Rider completes first solo lap of Australia by jet ski
An Adelaide man in his 60s has completed the first solo circumnavigation of Australia on a jet skiAdelaide's Lindsay Warner, 63, has completed the first solo circumnavigation of mainland Australia on a jet ski – and is believed to have set a number of jet ski ocean-riding distance records along the way.
Warner arrived in Exmouth, West Australia, yesterday, pulling up at the same boat ramp he left from 18 months earlier.
The journey was supposed to be done in one hit, however, border closures and coronavirus travel restrictions twice interrupted his feat. So he restarted after making it as far as he could each time.
In the end, he covered three massive legs of ocean riding over 138 days – which included time on the water, as well as rest days and jet ski maintenance – over an 18-month period.
The 2017 Kawasaki Jet Ski he rode on the record-setting ride – specially modified to accommodate extra fuel required to cover extremely remote stretches of coastline – was bought by Warner secondhand.
The craft was one of three identical Kawasaki Jet Ski LX models (non-supercharged, for improved fuel efficiency) used on a four-day return trip across Bass Strait – from Victoria to Tasmania – in 2017.
As a warm-up exercise to familiarise himself with the craft and the essentials required on his lap of mainland Australia, in January 2019 Warner completed a lap of Tasmania on the same craft. Now he has completed the set, also another first.
Sleeping rough
The trip around mainland Australia was largely self-funded, and Warner relied on support from family, friends, and strangers, often sleeping in coastguard sheds – or on the beach when he was between towns.
After starting at Exmouth, Western Australia on March 1 last year, Warner started his anti-clockwise lap by heading south past Perth and making it as far as Esperance, Western Australia, in the Great Australian Bight, before border closures paused his journey on March 20.
He returned to Esperance a little more than a year later, restarting on April 1, 2021. Over seven weeks Warner made it as far as Mallacoota near the border of Victoria and NSW, arriving there on May 21 when he was again stopped by coronavirus lockdowns.
After a short break, he restarted the trip from Mallacoota on June 26 and ran all the way to the finish line in Exmouth uninterrupted, bar the occasional rest day and stopping for maintenance.
Along the way, he battled icy cold waters off the southern coastline of mainland Australia but weeks later swapped to wearing shorts by the time he reached tropical waters off Queensland.
In the far north of Queensland, throughout the Gulf of Carpentaria, and most of the Northern Territory, he had to find high ground to avoid crocodiles when camping at night.
In the far north of Western Australia, he was caught out a number of times, left high and dry thanks to the massive tides. He resorted to setting his alarm every hour through the night to push the jet ski out with the tide.
When that didn’t work, he sat on the jet ski from about 3am on some mornings and waited until sunrise to continue that day’s leg.
Long legs
He averaged 250km most days he was on the water, though some were much shorter than this, while others approached double that distance.
His ride for the trip, a 2017 Kawasaki Jet Ski LX, has a 78-litre fuel tank, but he needed more than triple that capacity (298 litres all told) after loading up extra fuel on the deck and footwells of the craft, and on a tow sled.
The price of fuel was usually between $2 and $2.40 a litre, although he paid up to $6 a litre in the most remote regions up north.
Warner – a 30-year real estate veteran and auctioneer who is also a qualified pilot and has competed in the Finke Desert Race on a motorbike – said he did the solo lap of Australia by jet ski because it had never been done before, and to raise awareness for men’s mental health.
Time for a rest
He told WatercraftZone that now the journey was over, he was looking forward to a long rest.
“I'm relieved it’s over,” he said. “There is a lot of planning that goes into something like this, few people would have an appreciation for it, especially without a support crew to follow you all the way.
“I’ve genuinely been staggered by the generosity of all the people I’ve met along the way,” Warner said. “Considering what’s going on in the world, it’s actually a relief to see there are a lot of kind-hearted people.”
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