All the Way Round Read Online Free PDF Page A

again
    Eight days after I first set out from Broome, I started my journey again. This time I was a bit wiser. I’d learnt the lesson of how quickly the body could become dehydrated in these conditions, how an easy day’s paddle could soon turn into a battle of survival.
    While I was recuperating in Broome, I went to see a local doctor. She listened with some restraint to my story of how I got to my state of continually having to go to the loo. When I finished she stood up and walked me to the door while telling me to pick up some sports drink from the supermarket which would fix me up. The whole visit took less than five minutes; thankfully, she didn’t charge me or need to put on rubber gloves. I used the sports drink for a couple of days and the doctor was right; it fixed me up. So I decided to carry it in powder form and mix it with my water during the hottest days in the north.
    I left Port Smith on Sunday 18 April at midday at high tide. After about six hours’ paddling and 30 kilometres, I reached Cape Bossut just as dark was falling. At these latitudes twilight is fleeting as the sun dives quickly to the horizon. Soon after the sun hits the sea, the daylight fades fast, and it’s soon as black as it can get.
    As I approached the shore looking for a place to land, I saw the beach, its light sand standing out with the promise of a convenient camp. A dark line fringed the beach, but I just assumed it was mud as it was now close to low tide. As I got nearer I could see the line was in fact a reef—a 500-metre maze of ridges and drowned holes fringed with sharp edges. In the darkness it was impossible to judge depth, making the 500-metre reef hop too dangerous to consider.
    ‘Portage’ means carrying the kayak across ground. Having to portage is a fact of sea kayaking, but something you get credit for if you can avoid. Carrying a 5-metre long, 20-kilogram tube, with no design features to make it easy for one person to handle, is hard. But carrying it across a rough reef in the dark is asking for trouble.
    When you’re dealing with an 8-metre tidal range, getting yourself, your kayak and all your kit to and from the water can be impossible. You can land at high tide, take three steps and set up camp under the shade of a tree. Next day at low tide the water may have dropped 8 metres, presenting you with nature’s obstacle course of soft sand, mud, reefs and a rock shelf dropping 2 metres to the surf. This challenge would then have to be tackled multiple times as you balanced a kayak on your shoulder or carried bags while working against the clock. Working in these extreme tides was something I would learn a lot about.
    Keen to ensure my first day’s paddling didn’t get any worse than my previous attempt, I made a bumpy landing on the reef and decided to wait. Well, it’s not like I had a hell of a lot of choice. I could have headed off to another beach, but it was well and truly dark by now and I couldn’t be sure I’d find a better place to stop. There was a light on a beach about 4 kilometres away, but the approach could have been just as dangerous. Another reason I decided not to head for the light was a story of a guy who was recently speared in the leg for trespassing on Aboriginal land—the same land I was covering. The matter was currently in the courts, so I decided not to push my so far rather limited luck, and waiting for the sea to wash me off a reef in the dark sounded better than a spear in the leg.
    Making the best of where I was, I cooked my dinner sitting on the kayak and waited a couple of hours for the water to rise so I could drift to the beach in the moonlight. Not quite as romantic as it sounds. As the water rose there was a bit of a flow, catching the kayak and bouncing it with painful screeches from one rock to the next. Unsure if I’d get stung or bitten by something I might put my hand on in the dark, I used the paddle as a pole to propel me towards a soft sandy landing.
    It was a