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!

They took everything they wanted, which is why they left me here.

Roll-top Chihuahua-Tex Dry Bag

As our start date draws closer the pile of 'essential' gear seems to be growing like a mushroom in what used to be our spare bedroom and is now a resembles the warehouse of a small Chinese sweatshop.

PU coated nylon fabric, shiny stainless bits and pieces, rope, anchors, dry bags, solar panels, compasses, maps, first aid kits, mozzie repellent … and a dog.

Our two wildly energetic pups have to put up with a lot of our craziness (oh, how they suffer), so much that we believe that they are an entirely new breed, the Adventurehuahua! They have scrambled up all manner of hills, run for miles through the bush and up and down countless sand dunes, they regularly climb cliffs that most agile people dare not attempt, they have swum hundreds of meters of open ocean to save walking around to the next headland, and despite their silent protests, they occasionally don their doggy PFDs to join us for a paddle - sometimes kilometres offshore.

Although they are probably superbly qualified to join us on the Archipallo expedition, we simply cannot find the space in our kayaks for two pint-sized stowaways. I am not certain they would quite understand the risks of swimming in crocodile infested estuaries either.

Despite their undoubtedly tiny brains, these puppies seem to fully comprehend our intentions to lump them on our accommodating family (thank you!!!) for months on end while we flit off around the world. Despite being offered more comfortable bedding than an Arabian prince, Pippy has taken to sleeping in a box of dry bags in the spare room / gear pile, and I am sure she is signalling her desire to find one that fits.

I half expect to be sitting on a sandy cay somewhere up in north QLD, rummaging through my boat only to discover that the dry bag containing the last of our emergency rations has two hungry puppies wriggling about inside it!

I promise, Winnie and Pip, if we could fit you in the boats, we would.

Are we human, or are we camera?

Watching the little screen.

Every now and then the stars align and you find yourself in an incredible situation, like dancing in the pit surrounded by the massive stage at the U2 concert in Sydney this week (oh yeah, I am bragging!).

As amazing as U2’s performance was, the vibe of being surrounded by a full stadium of roaring fans, and the sheer spectacle of the show, what really caught my eye was the number of people living the show through their camera/phone/video/other small recording device.

It seems that for many people the only way to fully appreciate a spectacular moment is to have a record of it in high definition digital. Now, I am as guilty as any of enjoying the freedom of digital photography (I did take this piccie of Bono) but perhaps there is a line between just experiencing and appreciating the moment, or purely recording it.

I don’t suspect I’ll bump into Bono or The Edge in a kayak next year, however I do anticipate experiencing many incredible moments. I’m sure I’ll return with bulging SD cards and hard drives but after seeing the pulsing sea of small digital screens at U2, I think I’ll make sure to balance my camera snapping with just pure memories.

I know photos are important – many of my early childhood memories are thin threads connecting the photos in dusty old family albums. However, to just enjoy and appreciate a precious moment (or a concert) without the need to re-set the shutter speed surely has even more value for the soul.

Going a bit potty!

A kayak is not a camel. It's not a backpack, a MTB, 4WD or shopping trolley. It is a kayak.

In some ways Lain and I would have loved to just decide on this adventure and impulsively begin the journey the very next day - having too much time to think and plan is not always a good thing for us. It is like when you quit a job - you want to hand in your resignation and just walk out the door, not hang around for another two or four weeks pretending to be interested. Let alone waiting for months on end just to get to the start line.

I'll restlessly lie awake till all hours, my mind on auto-pilot, refusing to sleep until the tiniest details of the smallest problems have been examined from every angle. What if this happens? What else could that be used for? How would this work? Is this going to be better than that? With every solution there's a mad scramble to punch a quick note into the phone so my mind can release its grip on it's prize and finally let me rest. Unfortunately my insomnia-driven solutions don't always work.

Our kayaks are actually pretty similar to a camel.  These boats are renowned for having a large volume (or storage space) which means we can pack some luxuries that we wouldn't normally take on a hiking trip. The somewhat weightless nature of our load (I'll eat these words on a mudflat somewhere) mean we'll be able to take much more than a backpack - over 100kg each during some stages. I've seen Nepali sherpas being undoubtedly squashed hauling loads well over 100kg but fortunately there's no need for a fully laden sea kayak at Namche Bazaar.

We are limited though, and your average car camper would gasp in shock and awe at the tiny spaces into which we must jam a year's worth of possessions, food, water, emergency gear, and the huge pile of solutions to midnight problems. "But where do you put the fridge?" Hmmmmmm…… So all of our gear has to meet the criteria - it has to fit, it needs to be functional and not too bulky or heavy.

And it is on this delicate balance that I am stuck. If only I'd spent more time with camels. My conundrum (or is this now just an expensive obsession) is to work out exactly what cookware to take. Yeah, that sounds like it is worth losing sleep over! Well it isn't as easy as it sounds.

While we'll have a multi-fuel stove with us we hope to cook on campfires as often as possible. Most of our meals for the first few months will be dehydrated. We hope to catch fish (BIG fish), regularly bake bread, drink plenty of tea, we are big fans of one-pot meals, but not all the time, and we can't keep leftovers. So multiple pots is good, a big frying pan is good and something capable of baking a steamy fresh loaf is good - all at the same time. We can't simply fill our kayaks with a year's worth of aluminium foil.

I've tried quite a few solutions to this problem and am still no closer to an answer. I really like the spun steel Aussie Camp Oven - it ticks most of the boxes but is just a bit big (it only just fits in the large front hatch). Perhaps combined with a billy we'll have a winner, or perhaps there's still a few sleepless nights for this little black duck.

Anybody have suggestions? Not about insomnia - about cooking pots!

Feeding The Sponge

It was late May, 2010 when I was languishing on the couch resting my badly swollen and sprained ankle. Our dreams of competing in an adventure race in Vanuatu in August sorely rested, soggily wrapped in a tea towel with a bag of frozen peas. What to do now? How to escape the tedium of the daily grind?

The idea had surfaced several years previously. A paddling trip from Cairns to PNG, at least that's how it first bubbled to the surface. Not big enough! Dream bigger! All of a sudden, with a steady flow of freshly brewed beans, an odyssey emerged from our brightly muralled lounge room.

Pros and cons considered, deliberations mulled, details discussed and commitments made - our journey began, and a thirst for knowledge and inspiration parched my tv-stained grey matter.

I rapidly exhausted any relevant books from the bookshelf, mostly congested with heavily thumbed adventurous tales, and a seemingly endless catalogue of animals, plants, bushwalking routes and travel guides to long-forgotten destinations. Almost every week since then I have excitedly opened a well travelled parcel containing titles to fuel this fire of knowledge.

Books on kayaking techniques, navigation, and adventures like Paul Caffyn's "The Dreamtime Voyage" - a truly inspiring tale. Stories of adventure, travel and discovery, and of people who have made similarly crazy decisions, to take what they could and head off into some far flung corner of the planet. Desperate shipwrecked survivors' detailed descriptions of the body's response to dehydration and starvation are balanced with recipes for dehydrated meals, and desalinator manuals.

I wonder if this thirst for the written word will dissolve into the horizon next year, or whether I'll try to squeeze just one more book into the crammed crevices of my trusty kayak.