Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 13: The Kayaking
You may have picked up, somewhere across all of this, that I’m interested in kayaking.
I took my own kayak on the roof of the car for the entire lap. And I used it. I went kayaking eighty times around Australia — little adventures at dawn, mostly, because I’m the one who doesn’t sleep in, and a sleeping wife is a fine thing not to waste. So while she slept I got on the water, all the way up the east coast and all the way down the west: from Sydney Harbour to Dirk Hartog Island, from Lake Argyle to Port Lincoln. Rivers, lakes, bays, estuaries, the open ocean. Everywhere except the Nullarbor, which has no water, and the croc zone, which has the wrong kind of wildlife in the water. Everywhere else, I paddled.
It is a unique way to see a country — low and slow and silent, at the waterline, at the hour when nobody else is up. I wouldn’t trade those mornings for anything.
Now. Kayaking is, I should be honest, a somewhat risky sport. People die doing it — particularly people who don’t know the local conditions, which describes me precisely at every single one of those eighty put-ins. So I practise defence in depth. Life jacket. Paddle leash. Flippers and a tow rope. Watch, phone. And, if every other layer fails, a personal locator beacon — a satellite distress button — for the moment when nothing else is going to save you.
I did not need any of those things on this trip. Really.
It was mostly fun. It was, genuinely, mostly wonderful. I paddled around the coal carriers queuing out of Newcastle, and the iron-ore ships setting off for China out of Port Hedland — enormous, silent, indifferent slabs of steel, and you a speck at their waterline. I sat in the bay at Port Lincoln and watched a vast thunderstorm pile up over the town, which was magnificent right up until the moment it reached me, at which point being the tallest conductive object on a flat sheet of water became my entire focus. And at Walpole I surprised a dolphin — I heard it coming up the river ahead of me, breathing, and I drifted around a bend and it surfaced for air a metre in front of my bow, and I learned, in that instant, that a dolphin can change direction faster than you would believe anything that size could move.
Mostly fun. And then, one time, trouble came.
It was Ceduna, on the south coast, and I went out at dawn. It was going to be a hot day — the hottest of the entire trip, as it turned out, forty-three degrees, which makes perfect sense for the south coast, obviously. I parked on the beach, put in, and headed due south toward the port, around a small point of land.
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