ISLAND EVOLUTION

IT’S BEEN A LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP

I’ll never forget my first trip to Phillip Island for the MotoGP. If it wasn’t for a pair of huge, smelly, bearded men, I would be dead – a frost-blasted cadaver bobbing in Bass Strait.

Mick Doohan was busy winning his fifth world title and I was wedged between the warming bulk of Brother Silverback and Uncle Paint in the Bass Strait stand as a feral ice-gale lashed us from the bowels of Antarctica. I was wearing everything I had brought, including my helmet, in an effort to fend off death. And had I not been compacted between these two vast blokes and feeding off their body-heat like a tick between two bears, I would have surely died. This is no doubt how Vikings survived crossing the North Sea in their row-boats.