Snapping a rest day.

No piccie again - the cord for the camera is in the boat and I can't face the army of mozzies to get it now.

After nearly 50km on the paddles yesterday, today was a much easier journey. It is about 18km from Newell to Snapper Island, or about 3 hours in our heavily laden boats. We pulled up at the campsite on Snapper at about 10:00 and collapsed into the happiness of knowing that we were having the rest of the day off,

We have unpacked, dried out and repacked our boats. Everything still feels like a new toy trying to fit into a cupboard full of favourites - there;s not enough room for everything but you can't fathom getting rid of any of it. I am already shortlisting items that might end up 'accidentally' left behind on a coral cay somewhere further north.

Consider the fact that we are staring straight into the Daintree River mouth across a narrow strait from where we sit yet I needed to fix a small puncture in my sleeping mat. As with a bicycle tube, the mat just needs to be submerged in water to find the trail of bubbles oozing from the leak. Nowhere in the instructions could I find what to do if the only water available is potentially teeming with crocodiles eager to add another tourist to their tally.

The solution was to wade nervously into the water with an overinflated sleeping mat and find the leak as rapidly as possible while my lovely wife stood guard with a machete. Goodness knows what somebody might have thought had they caught us in the act!!

Anyway, hands are blistered, we have lips like Angeline Jolie from sunburn and it is now time to rest these weary bones.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS!!

After nine months of planning, thousands of dollars spent on gear, letters to sponsors, goodbyes to friends and family, we have finally slipped off the first of many beaches on our way to Bali.

Feeling somewhat like a fresh-faced tourist with a brand new Lonely Planet guide to a foreign country with a name we can barely pronounce, we have made camp tonight among the friendly pandanus trees in a secluded cove of Double Island. Having paddled our overweight boats only a few kilometres from Trinity Beach, today's goal was simply to start, and start we have done.

Already our gear feels as sweaty as we do in the humidity. Leaking water in this hatch, not enough weight in the stern, where's the cutlery, too much stuff and not quite enough room. We'll sort this stuff out. A couple of weeks and that Lonely Planet will be thumbed and earmarked with the grime of many kilometres of travel.

Juz.

Dictation from the neighbouring hammock:

We're away!

It is with the help, support and love of all the people who have helped us along the way that we are able to spend even the first night out on this journey.

Thanks for all your support and we'll keep you informed of our progress as often as we can.

Here we are now, rehydrate us!

There are some outdoorsy types who enjoy the luxuries of fine dining whether they are dangling from a cliff or squatting in a snow cave. The thought of resorting to dehydrated mush is, certainly to those 'camembert and crackers' types, as abhorrent as pouring an aged shiraz into a fancy, flexible plastic bottle just to save weight on the trail.

Food is fuel. Energy. Simple as that. For most of the Archipaddlo expedition we'll be eating what the locals eat, sharing a mudcrab and some sago with some friendly PNG fishermen or biting into some barracuda around an Indonesian campfire. Part of the joy of travelling overseas is to experience the culinary delights of a different culture and we can't wait to gather new recipes.

For the period we are paddling up the QLD coast our food supplies need to be more planned. I know I have sung the praises of the dehydrator in the past, and even explained some of our menu, but to see our supplies laid out and ready was an impressive sight. The picture above is six weeks worth of food for the two of us. Each column of packages is a week with the last week packed into the yellow dry bag which is a 20L Sea To Summit Big River Dry Bag. To give an idea of scale, each vacuum sealed bag is about 25cm wide or roughly the size of a pack of Tim Tams (that has been crushed down and pressed into a flat-ish cylinder).

Each week we have 3 or 4 breakfasts of cereal mixed with dried fruit (mostly dried strawberries) and powdered milk and then bread (flour and yeast) for the remainder. Lunches are more snacky than normal - super bars (dehydrated high energy muesli bars), pumpernickel (which we still have to pick up) and some lollies for supercharged energy. Dinner is a dehydrated meal portion - mexican beef, thai chicken curry, spag bog etc. We have extra portions of carbs like a grain mix (rice, quinoa, buckwheat, chia and barley), cous cous with stock and Deb potato in case our fishing gear actually works and we need to bulk up a fishy meal. We have some spices ready to add flavour when we need it. Ultimately we have enough food in each week's bag to keep us alive for a lot longer than a week, or to keep our generators fully fuelled for a week of heavy exertion.

Forewarned id forearmed and so the elements of variety and texture missing from our menu are the very things I am making sure I stuff in at every opportunity before we leave.

For those keeping track, it looks like we'll be sliding away from Trinity Beach on Monday or Tuesday next week as long as the weather is on our side.

Crawling out of the comfort cave.

We’ve cleaned the oven, washed the windows, had the carpets cleaned and mowed the lawn for the last time in a year. The ears in the walls of our gorgeous little house have fresh voices to listen to, and the laughter and energy of a new family to keep them company for a while.

With kayaks strapped to the roof and all our shiny possessions stuffed into bags, boxes and plenty of dry sacks, our car has become the vessel for the first stage of our journey north.

Right now I am sweating in a hammock in the overgrown paddock of my mum’s place in sultry, damp Brisbane with a trickle of misty rain catching the light of the swollen moon. Brissy is the opportunity to wave off family and friends, and catch a few more hours of rest after the last few crazy weeks of final preparations. Like mountaineers at camp 1, we have left the comfort of base camp but still have such a long way to go.

Mountaineers rarely have the opportunity to gather last minute supplies at high camps on the mountain so perhaps my analogy is flawed as despite our bulging possessions we are still racing around crossing equipment off the list. Pumpernickel bread, emergency flares, bungee cord, even batteries – our main power source for the next year are still on the list (Jaycar was frustratingly out of stock). I guess there’s still the opportunity to pick up a few more bits in Cairns…Cooktown…Thursday Island…Port Moresby…

The cocktail of emotions (shaken, not stirred) of leaving behind our house, our friends, our families, our dogs is difficult to describe. Our decision to climb well out of our padded, warm and colourful comfort zone is perhaps hardest to appreciate when we are almost out of the cave, and not yet quite on our own. Just a few more days of burning overpriced fossil fuel and we’ll leave the comfort zone behind for a while, and this adventure will really get started.

I expect that this time in a week there’ll be salt on my eyebrows and blisters on these fingers. I can’t wait.

I've got the power!

Watts, volts, ohms, amps - they may as well be Pidgin english to me. I can stick batteries in a remote control, fix a blown fuse, even wire up a house (not quite to legal standards!) but trying to work out how to make power for a pile of electronic devices while sitting in a kayak is another story.

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Thanks to the generous assistance of my brother Rob and his Tech Aura® (the ability to make any gadget work instantly by little more than looking at it) we now have a fully functioning mobile communications centre and power plant that would make any of the first 20 Bond films look like an episode of Play School.

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Despite my wishes, there are no monkeys on bicycles, just solar panels to generate the buzzing juice that keeps all these appliances whirring away. We have two 14W and one 4.5W Brunton SolarRoll flexible, water resistant, roll-up panels. I am looking to fix the small panel to one of the kayaks with a permanent cable to a battery in a hatch. The big panels will just be used when we are on land as they are too big to strap on the boats. I have whipped up tough storage tubes for the panels from 90mm PVC tube with a screw cap at one end.

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Originally I considered taking a Brunton Impel, a fancy battery with all sorts of connection options. After purchasing this expensive little box from the States I realised that the main 'out' connection from the battery is a custom Brunton plug that even had the nerds at Jaycar scratching their heads. The thought of trying to find spare parts while sitting on a beach somewhere in PNG convinced me to keep it simple.

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Enter the sealed Lead Acid 12V battery, and plenty of car charger outlets. Joining the solar panels to the battery there is a Brunton Solar Controller to regulate the charge. The beauty of these batteries is they are basic - even with my primary school understanding of electronics I can make sense of the whole "don't put the red wire on the black plug. We'll have three batteries (one for each panel) - two 9 amp hour (see I can speak Pidgin!) batteries and a smaller one for backup. Then the simple thing is to just make sure that all our gizmos can be charged from a 12 volt battery with a car charger plug. Easier said than done.

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Our only computer for this expedition is a Macbook Air 11" - a wafer thin, feather-lite, low energy, über cool, yuppie accessory that has been designed for swanky city dwellers rather than the mangrove swamps of northern Iran Jaya. The computer is dwarfed by the smallest laptop case that Pelican make (1080), a cumbersome, heavy, but water tight case - in fact the Macbook Air fits into just the lid of the Pelican case! However, Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have decided not to produce a 12V power adapter - perhaps the monkeys were a better idea after all! Literally the only place to get such a device is from a slightly suspect "Mikeguyver" in the States (of course).

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The satellite phone (Iridium 9555) has an unbearably expensive car charger, the GME VHF radio comes with one and I tracked down a 12V charger for my sparkly new camera (Olympus PEN PL1). The Garmin GPSs (78S & 78SC) run on AA batteries, as do the Black Diamond Icon headlamps and Apollo lantern for which I have raided Jaycar's shelves for two 12V AA rechargers (one is back-up). The iPhone and our two GoPro cameras are recharged from USB so we have several car chargers with a USB outlet (one to backup the backup one).

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With all of this gear anybody would think we are heading to the moon! We are aiming to travel through some of the most remote areas we could find on Google Earth and I suppose that one challenge for us is to make sure that we are still connected to the world as we go. With all of these devices, chargers, batteries, solar panels and Pelican cases though, I am hoping there is still a little bit of room left for food and water.

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I suppose if we run out of food I'll be able to connect to the internet and just order a pizza online!!

Fast food

Kentucky Dried Dinner

Sounding somewhat like an industrial exhaust fan, our Excalibur 9-tray food dehydrator has been one very busy machine over the last few months and our house now smells like a turkish spice market as the aroma of every new crispy meal seeps into even the tiniest nooks and crannies (I didn't know I had any crannies!).

The power company so generously offer us cheaper power after 8pm, so dehydrating is a nocturnal event in the Keniger house. Lain and I are somewhat independent (really?) and while we have enjoyed many a commercially produced dehydrated meal after a long day in the bush, for this trip we are taking on the food challenge ourselves to make sure we have the right amount of exactly the energy we need.

Tonight's blend is a gargantuan pile of food somewhat resembling chilli con carne - heart-smart beef mince (fat doesn't dehydrate so well), corn, kidney beans, with enough chilli and spice to blow the sombrero off a Mexican. Added to this is a mixture of rice and quinoa, and a generous pile of soya beans that have been soaked, boiled and blended to a grainy mush. When it is dry, probably 12 or 14 hours later, we'll mix in some extra bits - dried onion and garlic and perhaps a few dried peas to give it a little colour. Then the whole lot will get wizzed to smitherines in the food processor, mixed into an aromatic grainy powder and vacuum sealed in healthy meal-sized portions.

We will be dining on spaghetti bolognese, thai chicken curry, several versions of vegetable dhal, even banana bread all reduced to a crumbly mess. Yes, texture is the one ingredient we've removed from all our meals as storage space is extremely limited. The dehydrator removes a fair amount of flavour too (it is seeping into my sofa!) so each recipe has been made with more spice than normal in the hope our sloppy meals will actually keep our taste buds disguised into believing they are sensing something exciting.

We are hoping to avoid food drops up the QLD coast, and to take with us 6 weeks of rations for this section of the trip. Whatever we have left over, we'll send to Thursday Island and collect before heading into PNG although we expect we'll be able to find plenty of food along this more populated coastline.

During Archipaddlo we'll need huge amounts of energy just to keep the blades turning. High energy, easy to eat snacks that don't result in a sugar spike are challenging to make into compact portions, suitable for stuffing in while being blown across a choppy sea at 30 knots. That is where Juzzy's Super Bars come in. Based on fruits like pineapple, banana, raspberry, pears, dates, figs and apples, these densely packed mixtures of grains, nuts and fruit are like super powered muesli bars almost as powerful as Roger Ramjet's mysterious 'proton pills' (one for the Gen-Xers). We're expecting to stuff at least three of these down our gullets every day as part of a healthy, balanced lunch.

There'll be other gastronomic delights including pumpernickel, nuts, alfalfa for sprouts, lollies (sometimes we'll need a sugar spike) and no doubt plenty of coconuts.

Hopefully we catch some fish!