

A meeting of minds

I made Wye River on Thursday 11 November and was faced with a forecast promising a couple of days of headwinds. With 35 kilometres to go, I gave up the race to get all the way to Anglesea for the VSKC AGM and rang Tony Chick. He had volunteered to pick me up and look after me on behalf of the club.

I was soon made welcome at Tony and his wife Jill’s place and being treated to some of Jill’s marvellous cooking. The weekend approached and the kayaks of Victoria’s sea kayaking community were gathering, along with a few interlopers from the borders of New South Wales. Headlining the meeting were guest speakers Terry Bolland and Paul Caffyn; it was shaping up to be the who’s who of sea kayaking in Australia.

I drifted about during the weekend with no intention of getting in my kayak to go on any of the organised trips or attend the training classes on offer, opting instead to head off to the coffee shop with Terry and Laurie. Over coffee we caught up and swapped kayaking stories before the conversation swung round to making me famous.

I was reluctant to even entertain the idea; being known among fellow kayakers is one thing, but to try and reach the general public was another. Then my two well-meaning social-planners started to weave ideas for sponsorship, motivational speaking, interviews and articles. It was a wonderful endorsement of the trip that my progress so far was regarded as significant by those in the sea kayaking world. But I thought it would take too much effort to generate interest in the general public. I didn’t have time for that; I was flat out actually doing the trip. However, at some point during our chat, I did mention that I always knew I’d run out of money before I got to Sydney and I’d be visiting my bank manager when I stopped over at home. I didn’t give my comment another thought, but Terry took it on board and turned the Saturday night of the AGM into a fundraiser for me, auctioning off just about everything he had brought on the plane from Perth.

Up until that point I never once thought of approaching the sea kayak clubs for monetary assistance. As my trip progressed the generosity of the Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland sea kayak clubs at the presentations I gave was enough to ensure I didn’t have to go ‘cap in hand’ to the bank. But it was the Victorians who, with just a few hours’ notice, started the ball rolling and made me realise the trip was not just mine. Everybody who was following me and who had contributed deserved a place in my story.

Before the gathering of the VSKC I really had little contact with people other than those I bumped into on a beach after landing, and even then it was rarely for longer than ten minutes. I received emails from friends and family, as you would expect, but apart from that my social circles were very small.

During the weekend, however, I discovered that my web page was being studied by paddlers around the world, and my sporadic emails and updates were eagerly awaited and passed around to those interested in following my progress. This was the first inkling I had that anybody outside my close circle was taking an interest. Now I knew I had a great many invisible supporters and that was a truly motivating thing. I never felt alone again after that.