Relentless by Scott Donaldson

Author:Scott Donaldson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

The helicopter crew took me on a sightseeing loop of New Plymouth, told me they had ordered me a pie, and even better, said they had an ambulance – and Sarah – waiting for me at the pad. This meant that I could be taken direct to hospital without facing the media.

At the hospital, the staff checked me over and I was fine, and then I went to face what I thought would be a media storm. When I walked in, the room was dead silent as if someone had died, and it was clear that everyone felt really bad for me. The questions were all pretty respectful.

They weren’t asking why I had failed, it was more ‘why did you come in?’, and they were asking if I was healthy and how I felt – really positive questions that made me feel that they respected the work I had put in. It was for the best really, because if there’d been any sideways questions the mood I was in at that point meant they would have got a hell of a direct answer.

I told them that I would have happily gone back out on the water that same day and that I had genuinely fulfilled all my ambitions by getting as far as I had.

I never expected to see the kayak again. I had left the cabin door open to sink it, so it wouldn’t present a hazard to any boats. But 12 hours later, the boat’s tracking transmitter was still going. John Funnell had been watching it. He came to see me and it was great to finally meet him.

He said, ‘Mate, let’s go get your boat, the EPIRB is still going, so it’s clearly not down under.’

On my second day back on shore, we took off in his plane and headed off to find the kayak. We saw the boat from the air, about 19 nautical miles off Farewell Spit, the most northerly tip of the South Island.

Having located it, John went back up in the air, and I chartered a boat; it set sail just five hours after we had seen the kayak – complete with EPIRB – from the air. We found the EPIRB, which had now become detached, but not the kayak, despite John flying laps up and down the coastline looking for it. As the sun set, we gave up.

We headed back to New Plymouth thinking we would never see it again. Then about a month later, I got a call: the kayak had washed up on a farm in South Taranaki. The currents had cycled it all the way back to close to where I had left it.

Fortunately, it had come in at low tide, because if it had been at high tide, it would have been wrecked on the shoreline. I heard that someone was attempting to commandeer it, but fortunately a local helicopter pilot grabbed it for me. He then got a trucking firm to take it back to Auckland, where it lives in retirement to this day.

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