Andrew McAuley

Soon after Andrew McAuley disappeared just thirty nautical miles from the end of a thousand-mile kayak crossing from Tasmania to New Zealand in 2007, pundits began second-guessing him. Nothing could be worth such risk, they scolded, especially to a man blessed with a loving wife and young son.

McAuley, whose resumé included paddling three hundred thirty miles across Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria and three kayak crossings of the Bass Strait, had planned meticulously for the trip, placing great trust in a homemade cockpit canopy designed to right his modified production kayak in the event of a capsize. The canopy, nicknamed Casper, did that job on several occasions, but McAuley’s video diary, found when the kayak was recovered without the canopy, tells of him having to climb back into the kayak after being ejected in a hard capsize. The video also reveals that McAuley had glimpsed the high mountains of New Zealand’s South Island in the last hours of his life. He’d come that close to completing