Kayaking Freycinet

Email this story to a friend»

Back at Hazards the surf’s up. Mary seals the spray skirt neatly and grabs the paddle in time to meet the first wave of the set head on. I shove her out to sea and scramble to my own boat. Sitting on the sand, furiously struggling with the skirt, I have time to contemplate the roaring foaming behemoth mounting before me. It’s difficult to fit the undersize elastic around the oversized combing at the best of times but with a big one bearing down. It’s a tiny miracle when it snaps into place. Rolling white water engulfs the kayak deck and slaps me in the chest as I gain buoyancy. Paddle wheeling, I rage through the teeth of the second wave, emerging soaked and exhilarated. The last is steep and curling, the bow pierces the face and the boat feels like it’s standing on it’s end, with one frightened paddler hoping for all the world that he’s not heading back from whence he came. But it rocks seaward, and I’m out back. There's blue water, long swells and a great gaping bay to cross before our next landfall.

A light easterly ruffles the surface of the water and gains in strength as we paddle, lifting wind waves that we ride on our quarter across to Cooks Bay, the last crook before the notorious Weatherhead Point. Rednecked wallabies hop around under she-oaks behind the beach where there stands a crumbling cottage; all that remains of a 150-year-old sheep station. Newspapers line the walls to stop the draft and the doors hang a little limp on the hinges. The bush has regenerated completely and claimed everything but the house; a derelict monument to a bad idea.

With a couple of hours daylight left, we wander along the beach and up a track leading into the lush hinterland. Blue gums tower over a shrubby understorey and black stumps where fire once raged. There are thickets of tiny white flowers and everywhere the monumental lumps of silver-grey granite.

It’s a brisk walk to the summit of Mount Graham counting the minutes to darkness and dividing by two to end up with a number too small to make it to the top. But we press on and from the peak is an unforgettable panorama over the peninsula, Great Oyster Bay to the west and the infinite blue of the Tasman to the east.

"The siege continues into the early hours and I find myself running in my underwear through the pitch-black bush chasing a marsupial that has pilfered an empty plastic bag..."

It’s not far to New Zealand. But it has been some time since these islands have met. According to Continental Drift Theory the countries were once much closer - one in the same even. Which may go some way toward explaining why I’ve been walking through Manuka all day. But the wildlife could not be more distant cousins. Australia’s has been dominated for thousands of years by marsupials. In days gone by, there were koalas 4 metres tall, marsupial tigers and giant wombats, part of a great period of ‘mega-fauna’. New Zealand by contrast had no marsupials, and only two species of mammals - both of which were bats! With mega-fauna on our minds we trot back in the burgeoning darkness under the half-light of head torches.

A great portion of the night is spent battling wits with possums and in my somnambulant staggerings, I seem to be losing. They’re in the day packs and raiding the rubbish sack that was possum-proofed and precariously suspended. The siege continues into the early hours and I find myself running in my underwear through the pitch-black bush chasing a marsupial that has pilfered an empty plastic bag. The pursuit lasts some distance before the assailant gives up leaving me breathless, cold, sleep-deprived and a little lost.

Dawn brings a crisp southerly that piques the hair on my forearms, makes wet paddle-hands turn numb and the sea around Weatherhead stand up stiff in protest. Tide whips around the point with waves crashing green over the foredeck and we slingshot into Schouten Passage, feeling horribly exposed until the breeze dies and the water goes eerie-calm. The tide is turning and the wind goes with it.

Schouten Island was named by Abel Tasman three and a half centuries ago. It has been occupied by Chinese prospecters sifting for tin and an unsuccessful farmer called Crockett that ran a sheep station before it was deemed to be good for nothing, or simply too remote. But one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. There’s a long white beach, some shady trees, a stunning outlook over the peninsula and a deserted campground a paddle-throw from the highwater mark. It's idyllic. I feel like Robinson Crusoe.

Behind the beach is a leisurely saunter up a granite knob called Bear Hill. It quickly becomes a scramble on a shoddy track that gets steeper and rougher until we’re climbing on all fours up a 40º smooth granite incline exposed the prospect of a 100 metre drop and a 25-knot southerly cold enough to pull the skin off our bones. But the view is incredible. ‘To die for’ you might say.

The red-granite platform stippled by mega-time and striped with eons of erosion slopes down from the summit and eventually drops off. The vista extends out over olive-green eucalyptus trees and brilliant orange boulders to the blue trench that separates Schouten from the mainland. Freycinet peninsula reclines like a sleeping beast with great green limbs spread-eagled into the Tasman. The clear sky is striated with fine cirrus cloud, whipped into line by fierce jet streams and burnt orange by the setting sun. We’ll have to watch the weather.