Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
This is Scott Donaldson's kayak, the kayak that almost made it from Coffs Harbour, Australia to Taranaki, New Zealand last month.
For some reason it was sitting out on the footpath, in downtown Auckland this morning, so I figured I better draw it before it disappears. Well 15 minutes into my sketch, Scott himself wanders up and starts hooking to the back of a ute to take away.
Some quick sketching ensued including a poor attempt at a portrait before he drives off on his way to Avondale for a school visit. The kayak looks tiny, a lot like a regular surf ski but with a bubble on top with a hatch. You would have to be pretty keen to kayak 2,000+ kms across the Tasman in one of these. Sounds like he almost stopped at the beginning with a few false starts with gear breakages and backtracking to Coffs Harbour. At some stage the rudder broke, then, when very close to New Zealand a storm blew him back towards Australia! After 6 days battling the storm with no rudder he was choppered off, leaving the kayak behind. Last week it washed up onto a beach in Taranaki covered in barnacles.
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