by Chris Bray
Published in Australia in 2010 by Pier 9, an imprint of Murdoch Books Pty Limited
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Publisher: Colette Vella
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Project editor: Karen Ward
Map: Ian Faulkner
Text © 2010 Chris Bray
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Cover design © Murdoch Books Pty Limited 2010
Cover photography by Chris Bray
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Bray, Chris.
Title: The 1000 hour day [electronic resource]: two adventurers
tackle the world's harshest island / Chris
Bray.
ISBN: 9781742663067 (eBook)
Subjects: Bray, Chris--Travel.
Carter, Clark--Travel.
Victoria Island (Nunavut and N.W.T.)--Discovery and
exploration.
Arctic regions--Discovery and exploration--Australian.
Dewey Number: 971.955
To my extraordinary dad, Andrew Bray.
Without you, none of this could have happened.
Thank you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE: GENESIS OF ADVENTURE
The proposition
An adventurous upbringing
The grand plan
Tasmanian wilderness expedition
Preparation, PAC building and sponsors
The countdown
To the Arctic!
Cambridge Bay, Victoria Island
Home away from home
Action stations!
PART TWO: VICTORIA ISLAND
PART THREE: CALL OF THE WILD
Back from the Arctic
Let’s finish what we started!
Our home away from home
PART FOUR: BACK TO THE ISLAND
PART FIVE: STEPPING BEYOND
Acknowledgements
THE PROPOSITION
JANUARY 2005
‘Good morning, Air Canada.’
‘Hi, could you put me through to someone in your marketing department?’
‘Hold the line for a moment?’
‘Certainly.’
I gulped some water, which instantly seized in my dry throat. My heart was racing. I must have made a dozen similar calls that day already, but the pressure of only having one chance to convince a company in seconds that they really do want to give you thousands of dollars for no apparent reason, is never easy.
‘Good morning, Marketing. This is Ben.’
‘Hi Ben, my name’s Chris Bray. I was hoping you’d have time to have a quick chat about sponsorship?’
‘Er … okay …’
‘Great. Well, I’m 21, and the Australian Geographic Society’s “Young Adventurer of the Year”. I’m preparing for a two-man, world-first, unsupported, 65-day expedition across the Canadian Arctic. My friend Clark and I are going to be paddling and hauling our home-made wheeled kayaks through parts of the world that have never been explored before—past polar bears, wolves … It’s going to be pretty crazy, and we’re filming a documentary as we go, which could give Air Canada some great exposure … I was wondering if you’d take a look over a sponsorship proposal I’ve written for you?’
‘Wow, 65 days? That sounds like a hell of a trip! Yes, please send it through …’
I jotted down ‘65’ and circled it on my notepad—now a mosaic of stress-induced, subconscious doodles. ‘Thanks very much, I’ll post it right away.’
Well, that was easy. My confidence rising, I traced my shaking finger down our list of potential sponsors, and dialled the next number.
‘Welcome to Sony. How can I help you?’
‘Hi. My name’s Chris Bray, I’m 65, and Austra—’
Beside me, my mate Clark Carter burst out laughing. So did I.
‘Hello … who is this?’
We glanced at each other and shook our heads—nope, this wasn’t salvageable. I quickly hung up, hoping she wouldn’t remember my voice when I summoned the courage to call again. Enough trauma for one day. Eighteen phone calls: five write-offs, messages left with seven, and I had convinced the remaining six to at least read over the proposals that I’d apparently already gone to all the trouble of writing for them. So that was six proposals we now had to write up and post off.
Flipping through our endless To-Do list, I located the next task: ‘Borrow two shotguns from someone in Canada—protection from polar bears’. Like most of the grand, sweeping statements on our list, this was easier said than done. We didn’t even know anyone in Canada.
However, biting off more than is comfortable to chew is a skill—or habit—that Clark and I practise regularly. I had only just met Clark a few months prior, and already we had decided to entrust each other with our very lives, alone in the Arctic. To be honest, it was worse than that—somewhat amusingly, ‘Meet Clark’ was actually on my To-Do list for this expedition. In my defence, I will point out that it was right up there at the top of the list, along with other essentials like ‘Tell parents’.
A few months earlier, on 18 June 2004, the usual flood of spam email had found its way into my inbox. There were emails trying to convince me to buy Rolex replicas, money scams, and one entitled ‘Proposition’. Assuming this ‘proposition’ to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy two Viagra tablets for the price of one, I almost deleted it, but curiosity got the better of me, and I opened it up:
Hey Chris,
My name is Clark Carter, and I’m a 19-year-old guy from Terrigal, NSW.
Congratulations on winning the Young Adventurer of the Year. Your expedition sounded awesome!!!
At the moment I’m trying to plan a trip to Greenland to traverse its giant icecap along the Arctic Circle using skis and man-hauling sleds … I have been looking around for someone to partner up with on this ‘mission’ and to help plan out every detail with me. If this isn’t your sort of thing, do you have any advice you can give me on getting a sponsor’s attention or know of any other would-be adventurers that would take up this opportunity?
Thanks for your time, and hopefully in a year or so we’ll be trekking across Greenland.
Cheers,
Clark
I read the email again. If this was indeed spam mail, it was certainly very cunningly targeted, using an irresistible combination of keywords, specifically ‘adventurer’, ‘icecap’, ‘Arctic’ and ‘hauling sleds’. I fell for it, and replied at once.
I needed no encouragement to chase this proposition—I was in the middle of university exams, halfway through my third year studying Electrical Engineering at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. I longed to be somewhere else, far, far away from ‘Kirchoff’s voltage laws’ and ‘complex impedances of tuneable antenna stubs’. Greenland, being over 15,000 kilometres away, sounded ideal.
Of course there was more to
my decision than simply wanting light at the end of my study tunnel. Most boys, at some point or other, dream of setting off on wild journeys to unexplored lands. Boldly venturing where no man has been before, enduring unimaginable hardships and preferably braving wild animals—these are, after all, the key ingredients for any good adventure. If you subscribe to the Hollywood film definition, then there should also be at least one damsel in distress, to drive the hero onwards—I mean, why else would anyone risk their life in such a way? Unfortunately, historically, these damsel-in-distress cases are few and far between. There was no fair maiden waiting for Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay atop Everest, and although there were several bizarre theories about what early explorers might find at the North Pole—including a giant hole leading to the centre of the earth—finding a princess in need of rescue wasn’t one of them. There must then be other factors that motivate humans to embark on such seemingly pointless journeys.
Scientific research? Not as often as you might think. Sir Edmund is famously quoted as saying, ‘Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.’
Frostbite, altitude sickness, hypothermia—why on earth would anyone in their right mind want to willingly inflict such things upon themselves? This is the first question on people’s lips, and one that I, like many others, sometimes struggle to answer succinctly. I think this is partly because the desire stems from so many different reasons, but also partly because, quite frankly, words fail to convey what it is actually like to be out there. As Sir Douglas Mawson once said, ‘If you have to ask the question, you will never understand the answer.’
On a very elementary level, heading off into the ‘unknown’—be it ‘unknown’ to humankind as a whole, or simply ‘unknown’ to the individual who seeks to push back the limits to his or her own experiences—is what leading a fulfilling life is all about. As the old adage goes, ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ The way I see it, you can either spend your life in front of the TV pretending life goes on forever, or you can realise it is in fact finite, and that you’d better get up and make the most of it. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. I really believe in that—with a few exceptions. For example, why tell your parents today that you’re going to walk across an island inhabited by polar bears when you could tell them tomorrow?
AN ADVENTUROUS UPBRINGING
Most boys dream of wild adventures, but these dreams are put on the backburner—if not completely extinguished—to accommodate other more immediate, perhaps more ‘normal’ desires as they grow up. I count myself incredibly fortunate in having been somewhat freed from ‘normality’ by a fairly unique upbringing.
Most of my primary school years were spent sailing around the world with my family on our home-made yacht. My father, Andrew Bray—a mechanical engineer turned yachting-magazine writer—and my mother, Victoria, built a total of four yachts together. Some of my earliest memories are of them building Starship—a 44-foot (13.5 metre) aluminium cutter with a lift-keel—in our front yard.
We moved on board in 1988, when I was just five years old and my sister Sarah was seven. Early the following year all four of us, together with five years of correspondence schooling paperwork, cast off on the adventure of a lifetime for my parents, and a marvellous upbringing for Sarah and me.
We sailed up the east coast of Australia, then west across the top to Darwin and its crocodiles, and out across the Indian Ocean to Mozambique, via the islands of Chagos and Mayotte. In early 1991 we left South Africa and headed to Ireland via St Helena (one of the most isolated islands on earth), Ascension, the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores. Passing through Scotland’s Caledonian Canal, we then sailed across the North Sea to Norway and Sweden, ducking through the top of Germany to spend the winter frozen-in, making snowmen in Holland. Early in 1992 we crossed back to the UK, and by summer we reached the Mediterranean via the beautiful French canals—sailing right through Paris within sight of the Eiffel Tower. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, we were snorkelling in the Caribbean by Christmas, and after slipping through the Panama Canal, sailed out into the Pacific Ocean. A myriad of other exotic locations followed, including the Galapagos Islands, where we snorkelled with seals, and Suvarov Atoll, where we swam with sharks and gathered enormous coconut crabs with the islanders. All in all, by the time we returned to Sydney for Sarah to start high school, we’d visited 32 different countries and lived on board Starship for over five years.
There is nothing quite like ocean sailing. It has to be said, though, that Sarah and I got the better end of the deal. We didn’t have to keep constant watch for ships day and night like our parents did, nor worry about the weather. For us, life consisted of reading, playing Lego and other games, while waiting for the peg clipped over the fishing line trailing astern to go click, signalling it was time to haul in another dinner. The excitement of peering down into the sapphire-blue depths trying to catch the first glimpse of the huge fish—as the line audibly ‘zinged’, knifing back and forth—was just incredible. One gloved handful at a time Dad would pull in the last few metres of piano-wire trace and bring the now exhausted fish alongside. Perhaps a yellowfin tuna (one lasted the four of us a record 24 meals), or maybe a beautifully painted dorado or ‘dolphin fish’—or, on a few occasions, perhaps a not-so-exhausted marlin which would then rise to its full 3-metre length above the water and ‘tail-walk’ defiantly before flinging the hook from its mouth.
On top of fishing there were countless other things to keep us entertained. Tired seabirds would sometimes come on board for a break, and I’d instantly try to adopt them as pets. Dolphins would play beneath our bow, whales followed us, flying fish would litter the deck in the mornings, and on particularly dark nights, the yacht’s wake would often burn like blue fire from phosphorescence. To top the whole experience off, we usually only did our correspondence schooling when in port, and even then it took just two hours a day! As it was impractical to ‘correspond’ our correspondence schooling, we simply worked through the pages at our own pace under Mum’s guidance, and when we’d done that day’s scheduled work, we were free.
Life was one extended holiday, financially sustained by the rent from our home back in Avalon on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and Dad’s ongoing freelance magazine writings. We certainly didn’t have money to fling around—we couldn’t afford the usual tourist attractions, nor to eat out or hire cars to explore inland (the game parks in South Africa were an unforgettable exception)—but living on a tight budget made it financially just possible to continue this dream potentially indefinitely. Without much money to spend, nor shops to spend it in, and no TV to watch, Sarah and I learned to be resourceful and practical too, building the toys and other things we didn’t have, and repairing them when they broke—a skill I later relied on in the Arctic.
I was ten when we returned to Sydney, and after five years of sailing, I now had a problem. This adventurous upbringing had led me to believe that constantly travelling—always experiencing new cultures and places—was normal. As you can imagine, it didn’t take long before the novelty of remaining in the same place wore off, to be replaced by a burning desire to resume my ‘normal’ lifestyle of daily adventures.
School back in the real world didn’t seem very normal either—for a start it took a whopping six hours each day instead of the usual two. Inadvertently now applying my work ethic of ‘if I just plough through it I’ll be able to get back out and play’ to a full six hours of schoolwork a day, I excelled in my studies, and was awarded dux of both primary and high school. Unfortunately, this achievement combined with my ever-growing interest in everything from technology to entomology, the fact that I wasn’t the tallest or sportiest of boys, and my rather pale complexion topped off with an interesting haircut (my mum continued to cut it for me after we returned from sailing), led to me being branded a basket-case nerd. Admittedly, in addition to the usual boyish joys of blowing things up a
nd training my wondrous German Shepherd dog, Gypsie, to ‘cut’ and other Swiss-army-style functions on command, I did actually start an online business, BlackJackal.com, through which I sold electronics and home-made computer programs—so, yeah, looking back on it, maybe I really was a nerd after all. By the end of high school, an overall leaving mark of 99.2 per cent granted me access to any university course I wanted, and so I was faced with a choice: what did I actually want to do with my life?
I applied for Electrical Engineering at university, not out of a desire to learn the intricacies of circuit theory but because I have always enjoyed doing practical things, and solving technical problems. I saw—and still see—engineering as the degree that would teach me the most about how the world works, while also building problem-solving skills and design techniques which can be applied not only to electronics, but also to everyday problems such as how best to manage time or money, or—although I didn’t know it at the time—how to orchestrate a world-first expedition to an unexplored region of the Arctic.
It was in the summer of 2001–2, just before I started university, that I decided to convince my good friend Jasper Timm to come to Tasmania with me for a spot of hiking for two weeks. I was eighteen at the time, and had done a bit of bushwalking, camping and trout fishing with my dad over the years, and occasionally during holidays Jasper and I’d catch the ferry over to The Basin—a popular yet secluded waterfront camping ground in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Once off the ferry we’d then ‘accidentally’ slip outside the designated camping zones and hide out in the surrounding hills for up to five days at a time, living off hard-core camping foods such as chocolate biscuits and tins of creamed rice. To keep us entertained as we counted off the days, we’d flip through my SAS Survival Guide for ideas. For example, did you know that all animal snares fall into one of four categories—‘Strangle’, ‘Mangle’, ‘Dangle’ or ‘Tangle’? We failed to catch anything except occasionally ourselves, but succeeded brilliantly in the larger goal which was, of course, to have fun.
