by Chris Bray
I very nearly caved in, but my mum always quietly stuck up for me. ‘I understand what you’re doing,’ she’d say, sneaking up to my room after I’d stormed off following yet another row with my dad over my apparent short-sightedness. ‘I believe you can make adventuring work, somehow.’
Having made my decision to firmly follow my passion, to my overwhelming and eternal relief and gratitude Dad eventually changed his tune. ‘Well, if that’s what you’ve decided, Christopher, then I’ll support your decision, of course. I think you’ll make it work too.’ He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Just realise that you can’t keep doing this forever.’
Driving into the Blue Mountains to speak at a climbing festival in mid April 2007, something was clearly weighing heavily on Clark’s mind. ‘What’s up?’ I probed.
He didn’t reply for a moment, evidently picking his words. ‘Now, this is just an idea,’ he soothed pre-emptively, ‘but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.’ He flicked me a hesitant glance, checking to see if he should proceed. Horrified he was about to suggest that we delay—or worse, cancel—Victoria Island #2, I stared blankly back at him.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, you know how I’m interested in ocean rowing?’
‘Yes,’ I repeated, still not liking where this was going.
‘Well … I want to enter the Woodvale Challenge, to row across the Indian Ocean, in 2009.’ He jumbled the words out and focused on the road ahead, waiting.
‘Cool,’ I said innocently. ‘When in 2009?’ Victoria Island was planned for the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2008, that is, May until October, if it took that long.
‘Well, you see, that’s the catch,’ Clark winced as he spoke. ‘It starts in April 2009, so I’d have to leave within a few months of returning from Vic Island.’
There was an awkward silence. We both knew a rowing trip like that would take well over a year to plan, train, raise sponsorship, build and kit out the boat, etc. ‘You’d basically have to start preparing now,’ I mumbled. The fact that I knew he knew this made me angry inside—was he committed to Vic Island or not? How convenient that he was driving, I thought—he had an excuse not to even look at me while breaking news of his expedition infidelity.
‘Yes, I know,’ Clark said heavily. ‘That’s why I needed to ask you now if it was okay or not.’ He paused, and then reading my silence correctly, hastily cleared things up. ‘I’m still 100 per cent behind Vic Island, don’t worry about that—this would just be … on the side. I’ll delegate most of the prep to my housemate Ryan, who wants to go with me.’
I shrugged grumpily. ‘Well, okay. I can’t tell you what to do. I personally think two expeditions might be biting off a little more than can be chewed, but I guess we’re used to that. Sleep’s overrated anyway, right?’
By now Clark, too, had scored himself an amazing girlfriend, Bea, who was studying the same degree as he was, and he’d also become a member of the Explorers Club. I had started my second business, Expedition Facilities at
Finding large, lightweight wheels proved to be the sticking point. I spent weeks researching every possible tyre from ATV (all-terrain vehicle) wheels and low PSI (pounds per square inch, i.e. low pressure) golf cart wheels, through to the elusive ‘tundra tyres’ designed for light aircraft. None of them fitted the bill; they were all just too heavy.
‘What about tractor inner tubes?’ Max Riseley, a family friend and inspirational engineer, suggested. ‘You’ll have to build your own rims,’ he said, ‘and make them from something light, like fibreglass composite. I’ll fax you a sketch of what I have in mind.’
It was a great idea, and after downloading the complete range of tractor inner tube specifications online and running size, weight and buoyancy calculations on them all, I found one that would be ideal. My local tyre centre ordered it in, and within a week, Clark and I hurried inside the garage, turned on the compressor and watched our PAC-2 wheel inflate. Standing almost 1.5 metres high, and with about 37 centimetres tube diameter, it only weighed 6.5 kilograms and could provide almost 500 kilograms of buoyancy per tube (before it would sink entirely)! ‘This is great!’ I laughed, overjoyed to have finally found such a perfect solution. ‘And if we bring a spare,’ I grinned sillily, ‘we could blow it up in the afternoons and play in the lakes!’
Armed with sizes and dimensions to work with, we wasted no time in finalising the cart design. Having decided to do all the engineering myself this time rather than drag my dad into it, I set to work reading entry-level mechanical engineering textbooks, learning all about the ‘yield strength’ of different metals and the ‘section modulus’ of different cross-sectional shapes of extruded tubing, and how they’d all cope when loaded up, supported in the middle on an axle, and bounced across the tundra.
It became surprisingly complicated. It’s easy enough to design it just strongly enough (and therefore as light as possible) such that it wouldn’t quite buckle and break rolling across smooth ground, but as soon as you start factoring in bumps and wheeling it off little ledges and so on, the dynamic forces skyrocket. What ‘factor of safety’ should I build in? It was a constant balance between being too heavy, or dangerously weak. My dad was always for making it heavier and stronger, but with the immovable weight of PAC-1 still crushingly fresh in my mind, I was adamant about shaving off every gram I thought we could get away with. In short, it was a gamble.
Things got even more involved when I turned my focus to designing the ball-bearing wheel hubs that had to slide into the axles. I discovered that the grease inside ball bearings alone—the highest quality ones around, specially imported from Germany—would have frozen virtually solid in the Arctic! I had to have the bearings carefully opened and re-packed with lower operating temperature oil. The axles themselves I designed from extra high strength aluminium 6063-T6, which had to be specially ordered.
Meanwhile, Clark’s rowing preparations were gaining pace. As neither he nor his rowing buddy, Ryan Storey, had ever been at sea before, they both enrolled in full-on Yachtmaster sailing qualification courses run by a friend of ours. Learning celestial navigation and meteorology sounded like far too much fun to miss out on, and I also attended the classes. Having gained our Yachtmaster shore-based tickets, we all then progressed to Coastal Skipper level. Down in Tassie a few weeks later, a friend, David Pryce, upon hearing that Clark and Ryan had never been to sea before and were about to try to row across an ocean, laughed heartily and said, ‘Well, we’d better get you both some ocean experience then! Do you want to help us sail Blizzard over to Chile?’
It’s not every day that you get asked if you’d like to sail a 66-foot (20-metre) aluminium expedition schooner from Tasmania almost halfway around the world, across the infamous Southern Ocean—via several sub-Antarctic islands—all the way to Patagonia. ‘It should take about a month and a half—we leave in October.’ Dave looked at me. ‘You can come too if you want, Chris.’ Despite mounting Victoria Island pressures, this wasn’t something I was about to pass up.
In the months before our sailing voyage, we fixed our attention on another major unknown—what rims would we use for our tractor inner tube wheels? Clearly we couldn’t use a standard tractor rim, and following Max’s idea, we met up with a local successful engineering firm, EMP Composites, for some advice.
The owner, David Lyons, took a keen interest in the project, and agreed that, yes, a composite rim would be the best solution. To allay my fears that essentially a sandwich of foam between two layers of fancy fibreglass could be anything like strong enough, he passed me a sample, and a hammer, and asked me to give it my best shot. I couldn’t even dent it. Amused at our amazement, he flung around some more expensive-sounding terms like ‘carbon fibre Kevlar composite laminates’ and wrapped up the meeting with the words, ‘I’d actually like to take this on as a little EMP-sponsored project, if you’re willing?’ We left him in no doubt that we were, indeed, very willing.
Having planned our new route, calculated a better meal system (eliminating the dreaded ‘rice-only dinner’), and added all this and more into our epic sponsorship proposal document, we hurriedly despatched it firstly to all our previous sponsors, almost all of whom replied with a resounding ‘Yes!’ On a massive mental high, we packed our bags, flew to Hobart, helped provision the yacht, and set sail for the other side of the world.
There’s something quite unforgettable about standing precariously on the stern of a yacht, at night, in howling winds laced with snow, shackled on and gripping the steering wheel in front of you with sopping, freezing gloves, and suddenly feeling the whole stern of the yacht rise up into the air. Bracing but unable to look back, you can hear the huge wave rolling in from behind as the yacht surges forward, accelerating, and then, amid a deafening roar of crumbling white water, you can feel the yacht begin to surf. Now perched at the helm of a 66-foot rocket ship, hurtling into the darkness at 22 knots (41 kilometres per hour), every inch of your body is straining to sense and pre-emptively correct the slightest wobble in this unbalanced missile’s track, knowing full well that if you allow her to turn even the slightest amount the bow will dig in, and the almighty power of the wave pushing from astern will spin the yacht side-on, and then roll her—possibly right over—with potentially fatal consequences.
Sailing the Southern Ocean was a steep learning curve for me, and I can only imagine even more so for Clark and Ryan. Hand-steering all 6000-plus miles (10,000-plus kilometres), we blearily staggered our way through a rotational watch system, and even managed to navigate the last 1600-odd kilometres using celestial navigation. It was an exhausting eye-opener, but a wonderful experience. We were pretty lucky with the weather, only getting caught in a few 50–55 knot (100 kilometres per hour) pockets of wind, and there were even periods of surreal calm, where we watched snowflakes falling silently into the ocean around us. Wandering albatrosses circled us in memorisingly graceful arcs, the tips of their 3-metre wingspans seeming to all but touch the water as they rode the unseen pressure waves. The sub-Antarctic islands teemed with wildlife like I’ve never seen—we pretty much had to ward off sea lions as we stepped ashore, and huge Southern Right whales rubbed themselves against our inflatable dingy.
By the time we sailed into mobile phone reception at the quaint Chilean fishing village of Puerto Montt 39 days later, my wonderful Russian girlfriend, with whom I’d shared a blissful relationship for over a year, had left me. The parting gift was my $1600 mobile phone bill as I repeatedly called her via global roaming, begging some form of explanation, which she would not give. It was a painful blow at the time, and a poignant reminder that, as my dad had said, ‘You can’t keep doing this forever, Christopher.’ I feared perhaps she’d glimpsed a future in which she was repeatedly left at home or work while I went off travelling. My adventurous lifestyle was what had helped lure her in the first place, I am sure, but it was truly a double-edged sword. Either I needed to find a girl who was not in the least bit outdoorsy and thus content to stay behind, or one who could come with me and share my crazy adventures—if such a girl existed. Right now, though, I sadly had no time for such things, and after a few short days in Chile we flew safely back to Sydney.
Back at home, an enormous pile of letters and my overflowing email inbox took me the best part of three days to sift through. There was a lot to digest, including the devastating news that my Arctic hero—our legendary bush pilot, Willie Laserich—had sadly passed away in hospital following heart surgery. Not only had the world lost a truly great man and we a true friend, we’d also lost our way of getting back out to our start point.
EMP had finished the mould for our wheel rims, and we hurried over to watch the first rim being made. Layer upon layer of Kevlar and carbon fibre was painstakingly laid across the mould, sealed under a sheet of plastic with a vacuum pipe sticking out of it, which then sucked out all the air and drew in the epoxy resin. Once it cured overnight, we just popped it off the mould, trimmed and sanded the edges (desperately trying not to let the prickly fibreglass dust settle on us) and then fitted the wonderfully light and strong rims onto our axle hub ready for testing. ‘Well, that’s how it’s done, boys!’ EMP owner David said proudly. ‘Now you can make the rest yourselves, if you like.’ We needed to construct a total of eight half-rims for the trip, plus some extra ones for testing. It was going to be a long, itchy process.
Over the next month, we divided the daylight hours between PAC-2 frame building in the garage at home, and rim construction at EMP. Hacksawing, grinding, welding, bleeding, filing, circular-sawing, sanding, bending, cutting and pop-riveting … by 5 pm each day, when we’d call it quits to give our neighbours some peace, we both looked like dirty (but happy) little chimney sweeps. Progress was good, and we were feeling increasingly confident in our PAC-2s. We were going to great lengths to lighten everything, including shortening all the bolts, and even drilling big holes out of whatever we could—Swiss cheese style.
Late one December night—with about six months to go—we finally decided to start training. Heaving the old truck tyre into the back of Clark’s car, we drove down to a deserted Palm Beach, shackled up and took turns hauling. It was hard, but not as hard as we’d remembered when we trained in 2005. Determined to be in top physical form, we tyre-dragged most evenings around midnight for an hour or more, and we could really feel our strength build. What started out as swapping every hundred metres with the other person walking beside offering encouragement, soon grew into one of us hauling the entire length of the beach (2.3 kilometres) while the other ran three lengths. Conveniently, both tortures took almost exactly the same time, thus spurring each of us on into a continual race. One hauling, one sprinting to the finish line, we’d then swap again, and again, until we were so exhausted we struggled to get the tyre back to the car. Pretty soon, however, we’d even done away with the car, and dragged it all the way from home to the beach and back again afterwards, training for as much as three hours a night.
With four half-rims finally built, we assembled our first complete PAC-2 in early January 2008 and stood back to admire our handiwork. ‘It’s bigger than I thought,’ Clark mumbled.
Wider than our driveway and longer than a car, it was certainly a sight to behold. Eager to test it out, we loaded it up with 100 kilograms of water containers and I shackled up and took the first few hesitant steps. Disappointingly, it was actually rather hard to pull. Although the enormous tractor inner tube wheels gave a soft, spongy kind of suspension which let it roll up and over obstacles that would’ve stopped our first PACs in their tracks, the hysteresis losses—that is, the energy lost through flexing and distorting the rubber—as we wheeled these squashy, essentially ‘flat’ tyres, was a little daunting. Trying to pump them up any further was useless, as they simply expanded instead of gaining pressure.
To firm up the tyres a little and to add some extra protection for PAC-2’s thin balloon-like wheels, we proposed a fabric tyre cover and set to work acquiring samples of every kind of fabric we could get our hands on, testing how hard-wearing and durable each was. Various patches of sailcloth and other materials quickly became frayed and worn when subjected to vigorous scrubbing. Then I tested some 100 per cent pure Kevlar—the stuff they use in bulletproof vests—and let me tell you, it lived up to its reputation. Ordering 18 metres of ballistic-grade Kevlar fabr
ic and a 3-kilometre spool of Kevlar thread to sew it with, we dug out my parents’ old Singer sewing machine and learned how to sew in the spare room. Once completed, our first set of silky, golden wheel covers looked spectacular. Slipping them over the tyres and pulling the spectra drawstrings firmly on each side tightened them against the tube, enabling us to pump the wheels up to much higher pressures, avoiding that sluggish ‘flat-tyre’ feeling when hauling.
The sharpest, nastiest rocky area we could think of for testing was the Avalon Beach rock platform, exposed at low tide. Every head turned as we wheeled our contraption past the public pool, and I saw one little kid tug her grandfather’s arm and whisper, ‘What’s that, Pa?’ to which he hesitantly replied ‘I have absolutely no idea … ’ This time we loaded it with 150 kilograms and again I leant forwards into the harness. Obediently, the PAC-2 rolled forwards, with amazingly little effort! We ground it past, into and over as many savage boulders, rock edges and spiky-shell-covered ditches as we could find, and then stopped to assess the damage … and to our genuine amazement, it hardly had a scratch on it! With a bit of momentum, the PAC-2 seemed to just roll effortlessly along behind us, irrespective of sizeable boulders in its path.
‘Bring it on, Victoria Island!’ Clark shouted in euphoria. ‘We’re ready for you, Death Terrain!’
‘Shall we see if it floats, guv?’ he grinned. For our final check we ceremoniously rolled it into the local ocean pool while onlookers crowded around, perplexed. Someone eventually summoned the courage to ask what it was all about, and an elderly man shuffled up to Clark, and asked, ‘How long will it take?’
‘Oh, about three to four months …’ Clark began, but seeing the look of horror in his face added, ‘Well, we’re hoping less than 100 days.’
