Beau Miles - The Backyard Adventurer

The world around me looks like a mouldy sponge cake. One thats been left uncovered on a kitchen table for 26 days of stale summer air, enduring two heatwaves and four storms. A cake that had once been freshly creamed, passionfruit drizzled and frosty-topped, but is now a blotched, fuzzy fusion of bacteria and mould; its clearly defined layers, once perky as new mattresses, are now sagging.

The view over the bow of my kayak, my view for seven to ten hours a day, currently due south, would usually be a perfectly clear version of myself silhouetted by the midday sun, but today I cast no shadow. The layers of sea, air and sky are several shades of grey. Sea is mossy green and whorls of grey dot the skyline, like the cakes bacteria, which would be fit to kill a dog if I was to eat what I see, although they could be thought of as passionfruit seeds I presume the whorls are storms, or squalls, or a distant flock of birds. I take it that I should avoid the dark bits, which is useless to think from a kayak at sea, wind at my back, land that wont have me, and a sky that moves. The benign breeze that usually blows a little stiffer in the afternoons is no longer playing out.

At 45 degrees to my right is a view of borderlands between South Africa and Mozambique if I squint. I assume the official line of sovereignty is a triangular cardinal marker built on the highpoint of a reddish headland, but it might be a house, or a fused droplet of water on my sunglasses. Theres no border marker on my charts, which are from the 1970s and fast becoming useless, destined to be toilet paper instead of navigation aids. Im eight kilometres from shore, although it could be ten, or five. Distance and scale are gummed up and hard to fathom in moody conditions, and I dare not turn on my GPS because Ive learnt my lesson. You come to rely on gadgets and digital numbers like grease on lips and milk on cereal, and I dont like the feeling when batteries die, as if youve lost part of your brain.

To distract myself, I return to my vision of the cake on the table. I imagine no one has come or gone from the house to disturb things in those 26 days. Sweaty funk emanates into the room, combining with the essence of four white terriers that live almost permanently in the house. The cake has sat there for four weekends and three working weeks, awaiting swearing and howls of disgust from the returned troop of sandcastle-building, trash-novel-reading, overeating family of seven.

I see Jack, the most lovable of the family, youngest of five, irresponsible because hes ten and has been allowed to be carefree. Its Jack who forgot the cake. Jacks dad, Henry, who people including his kids call Hen, is really to blame, having given Jack two jobs instead of one. Keeping the dogs happy while the car was being packed is where the boys responsibilities should have stopped. It was a stupid idea for Jack to have to get the cake from the kitchen table when the dogs had been shut in the back of the car, as his eldest sister Kate knew all along. Hammering home the injustice, she had made the cake.

Jack remembered hed forgotten the cake not far from home, only about 20 minutes into the six-hour drive to the coast, but thought best not to tell his mum, which to Jack was a sure sign of good decision-making. So, there the cake was, moulding away beautifully in a semi-controlled state, as if the new science teacher, overeager and wasteful by nature, had set up an experiment to impress the kids on day one of the school year.

Storytelling fills my thoughts to the beat of 50 unthinking strokes per minute because I have all the time in the world. Its unsurprising theres a mouldy funk to my thinking, as life at sea particularly sea kayaking, where your backside sits below the waterline is a life of moisture and festering. Even when your pruned hands get a chance to dry out in the evening, youre still damp, as are your tent, sleeping bag, spare clothes, your oats and your book. My own sweat, ambient humidity and constant variation of temperature cook and stew everything. Salt holds on to water like an infant holds on to a grub theyve found on the lawn, and is equally greasy, applying a sheen of glistening slip to everything from toothpaste to eyelids. Water infuses you and your being, and will not leave until you leave the coast. Even your subconscious, sleeping self is watery, tuning in to last nights tide without being asked, knowing how far up the beach it got because your own outer layer of nerves and follicles never stop listening.

There is a beauty in the unexplainable passage of time when youre by yourself at sea because time seems to operate so differently. Humanity seems to drown after a while, streaks of aircraft and the odd boat becoming no different from birds or flotsam, coming in and out of your orbit without touching you, so they disappear at the same rate they came into view.

On I plug, imagining abstract life inspired by whatever speaks to me from the chromatic layers of due south panorama. Taken over, I become a daydreaming animal. Leaking at regular intervals which for the long-range trucker and the expeditionary sea kayaker is our cue to take our eyes of the horizon and focus on the teeth of a zipper brings me back to reality. I aim badly into a crude, sharp-edged plastic sports bottle with the top third cut off. Its a dangerous activity given all the moving about, chancing a nick followed by an infinite supply of stinging salt. On rough days I question why I only brought one penis, having never thought to bring a spare. It could sit in a Tupperware container in the day hatch, all greased up, with the spare set of allen keys and fishing tackle. Ive brought the worthless pee bottle from Australia, the kind you can pick up from any roadside in the world. Its here because it never leaves the kayak, stowed with another dozen essential items in the front hatch. It flew halfway across the world to be used constantly, multiple times a day, far more useful than the satellite phone thats only really useful when its too late.

Tannin-rich wee gets emptied over the side. I remind myself to drink more, so often finding myself dehydrated in places of water. You forget to drink when youre always wet, or looking at a vast desert of liquid. I bob about for a few minutes, maybe five, sipping water, stringing things out for as long as possible. My rule of thumb is to start paddling again when the boat finally gives in to the business of waves, which is to be neatly and without fail parallel-parked at the mercy of waves. Being at sea without steerage or power, which is the kayakers state whenever you pull your paddle from the water, is to be subject to the worlds largest, endless, lines of infantry, pushed along by the forces of swell, chop and wind. Swell is the big stuff that rolls in from the deep, a Swiss-ball equivalent to the tennis-ball chop that skips across the surface, while wind is air trying to be somewhere else. Both swell and chop are bound for shore, naturally, but not always in the same direction since swell is driven by gigantic currents that are dictated by everything from week-ago storms to the spin of the earth, and chop comes namely from the day-to-day direction of wind. In this way, two forces, big and old, young and small, dictated by wind, pushing and dragging and roiling beneath you. When your paddle makes it back into the water and you get up enough speed to determine your own direction, you counter these forces with ruddering and edging in a particular way to head where you want to go, trying not to comply with the giant carpet beneath, which is nothing less than colossal forces moving in a particular direction by the laws of horizontal gravity.