Sometimes the line will start to wobble when you're out in space, says Shane , and it's not the wind, it's you
The line is like a sensitive instrument that picks up the minute signals of your physical and mental state and plays them back to you, amplified. If you’re tight and tense, the line is unsettled; if you’re calm, the line is still. The thing to do if it starts wobbling is to fix your gaze straight ahead, to the point where it’s anchored on the cliff. Focus on that, calm yourself, and the line will become calm. It’s a mind game, Yates says; that’s what he loves about it.
The 29-year-old Kiwi carpenter, who’s been living in Sydney for the past five years, is pictured walking a highline over Diamond Bay in Vaucluse.
“We only ever do it in beautiful places.”
Picture: Richard McGibbon
It’s a small one by his standards, 15 metres or so from end to end. He’s done 60m before. As long as the line is rigged properly it’s not as dangerous as it looks – he uses a safety leash to protect himself in the event of a fall – but still, it takes a lot of nerve. Yates has always been attracted to such things.
The youngest of three boys, he grew up in a small coastal community on the North Island – “forest on one side, beaches on the other” – where they made their own fun, cliff-diving into the ocean and motocross racing. These days his lifestyle is based around rock climbing; he’s currently taking a few months off work to push his limits in the climbing mecca of southern Thailand.
It was on another climbing trip to Thailand three years ago that Yates first had a go on a slackline – a loosely tensioned line rigged a metre off the ground. He was all windmilling arms back then, like every novice, but the challenge of it hooked him, and he progressed fast. He started highlining 18 months ago. There’s only a small band of people doing it in Sydney, which means plenty of virgin territory to explore. And it makes you look at the landscape differently, he says; he can’t see a nice view now without thinking of the logistics of setting up a line over it and stepping out to test his nerve, and beat his mind. There’s one unwritten rule: “We only ever do it in beautiful places.”
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