Whether it’s surfing 15m waves on a 2m board off Portugal, or down 8m waves on a 15m yacht in the Southern Ocean, these two docos offer much swell-powered excitement. You may well come out of either feeling like a sock that has just gone through a very long spin cycle or trying to drain the seawater from your ears. You will certainly come out of both with an admiration for the two Australians the films are about. Though one perhaps tempered by the thought that there’s a very fine line between determination and foolhardiness.
Ice Maiden is about Lisa Blair, the yachtswoman who holds many solo sailing records, including the fastest non-stop and unassisted circumnavigation of Antarctica in 92 days. She did that in 2022, but this film follows her 2017 first attempt. A demasting forced her to Cape Town for months of repairs before she continued on, sailing through icebergs and periods of personal despair.
It’s essentially a riveting video diary of the voyage, occasionally interspersed with clearly dramatised sequences, like one following her do-or-die efforts to cut the rigging free before the broken mast did any more damage to the boat’s hull.
And as well as Blair recounting the voyage to camera, its cast of supporting interviewees includes her mother, who inspired her sailing as a kid, her sister, and land-based support crew – among them veteran NZ meteorologist Bob McDavitt.
Her sailing, in a monohull she renamed “Climate Action Now”, dovetails with her environmental campaigning, focused on microplastics in the ocean. There’s an irony perhaps, that after the demasting, the freighter sent to her aid attempted to give her fuel to allow her to motor to Cape Town, but the jerry cans hoisted aboard were the heavy fuel oil used by cargo ships and incompatible with her diesel engine. That meant a jury rig and a carbon-free limp back to dry land.
Occasionally, for a film about a solo sailor, it can feel a little crowded and padded with Blair and the other talking heads repeating the same points. And it has a soundtrack that registers high on the Beaufort scale for sheer windiness. But as a story of worse things happening at sea – and surviving them – Ice Maiden is gripping.
The Blind Sea is the story of another oceanic Aussie battler, Matt Formston, a four-time world champion blind surfer and former tandem cycling Paralympian. Since childhood, his macular dystrophy condition has left him with 3% sight, just a tiny amount of peripheral vision. Now in his 40s, he balances his high-performance athleticism with family life and a high-powered job at a major Australian telco – one that gets enough screen time to turn a couple of minutes of this into a corporate puff video.
The film follows Formston as he prepares to take on Nazaré, the break offering the world’s biggest surfable waves on the Portuguese Atlantic coast. As with his earlier competitive pursuits, that requires a support crew, and the film becomes as much about the team effort to get Formston to those waves – and out again alive – as it is about him and disability.
Big waves, says the quietly spoken Formston at one point, are actually easier than smaller ones for him to surf as they require less constant adjustment on his part. However, the towering mountains of Nazaré are something else, requiring a jet-ski tow-in and, if needed, rescue.
The Blind Sea takes its own good time to get Formston to the base camp of this particular personal Everest. But seeing him conquer it is exhilarating and inspiring.
Ice Maiden, directed by James Blannin-Ferguson and Nathaniel Jackson, and The Blind Sea, directed by Daniel Fenech are out now.
