Paddling on Faith
“Okay, Jon. Take a deep breath. You’ve made a miscalculation, or a stupid blunder, and now you’re swimming with a knife in your hands and your PFD floating above your head, off course, surrounded by the vastness of waves and sky.”
Life had felt so jaunty the day before when
I lashed the outrigger to my plastic Ocean Kayak sit-on-top, fashioning a few pieces of wood with a machete and tying them together with some string. Te outrigger was supposed to give me stability so I could sleep, because I had romantically envisioned a placid ocean and a peaceful night alone beneath the South- ern Cross. Now, bobbing on unfettered ocean swells
in the northern Vanuatu chain, I looked be- hind me to see Maewo Island, only eight miles away but unreachable because it was upwind. Ahead of me, Gaua Island lay below the ho- rizon, recognizable only as a waypoint on my GPS. I suddenly realized the utter madness of hodge-podging a new boat design together on a tropical beach and setting out, without sea trials, onto the open ocean. I had to cut the outrigger loose. Without it,
I would have to paddle the next 40 miles in one big push, without rest. But there was no choice, so I grabbed my knife and jumped into the wa- ter. My PFD floated over my head because I had forgotten to zip it shut. I was bobbing in the water, only my chin,
nose and eyes floating, and from this perspec- tive, even my diminutive, vulnerable Ocean Kayak sit-on-top seemed so secure, so substan- tial, like the deck of a grand passenger liner. I was seasick for the first time in thousands of miles of sea kayaking and felt like throwing up. Seasick? Or terrified? “Okay, Jon. Take a deep breath. You’ve made
a miscalculation, or a stupid blunder, and now you’re swimming with a knife in your hands and your PFD floating above your head, off course, surrounded by the vastness of waves and sky. But, you’ve survived so many close calls at sea—in kayaks, yachts and commercial fishing boats. You know what to do. One step at a time. Get the situation under control. Step one: Zip up your PFD, dummy!” A few weeks before, I had set out from the
capital city of Port Vila with Aundrea Tavak- koly, a big wave surfer from Hawaii and Cali- fornia, but she hadn’t bonded to the kayak as she had her surfboard, so she left the expedi- tion and hitched back on a yacht, and I con- tinued on alone. My goal was to paddle to the remote northern islands of Vanuatu, the Banks and Torres groups, and then make passages of
42 ADVENTURE KAYAK | EARLY SUMMER 2010
125 and 200 miles, first to the Santa Cruz Is- lands and then to the Solomon Islands. Te seasickness faded as soon as I pulled my
PFD tight. Te next wave rolled toward me with a tiny fringe of white teeth, grinning, not baring its fangs. I rose gloriously to its crest, and scanned the great expanse of sea, rolling ceaselessly, yet unchanging. I cut the lashings loose and felt a combina-
tion of tangible relief and abject terror as my safety net drifted off into the sea. Ten I hoist- ed myself back into the boat, hefted my paddle and took a few strokes. Te boat jumped, as it was designed to do. I raised my simple square sail and caught the
wind. Te boat skimmed, planed and danced, responding to my tiller. One wave broke over me, knocked me sideways and I stalled out on the next. Ten I lined up perfectly, took a few hard strokes and surfed, hull hissing, sliding obliquely off the face, like a Hawaiian king on a wooden surfboard with feathered headdress dancing in the wind. I turned on my GPS, estimated my drift,
calculated, recalculated and then mentally checked my figures again. I could make land- fall if I paddled as hard as I could—and never stopped to rest. I popped open one precious can of Chinese peanuts and planned to eat a small handful between paddle strokes every time I felt totally out of energy. Te rest of the time I would push my body relentlessly to ex- haustion—and beyond, if needed. Te night before, at the bon voyage party
on Maewo, in the village Nakimal or meeting hall, a young man named Namu asked me, “What is the aim of your voyage?” Night had descended and a few men were playing drums, one made of a hollowed log and the other out of a wooden shipping crate. A smoky kerosene lamp swung from a pole. “I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe I am just
going from island to island, like going from day to day.” I paused, “What is your aim, in life?” Namu didn’t answer and a few other men
picked up guitars and started to sing. An hour later, during a lull in the music,
Namu suddenly addressed me, as if no time had passed. “I still don’t know. I am thinking.” But then we all got stoned on kava and the an- swer never came, which is just as well, because there is no answer.
drifted into afternoon and afternoon waned toward evening, I felt confident that my mus- cles would sustain me. Te total distance, after all, was only 48 miles on a broad reach off the Trade Winds—with the wind as my enemy because it blew me too far westward, but also as my friend because it simultaneously pro- pelled me forward. Te sun softened and reddened, then settled
T
on the horizon and flattened out, as if it had fallen too fast and landed with a splat. I had been in the boat for 15 hours and I was los- ing alertness. I grasped another tiny handful of peanuts and they sloshed around in my empty stomach, tiny and without impact, just as I sloshed around on this sea. Darkness descended quickly and I set my
paddle down for the first time in many hours. Te coolness was welcome, unlike nightfall in higher latitudes. By now, I was about three miles from land and slightly upwind of the island, so I no longer needed to struggle. I switched on my headlamp but the vast night absorbed the feeble electronic glow and made it feel puny in its attempt to civilize what could not be tamed. I turned off the light. I could no longer see waves approaching, and without the visible anticipation, felt uncomfortable carrying sail, so I lowered the halyard and bunched the nylon under my knees. Without the sail, the kayak responded less playfully, but with more stability, and night enveloped me with a warm, embracing hug. If I felt alone in the ocean dur- ing daylight, I felt even more alone as an invis- ible speck in the inky blackness of night. After another hour, I heard the sound of
breakers, and then paddled carefully toward shore until I felt the waves steepen beneath me. For so many hours I had refused to let exhaus- tion overrun the castle of my mind, but now my willpower seemed to collapse catastrophi- cally. In a moment of weakness, I thought that I couldn’t paddle another foot and my only re- course was to soldier straight into the surf, take my hits, and make it to shore, somehow. Immediately, an internal voice cried out,
“Tat’s a really stupid idea!” Many of the islands in the Vanuatu chain are
bordered by shallow fringing reefs extending about a quarter-mile offshore. It was close to low tide, so the surf was breaking against hard coral, submerged beneath only a few feet of wa- ter. I set my paddle down again, reaching into the night with my limited senses. I could see a faint, dark outline of timbered hills that were conspicuous because they were even blacker than the blackness of night. Te surf sounded as if it were hitting something hard, with a thud, a different sound than the gentle whoosh of wave against sand. I thought about the irony of pad- dling 47 and three-quarter miles from Maewo only to be seriously injured so close to land.
here are two kinds of exhaustion: muscle fatigue and loss of alertness. As morning
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