Atop a towering 20-foot wave, I look down two stories and see my teammate Alex Nicks in the trough far below. We’ve been paddling in heavy seas for more than four hours and our day’s destination, Cloudy Bay, near the southern tip of Bruny Island off Tasmania’s remote southwest coast, is still a blur on the horizon. Lelia, who grew up on a sailboat, has already succumbed to seasickness, vomiting deftly over the side of her sea kayak, and then pressing on. This is our most exposed paddle yet. The Roaring Forties, after blowing unimpeded from Cape Horn, smack at full tilt into Tasmania’s west coast. Wind-lashed and wave-carved, 150 miles off the southeast coast of Australia, Tassie, as the locals call it, is the very definition of remoteness.
Our plan is to round the tip of tiny Devil’s Rock Island and then head straight for the big lighthouse, built between 1836 and 1838, that anchors the southern tip of South Bruny. We pass Devil’s Rock at noon, watching six-foot waves slamming into its far side and breaking toward us. Beyond them, the following swells grow with every paddle stroke, pushing us toward the big island. The sea is a churning mish-mash of waves colliding from all directions.