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Bass Strait
23 March – 4 April 2006
By James Castrission
On the first day of this epic 350km crossing we were inches away from being swallowed by two container ships. After playing chicken with these moving steel islands, we were greeted by a 6-8m breaking swell on the second day. Naively, we thought that it couldn’t get any more exciting. How hideously wrong can one be? On our sixth day, we were cunningly hunted by a pack of tiger sharks as we approached Flinders Island. Our Bass Strait Crossing provided its fair share of harrowing moments as is expected in this notoriously violent stretch of ocean.
Um…..No. Sorry to disappoint, but this is a story of two young mates, a Pittarak double kayak and our team mascot Mr Penguin who successfully crossed Bass Strait via the “Eastern route”. Surprisingly, there are 28 islands between the Australian mainland and Tasmania. Our course linked 4 of these islands, with the largest distance between two of them being 72km. This route is crowded by at least 3 parties of kayakers each summer.
CROSSING BASS STRAIT
Four friends, Jonathan Papalia, Judd Boeker, Anthony Buykx and David Southwell had talked about kayaking across Bass Strait for a long time. The plan began formulating almost immediately after three of them had completed a kayak journey from Cape York, Australia across to Papua New Guinea, five years earlier. All are experienced kayakers with many years of marathon kayak racing and ocean kayaking between them. But Bass Strait was to be the biggest challenge. The goal was to kayak four individual Pittarak kayaks without sails from mainland Australia to mainland Tasmania via the eastern route connecting distant islands before passing down the west coast of Flinders Island.
With weather reports received during the drive to the southern coast of Victoria indicating strong north-easterly winds the planned start at Tidal River for a kayak around Wilsons Promontory to Refuge Cove was switched to a longer kayak from Port Welshpool (on the other side of Wilson Promontory) to Five Mile Beach then onto Refuge Bay which would be sheltered from the strong north-easterly wind.