Kimberley Expedition Departure Video

My name is Mike and I'm just about to head off into the middle of nowhere for five to six weeks surviving mostly on bush tucker and I'm going to do it on this raft here which I've just been building over the last 10 days and I'm going to position myself in the middle of nowhere with no food and no water and see if I can get out to civilization on my own just using my own skills. Now why would I want to be in such a situation? Well that is the same question that two German guys asked themselves when they ran out of fuel in their seaplane in 1932. They tried to survive their way out over about six weeks, they tried making a raft, they tried walking, eventually they gave up and were luckily rescued by local Aboriginal people and those Aboriginal people still live in this town and throughout this region today. So I'm going to place myself in the same situation with mock seaplane floats and see if I can survive my way out. So it's a pretty big adventure and it's been quite a while making these floats. There's a lot of first of all collecting drums or a kind local here has allowed me to use his shed to build it has collected some drums for me and I basically welded them up and ground them, painted them, cut down bush logs to make the top of the raft and I've now moved it down onto the wharf and I've just had a test run in the water. It went pretty well. The test run I did yesterday didn't go so well, the engine was sitting a little bit low and the only reason I have an engine is so I can get to where the seaplane landed. From there on I'll just be sailing, trying to sail my way out from there. So I'm going to head off tomorrow. It'll be five to six weeks, probably take me a week to get into the bay where the aviators landed their seaplane and then I'm going to try and get the raft ready for sailing. I'm going to sail it along the coast up to about a hundred kilometres then I'll leave it and then I'll walk inland to where the nearest civilisation was back in 1932 to see if I could have rescued myself if I was in that situation. First thing when I get out there is I'll fix my position using the stars and I'll talk about that and what I'm aiming to do is create a nice video that really describes what it's like to be on your own in the middle of nowhere surviving on bush tucker because I don't believe that the current programs that you see on the TV and the internet really capture that so I'm going to see if I can do that. So I've got a plan, I don't know if things will go to the plan because it's a very variable situation. Once you get out about 100km to the coastline up here and turn left it's very large seas and it's quite scary and it's quite easy to get smashed up on the rocks. There's very large tides, there's crocodiles, sharks, there's a whole bunch of things that you really need to be very careful and look out for and I'm going in there with the permission of the local Aboriginal people which has taken a while to get but it's been a good process because I've got to meet the traditional owners and get a real sense of how important the land is to them. It's very important to me but I know to them it's even more important because it really is part of everything about them and so I'll possibly be walking through areas where no white people have walked before even though I'm more of a brown person. So to capture this journey I've got a great range of different camera equipment, handy cams, GoPros, SLRs, remote sensing cameras so I can set them up and as wildlife goes through the shop I'll be able to capture those. I've also got drones, I've got three different kinds of drones, they're the latest ones out, they can track me and there's a whole bunch of the things that you can do with these drones which really is going to bring together hopefully quite a nice documentary at the end. So if you'd like to watch that documentary please go to my website www.outbackmike.com.au and you can register for the video that I create at the end. So thanks for watching and I hope to see you when I get back.