by Chris Bray
We only just made it across in time, digging hard back strokes at the last moment to spin our houseboat lethargically around to face the flow (so that if we did strike a rock with our wheels, the tyre would absorb some of the impact, and then the PAC should roll up and over it, compared to striking anything side-on at speed, which would pull the tyre off the rim, smash the rim, and then probably break the whole wheel off the axle). Breaking up in the middle of a rapid doesn’t even bear thinking about—some of our gear bags would sink out of reach, and the others would be washed away. Either way, we’d have nothing.
As the mouth of the chute started to suck us inward, HMAS Nugget still hadn’t spun far enough around, and fear started to spike through our excitement. Glancing quickly from side to side with widening eyes, we tried desperately to see what was coming, all the while barking warnings and instructions at each other through teeth gritted hard by the exertion of paddling. ‘Keep turning!’ We managed to get ourselves aligned just before the chute really took off, and for a brief moment, it all looked like it was going to go smoothly.
We bucked over the first few standing waves without too much drama, our speed rising above 10 kilometres per hour, and then, part of our houseboat must have slipped out of the main flow of water, causing that corner to be pulled around by the slower water. To our absolute horror, we started to turn broadside in the middle of the rapid.
Adrenalin surging through our veins, we did all we could to counteract the spinning, but it was no use. We were travelling down the rapid, completely side-on, at about 11 kilometres per hour, when something hit one of the wheels. Crunch! Expletive! Terror.
A quick glance showed the wheel itself was still there, and as we were still being swept onwards we needed to remain focused. HMAS Nugget had been jolted around still further by the impact, and now our stern was facing more forward than the bow, so we switched directions of our frantic paddling and had almost aligned ourselves stern-first instead, when *CRUNCH!* Scraaaaape … *CRUNCH!* This impact was even harder than the first and almost jolted us overboard. Clark—pale and very wide-eyed—shouted ‘Puncture?!’ to which I helpfully replied, ‘Keep paddling!’
Hardly daring to prise my eyes off the situation still unfolding, I spared the wheel a quick glance—it didn’t seem to be punctured, but there was certainly something odd about the way we were floating. But we were still floating, which meant things could yet get worse if we didn’t pay attention, so I whipped my head forwards again, and helped to paddle, push off, swear and splash our way along, bouncing over more rearing stationary waves and sucking troughs, and ultimately … we were spat out on the far side. While the rest of the flow charged onwards downstream, we were left spinning slowly in a side eddy. We scooped ourselves toward the bank until we were vaguely within standing depth and then leapt out in our drysuits, pulling the wounded HMAS Nugget to shore. Once alongside, we just stood there for a few silent moments, shaking.
A careful inspection of all four tyres revealed that somehow—unbelievably—there were no punctures. Next, I looked at all eight carbon-fibre/Kevlar half-rims, and the situation there was not as pretty—the edges of four of them had obviously been introduced to different rocks at some speed. The huge strength of the Kevlar strip reinforcing the rim’s edge prevented the whole impact regions from actually crumbling away, but the damaged parts are now flexible as the epoxy resin bonding all the various carbon-fibre sheets has been pulverised. All in all, though, the strangling feeling around my chest relaxed a little; it was not as bad as I had feared. The rims themselves were vaguely okay, and would probably still perform their function quite well, especially if I mixed up some fresh epoxy glue to smear into the wounds and strapped it all with some spare carbon-fibre cloth that we brought along in the hope that ‘what you prepare for never happens’—except on Victoria Island, clearly.
As after our billycart crash, our first action after this quick damage assessment was to walk away. Strangely, it just seems to be our subconscious way of dealing it. We both found ourselves with cameras in hand, walking towards the towering cliffs overhead, with a nut-break ration and thermos, as if we were merely on some photographic safari. After all, being about 1 am, the lighting was perfect—low and golden. A pair of rough-legged hawks repeatedly launched themselves from the top of the cliff and wheeled above us, screeching mournfully before alighting back on the crumbling skyline.
In the end, we both climbed back aboard HMAS Nugget and pushed off back into the river. It seemed the reason we’d been floating lopsidedly was just that the impact had pinched the air out of the submerged part of one tube, making it less buoyant. We soon fixed this, and continued on our merry way, around the next corner, to see another rapid.
And another. And another. The last 35 kilometres of the river was one rock garden after the next. These bank-to-bank sections of angrier, darker water—pock-marked with splashes of leaping white water—seemed to occur around every corner, and neither of us got a wink of sleep all day. Considering we’d only managed about two hours of sleep in the 24 hours prior, we were starting to feel spaced-out, big time. We were desperate for a section of calm water long enough for one of us to get some shut-eye, but it just wasn’t to be.
The wind picked up, making even the sections in-between rapids an exhausting trial. At last we could cope no more, and after a few near misses and a few more minor rim-crunches that should have been avoidable, we dazedly pulled to the bank, tied off on a boulder, and—taking our Thermarests with us—staggered ashore and fell asleep on the ground. The novelty of 24-hour travel is wearing pretty thin. We awoke about an hour later—not feeling very revived, but at least conscious enough to realise that both kipping on the open ground in a place where we knew there were wolves and bears around was not the smartest idea. So, keen to get to the end of this nightmare where we could set up the tent and tripwire and climb into our sleeping bags for the first time in five days, we agreed to push on.
The ‘end lake’ where we’ll exit the river—just before it swings south and turns into angry Class III white water with waterfalls—was only about 9 kilometres away by this stage, and with the river pulling along at about 5 kilometres per hour it could only be two hours away at most. We wearily walked HMAS Nugget out into the flow, Clark hopped on and I walked a few extra paces deeper, to ensure we were well clear of the rocks.
Just as I was about to heave myself up onto the deck, I felt the gushing rush of water pouring down into my pants. Either I’d just pissed my pants, or I’d forgotten for the first time in my life to pull closed the wee-zip in the front of my drysuit. Lamenting the fact that the water gushing in was by no means warm, I had to accept it was the latter scenario. Idiot! I had both my pairs of Icebreaker leggings on, and both were now drenched. I sat on the deck, seething with anger at my own carelessness. Clearly we did need more sleep—but real sleep was almost within reach, if we could just keep going …
We later broke the HMAS Nugget speed record again, ripping down a chute at 13.2 kilometres per hour, shortly before the flow did a sudden left-hand turn and then hard right. We almost had to lean into the corners, and the water’s depth meant no risk of collisions, so it was actually quite fun.
We became well acquainted with what the GPS euphemistically refers to as ‘unconsolidated ground’, which translates in practical terms to what might be land, might be water, but is more likely a combination of both, just shallow enough to make us get out and walk the houseboat at 2 kilometres per hour while the water itself races past at 5 kilometres per hour. We hated it. The wheels crunched on the bottom if we stayed on, but trying to hold back HMAS Nugget when we got off was a drawn-out torture of slipping, sliding, and generally pummelling our already traumatised feet into all manner of slippery rocks, big and small. Wearing our rubber-soled Neoprene booties, we had the pleasure of intimately experiencing everything we stepped on, and by the end our feet were covered in bruises and aching terribly. Somehow we remained civil to each other, and just laughed weakly at
each other’s expressions when our feet copped another rock: a look of apprehension, followed by a wince of excruciating pain that dissolved into a look of utter helplessness and defeat.
And so it was that after several hours of this torture, the ‘end lake’ finally came into view. We just had to travel two final kilometres to where the river expanded enough to be called a ‘lake’ and then we’d stop. Naturally—in good old Victoria Island style—this wasn’t as easy as it looked.
As usual, the wind prevented us from staying in the main flow, and we were constantly sucked broadside into any one of an endless series of side flows draining at right angles into a region of ‘unconsolidated ground’. Frustratingly, we were forced to get out and haul the entire way through knee-deep water that covered a viscous, sucking muddy bottom. By the end, we weren’t speaking at all; we had withdrawn into our own worlds, as ever growing swarms of mosquitoes billowed around us.
Over an hour later we got to the lake, pulled HMAS Nugget partly up onto the shore, tied her off, grabbed the tent, staggered up to the first patch of grass, set the tent up, put the bear alarm up, and crawled inside. After zipping up the tent and squashing countless hundreds of mosquitoes against the inside, we set our watch alarm for just two hours’ sleep—the idea being that we’d then have dinner, write our already late website update to let people know we were vaguely alive—and then go back to sleep until tomorrow.
Utterly dead to the world, we awoke eighteen hours later, when the bear alarm went off.
DAY 44: Hoist the sail, Mr Carter!
It turned out to be a false alarm—tripped by the wind—but without it, I think we may never have woken, ever. Cringing at the flood of concerned emails—including one from my dad, who believed something terrible must have happened to us—I wrote a website update as we began filling ourselves in on all the meals we’d inadvertently missed while unconscious.
After licking clean the packet of Mexican Chicken, we still had a few hours of the day left to utilise, and a few kilometres of lake still to cross before reaching our exit point. Packing up camp, I collected the bear alarm while Clark folded away the tent.
‘Check this out,’ Clark called. ‘It looks like a sail!’ It did indeed. Our special joining vestibule that we’d had made for us to join our two tents together (back in the days when we had the luxury of two tents) had caught the increasing wind and billowed out exactly like a yacht’s spinnaker. It wasn’t surprising, really, as the material we bought for it was in fact spinnaker rip-stop nylon.
‘We should use it to pull us across the lake!’ I suggested, throwing this ludicrous idea at Clark to see if he’d rise to meet it.
‘You reckon?’
I gave the usual shrugging nod, translating as, ‘No idea, but I reckon it’d be fun trying.’ And that settled it.
We loaded HMAS Nugget up for one last voyage, pushed off into the now wave-filled lake, and hopped aboard. Clark clipped the front corners of the vestibule onto the bow, and tucked the rest of it under a strap of webbing, where it waited—trembling with anticipation in the wind—for us to release it.
‘Hoist the sail, Mr Carter!’
PHWOOOOMP! The wind—by now 30 kilometres per hour and whipping the lake’s surface into crumbling waves—leapt inside the tent vestibule and exploded it full of air. HMAS Nugget sagged to one side as we settled in on a course about 45 degrees to the wind, doing about 3 kilometres per hour. It was not bad at all, except that we quickly ran out of lake, and found ourselves now stuck on the downwind shore, and wishing we were much further along, up an inlet on the upwind shore.
‘I’m sure we can do this!’ I persisted, taking down the sail, and swapping ends. Now crouched on the stern—on top of the solar panels—I held up my end of the sail, while Clark stood in the centre cockpit (that’d be the middle of HMAS Nugget) and held onto his, erm, sheet rope (an over-length zipper, actually), and as the sail filled again we charged back across the lake and made it directly to the point from where we needed to turn up into the inlet. Brilliant! With the wind now blowing a slightly alarming 40 kilometres per hour and the breaking waves making the lake look more like the ocean, we set sail up the inlet. Our last bit of sailing just wasn’t meant to be, though, and we ran aground with waves surging right across the deck. Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted.
We hauled the last bit and unloaded all the heavy bags, and carried them well up onto solid dry ground, and then rolled the empty houseboat up to meet them, ready for tomorrow’s day of checking our food inventory and converting HMAS Nugget back into the ‘original’ land-based Nugget. After some much-needed repairs we’ll then set out on what will hopefully be the final chapter in our epic tale of adventure—the 230 kilometres of lakes, mountains, and who knows what kind of new unseen horrors that lie between here and the western side of Victoria Island.
DAY 45: Closed for stocktaking
Today was a day of preparations: converting HMAS Nugget back into permanent land mode, and readying us and our gear for the final stage of our adventure.
We split the jobs up and began ticking them off, one by one: repair damaged rims—tick; dry hiking boots—tick; put Kevlar wheel covers back on—tick (well, what’s left of them. Two were such a tangled mess of bandages, rips and patches that we couldn’t even work out how to unfold them, so we’ve decided to use our two ‘spare’ Kevlar covers—our original prototypes—for our front two tyres). Set hauling ropes back up—tick; make new fish-drying rack so Clark can have his hiking poles back—tick; plan route—semi-tick. (We have a vague idea that will see us through the next few days, after which we’ll give this item the time it deserves.)
And, last but not least—check food inventory. Clark went through each and every food type, counting the number of rations we have left of each. As we have by mutual agreement been stealing the odd bit of extra food from time to time when we figured we deserved it, it is important to get a handle on what’s left when planning the final stage.
The results were varied. Considering it’s Day 45 and we packed 100 days’ worth of food, we now should have 55 days left of everything. These were Clark’s findings: lunch tortilla wraps, 51 days; sugar, 53 days; oats, 54 days; couscous, 51 days; milk powder, 63 days (extra creamy oats and coffee from now on!); protein drink powder, 34 days (whoops); hot chocolate powder, 51 days; cashews, 53 days; peanuts, 53 days; trail mix, 27 days (we lost heaps to water damage, remember); butter, 59 days (woohoo!!! yum yum); peanut butter, 50 days; chocolate, 53 days; dehydrated dinners, 42 days (and, horrifyingly, only three sets of Mexican Chicken left! Maybe Day 50 celebrations, end-point celebrations, and one for when we really need it?); instant coffee, 41 days (No!!! Clearly the number of days we can survive out here is dictated by the weakest link, and this is it); dried lake trout, three days; no, two days … chew chew chew … make that one day. Oh, okay, cross trout off the list.
So, we’re all set to wake up tomorrow and haul. Our Nugget should be about 150 kilograms lighter than when we started, so that’s only 350 kilograms. And in other breaking news, Clark just timidly turned on his iPod for the first time since it fell underwater, and—moment of truth—mercifully, it still works! All bodes well for the next section of the trip.
DAY 46: Five punctures at once
Today—our first day of post-Kuujjua hauling—unfolded very well. We practised a little procrastination in the tent first, further pondering our best route. Glaring at the whiteish areas on Google Earth—which seem to span much of the route from here on after an initial stretch of green—we couldn’t help but notice its similarity to the colour of Death Terrain.
We set off at a trot, full of energy and enthusiasm to get back into hauling, and the green terrain was great. By first nut break we’d passed the 2-kilometre mark, and we were almost at the second nut break when, passing over an old river bed, we heard the dreaded ‘PSSSSSssssssss!’ Whirling around in our harnesses, we stared accusingly at the back left side of the cart as it sank to the ground, the tyre totally deflat
ed—just like our optimistic outlook for the morning.
‘Quick, let’s get some load off this thing!’ I called, noticing how our poor rims themselves were now bearing the load, and pinching the limp rubber inner tube into the ground.
It was a smooth operation: unloading, hoisting the back of The Nugget up onto our tripod as a stand to survey the damage. Not one, but five punctures, one after the other in a line, where a sharp corner of rock had snatched at the exposed side-wall of bare rubber, right where the Kevlar doesn’t shield it. We both grinned and said, ‘Ayuuknakmat’ (that’s our new word, emailed to us the other day by an Inuit lady—it means ‘It can’t be helped’).
It took just under one hour to make the repairs, and we decided to skip the nut break that was now long gone, and press on until lunch to try and recoup lost hauling time. The terrain remained favourable, and the kilometres trickled obediently past on the PAC-o-meter.
Lunchtime saw us chewing our peanut butter wraps from on top of a huge boulder overlooking an open expanse of grassy tundra that was literally smothered in colourful flowers—it was beautiful! Boulders—although smaller than the giant we were sitting on—are becoming alarmingly common, and with our rigid four-wheeled craft, steering to avoid them is something that requires a lot of forward planning. They’re everywhere—it reminds me of a joke I overheard once about how God apparently created the world in six days, ‘and then on the seventh day … he threw rocks at the Arctic’. It almost looks that way—gently rolling grassy hills, spattered with huge boulders resting on the surface.
