Donaldson Scott - Relentless: A Story of Grit and Endurance from the First Person to Kayak the Tasman Solo

HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in 2019

by HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

harpercollins.co.nz

Copyright Scott Donaldson 2019

Scott Donaldson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This work is copyright. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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ISBN 978 1 7755 4145 5 (paperback)

ISBN 978 1 7754 9176 7 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

Cover design by Amy Daoud, HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover images by courtesy of the author

A MATE OF MINE phoned me up one day and said I had to come down to the local bistro and meet this bloke, because he was something special.

Now, Id never heard of Scott Donaldson, but its not that often you meet someone with that sort of look in his eyes. In my coaching career in rugby league Ive met some pretty impressive people and Scott would be right up among them.

He is unique in some ways he looks so ordinary, and yet he has that dash of extraordinary about him. I always found that you couldnt necessarily pick up who the toughest among a team were from how they looked. Instead, it might be a sly grin or a comment, or some air of confidence that gave it away.

As a coach, there are certain special athletes who, at times when I was in a difficult position, I just knew would do the job for me players like Ellery Hanley, Wally Lewis and Mark Graham. I knew that they would do something special to get me out of a big hole they wouldnt just try to get the job done, they would get it done. Scott had that same quality of absolute dependability.

When Scott told me he was going to paddle across the Tasman, and pointed to his boat parked outside, there wasnt even one per cent of me thought that this bloke might be having me on. His determination was like an aura around him, and it left me in absolutely no doubt that he was going to do what he said he was going to do.

When he showed me the boat, it struck me that everything matched: here was this extraordinary guy, setting out to do an extraordinary thing, and the boat he was doing it in was just as extraordinary.

While many would see Scotts journey as a battle against the elements, I saw it as battling against man. The battle was always going to be mostly in his own mind the mental toughness it would require to keep going with something like that is at a level that very few of us possess.

Often, I would be preparing a team who were the complete underdog I knew it and they knew it but I would ask them to try and achieve something I knew darn well I couldnt have done myself and that I could only imagine doing.

While Scott was out there on his own, he always had a team around him, and if anyone on that team had cracked in any way, he wouldnt have been able to carry on. While there was only one person on the team who was ever going to go cross the finish line, every member of that team was critical to its success.

I remember saying to him that it must have been hard to get to sleep at night while he was planning the trip, because before any big challenge, you go over it in your mind many times before the referees whistle actually blows.

Theres no bigger challenge than this one, and I can imagine the whistle must have blown in his mind many times before he started. In his mind, he must have paddled countless crossings, in the best and the worst of conditions he could imagine.

Its clear you would have to be fully mentally in the zone to get in your boat in Australia and just head off but when I talked to him about this it was months before his scheduled departure date and he was already well and truly in the zone.

I knew from my career that the big occasion can get to any athlete. I can remember standing in the tunnel at a packed Wembley Stadium before my Wigan team played the Challenge Cup final against Halifax. It was a very formal occasion, with the teams being introduced to the royal family before the game.

As we waited in the tunnel, I looked across at Chris Anderson, who was coaching Halifax, and I thought, Jeez, he doesnt look very well he looks a bit grey. Then I looked at his team, and they looked like frightened young boys. I could tell the occasion had got to them. We will murder these guys today, I thought until I looked back at my team, and they all looked just as bad. Big occasions get to people, even those who are very well prepared.

Even with all his preparation work done, it struck me that Scott wouldnt know how to handle the hardest parts of the trip until they actually happened. How do you know what youll face out in the unpredictable ocean? How do you know how youll react to tough times in the middle of the sea? I couldnt begin to imagine what that loneliness of being so alone for so long must feel like, but I knew he was the sort of guy who would never feel helpless.

Ive had a lot of health issues over the years, particularly with my heart, and when youre at deaths door, its easy to say that it is all out of my hands now. But its not: youve got to try and control the parts you can control, like your attitude, and how you respond to setbacks. When Scott finds himself in storms, he cant control the weather, but he can control how he deals with it. Someone successfully completing a challenge like this, I think, gives you hope.

Scotts crossing didnt get the media and public attention at the time that I felt it deserved, but I do hope history reflects just how great his achievement is. To me, it sits alongside the achievements of people like Christopher Columbus and those other explorers who set out to sea never quite knowing what they would find on the other side. Those explorers are remembered and celebrated in history. In our generation, I think this achievement stands alongside those of our modern-day heroes like Sir Edmund Hillary.

Graham Lowe

Graham Lowe is a coaching mentor,

media commentator and rugby league legend.

AS A KID, I was fascinated by the story of the race to be the first person to reach the South Pole. To my mind, Amundsen vs Scott was the original adventure race.

On 14 December 1911, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first people to reach the South Pole. A month later, the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the Pole, only to find a tent left there by Amundsens party along with a note politely asking him to forward a letter to the King of Norway.

The Scott teams trek back to their ship was a horrid combination of depression and hardship, culminating in Scotts final diary entry on 29 March 1912: I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.