Non Fishing Kayaking Story

don't know if this was posted here already.  Anyone watch that VOD of Andrew McAuley attempting to paddle from Australia to NZ?  What an a$$hole.  I'm all for extreme efforts of human endurance.  But there's extreme and then there is insane.  To put his wife and infant son through that without any prospect of material gain for them is just plain irresponsible.  In the 18 min clip I saw last night on Comcast, I developed pretty strong sympathies for McAuley initially, but overall felt it was just a foolish thing.  Call me a hypocrite, I would have probably extolled the effort if he had made it.  RIP

so hes dead?

so hes dead?

Presumably so. Here's his last known communication (I pulled it from Wiki)

do you copy? this is kayak one. do you copy, over?
I've got an emergency situation
I'm in a kayak about 30 kilometres from Milford Sound
I need a rescue
my kayak's sinking
fell off into the sea
and I'm going down

I read about his attempt.  I guess one mans extreme is another mans insane.  I do agree though that when you get married and start a family, you have certain responsibilities you gotta look after.  You can figure the wife knew who she was mating up with, but the kid is innocent.

wow, that sucks, so hes has not been found... sad story, i fugured he was doing this with some kind of vessel assit tagging along just incase...

wow, that sucks, so hes has not been found... sad story, i fugured he was doing this with some kind of vessel assit tagging along just incase...

No vessel assist.  The film clip shows he was emailing/texting via sat phone to a frog sailor who lived in Australia.  The frog would radio back, plot LKP, and give him bearings, weather updates, and other intel.  Watch the video if you can.  Its pretty amazing that he ate slept and crapped in that little boat. 

I found the film on Comcast VOD when I tired of the Saints game.

A little more details about his last adventure!

In 2007,  Andrew McAuley set out on a 1,600 kilometre solo adventure to cross the Tasman Sea by kayak. His journey across infamously treacherous seas was outside of the range of helicopter rescue for all but the first and last 200km. After a month at sea, in which he survived incredible storms, 60 knot winds and 10-12m waves, he was within sight of New Zealand’s South Island. His wife and child were waiting on the shore at Milford Sound when a distress call was received. Soon after his kayak was found, but Andrew McAuley had disappeared.

‘Solo’, a documentary about his adventure and final days, aired on on ABC1 (Australia) on Friday 17th April 2009. The complete documentary can be watched online at ABC’s iVIEW for until May 1st 2009. Within Australia, it can can also be downloaded here, streamed from here, and is available on DVD from the ABC shop. The documentary was screened by the BBC in the UK as ‘Solitary Endeavor on the Southern Ocean’ in February 2009.

‘Solo’ is very hard to watch, but is too incredible a story not to hold your complete attention. The entire expedition borders on fantastical, and seems almost beyond the possibilities of human endurance. That he successfully crossed the Tasman is an incomprehensible achievement, and only serves to compound the tragedy that he did not make landing on the NZ coast. The footage is harrowing enough that it seems unlikely that anyone will attempt to repeat the journey in quite as pure a fashion as McAuley. His journey was so different, both in craft and route, to the successful Queensland-Auckland crossing by James Castrission and Justin Jones in 2007/2008, that they can hardly be compared in the same breath. Watching the video footage recovered from his kayak, it’s hard to believe that McAuley made it so far and equally hard to believe that he did not make it to land.

With regards to the film-making, it is worth watching if only for the footage recovered from the kayak’s cockpit. The interviews with his wife are emotional but also revealing into his psyche and strength of mind. However, I found the footage of his son to be entirely intrusive and edited in a way that seemed wholly contrived to tug the emotions of the viewer. This detracted from the piece as an expedition documentary and made it more like prime-time reality TV. Most interesting were the interviews with his friends and colleages, with regards to his perceived competition from the Castrission-Jones crossing. The section covering the marine police’s enquiry into his expedition was not given enough attention. As a viewer interested in expeditions (rather than personal dramas) I would have enjoyed discssions into the reasons for these actions.  ‘Solo’ does not have the style of expedition docmentaries that are made for film and that it was ‘made for  television’ is obvious and detracts slightly from it as an adventure film piece.

No some where out there is another idiot who watched  this thinking to himself, "I can do this!"  Any one care to bet in the next five years some one is going to attempt it?  I never thought anyone would be dumb enough to swim the length of the Amazon, but they did.  As long as no one has done it, some will keep trying.

Ok I watched the VOD.  I now agree with Yakuza.  Even if he were single, its still insane.