Sail away...

So we amazingly were given sponsorship of 2 sails! Thank you so much Pacific Action Sails.

To be honest I was a little dubious to add a sail to my little boat. I wondered what it would be like to have a lung full of air propelling me in some direction I was not sure I wanted to be heading in… but…

OMG! This is a revelation! From the first nervous second of actually raising my sail and seeing what this new toy could do, I was so totally impressed! We had just paddled out through Boaty heads and with only about a half meter swell but a good 10 – 15 knots (predicted for 25 – 30 kts to grace us shortly) I nervously raised my sail. My thought to prepare for this inaugural raising ceremony was that I would probably be upside down within about half a second! Instead… this was the most fun experience I had had in my boat for quite some time. Gone are the days of routine paddles with tight spots in all sorts of places! Here I had found some relief!

My little 1 sq m sail picked me up perfectly and deposited me on this beautiful downwind run with such stability and confidence that I forgot about all of my pre-conceived ideas of a sail on my boat. Within possibly less than 2 minutes (as I headed further out to see and directly over a little reef) I was riding beautifully in front of a breaking wave, my sail propelling me forward with the most smooth and exhilarating feeling. Juz looked over and at a later moment told me that all he could see was a little sail cruising through a breaking wave surrounding my boat.

So my last word here is… If ever you have contemplated a sail and you enjoy the free-ride of nature… this is for you! I am totally hooked!

There's still water!

Water today, Vodka tomorrow!!

Marooned on a sandy, deserted, coral cay, with fresh shark teeth still plugging the holes in the stern of the kayak, the midday sun belting down on our backs, and very little water left to quench our thirst - what do we do?

Despite the grey fins flashing around us in the shallows, it's likely to be thirst that kills us first, so that's why we'll be prepared.

Desalinators are expensive, require constant pumping, and are somewhat bulky. We hope that most of the time we'll have access to fresh water streams or plenty of rainwater but when we don't, our trusty home-made water still will do the trick.

I found a second hand pressure cooker in good nick at the recycle centre for $5. The friendly local refrigeration supplier found a couple of old fittings and a rubber hose for me while suspecting that despite my convincing story of a crazy paddling expedition, I was in fact making a moonshine still. Reece Plumbing charged me an extortionate amount for 5 metres of 1/4 inch copper, a few fittings and a plastic hose. The whole contraption fits neatly inside the closed pressure cooker for storage.

The process is simple - boil seawater in the pressure cooker, collect the steam, condense the steam in the copper coil that is dunked in water, and hey presto, fresh water!! Apparently it produces about 1.5 litres an hour, and from its maiden test, I'd say that estimate is about right.

I might go back to the drawing board for the rubber refrigeration hose that comes out of the top of the pot. It is giving the water a very rubbery flavour and it takes some force to squeeze the rubber over the steam valve - I am not sure it would last the full 12 months. Perhaps a trip to the local home brew shop might be an idea, they are bound to know a solution.

The pressure cooker also steps in as a camp oven, so some of my earlier 'which pot' issues are also solved. We'll be taking this pressure cooker, a 2L stainless billy which will double as a condenser cooling unit, and a frypan with a removable handle.

So the water problem is taken care of, now what to do about those sharks…

Plastic Fantastic

Pick a boat, any boat.

Ford or Holden? NRL or AFL? Labour or Liberal (or Greens!!)? Scrunch or fold? These are not issues for fence sitters, these are matters of pride, of tradition, of importance! And so it is with sea kayakers - plastic or glass?

Perhaps it is strange that there aren't too many kayakers still raving about the benefits of reindeer hide and whalebone kayaks, but the polar opposites on the continuum for paddlers are whether to place your backside in a boat made of fibreglass or roto-moulded plastic. There are of course pros and cons for either option, and staunch supporters who wouldn't dare to budge from their position.

Glass boats have a reputation for being smoother in the water and travelling faster than their plastic cousins, they are more rigid and often significantly lighter. Try offering, however, to drag a glass boat up the beach for your paddling partner and you risk sudden and immediate death.

Glass boats are somewhat fragile and a precious smooth gelcoat can be scratched easily and even punctured on rocks, coral or shark teeth. Promoters of glass boats will often tell you that fibreglass is easy to fix but I am yet to meet a single human being who enjoys breathing in acetone fumes or sanding back multiple layers of toxic goo.

By now you might have detected my preference for plastic boats. This is not a general rule, but for the Archipaddlo adventure a plastic boat will be better suited to our needs. Plastic boats are more flexible (not necessarily an advantage), they are heavier and they can be slower in the water. The main advantage of a plastic hull though, is that I can clumsily scrape my loaded boat across a coral reef at low tide (sorry Nemo) or across a sloppy mudflat without risking terminal failure.

Plastic is tough, durable and difficult to break or puncture. It is not as easy to fix as glass but usually there is no need. As much as I care about my gear I know there'll be plenty of times I'll be happy to slide my plastic boat straight up onto a coral cay, keeping my knobbly knees well out of the croc infested water around me.

Yep, on this occasion I'm happy to be wrapped in plastic!