I should have seen it coming, but didn’t. It wasn’t that we didn’t have any food at all—we still had oats, potatoes, salt, sugar, spices, and tea—but we had run out of powdered milk, the potatoes had roots in them, and we had to eat porridge, without milk, three times a day. It was my own fault because I had never thought to stock up on fresh food before leaving Perth. We had left in too much of a hurry, and I didn’t see how we could make land again until Tasmania; the risk of getting caught was too high. Once we rounded the southwest corner of Australia and entered the Great Australian Bight—an enormous bay half the size of the country—it was too far to return to shore anyway. If we followed the coast, which would be very foolish to do, our journey would take twice as long. So I set a course directly for Tasmania, and figured we’d just ration our food until we got there. With any luck, it would only take us a week. But it took two. And our food was gone sooner than expected.
