BASS STRAIT BOOGIE
As I pull my camera out, Richard dribbles his breakfast down his chin, not even able to lean to the side. He manages a weak smile. Moments like this are precious—I can see the pain in his eyes—so I make sure to take a few seconds of video as well. We are in the middle of the wild waters of the Bass Strait, three hours off Deal Island; Flinders Island is more than 50km away. The waves roll through and I look out to the faint pair of shadows on the horizon; our kayaks feel small in such a vast space. And our minds paint pictures much bigger than our eyes can, seeing empty oceans far beyond the horizons. But every minute we wait, tidal currents push us further off course. We need to keep going.
For me, the Kent Group—a collection of remote, tiny, granite-cropped islands of which Deal Island, easily the largest, is just five kilometres end-to-end—was first a giant sketch. It was back in 2015 when I initially saw them, there on the Melbourne University Mountaineering Club’s front window where a hand-drawn map of the islands promised cliffs, simple living and the unknown. We never made it that year, but the images—more striking than actual photos—stuck with us, and we didn’t give up on getting to the Kents. We weren’t sure how we’d
