IT Consultancy and Adventure Racing

The weekend didn't start auspiciously with a teammate pulling out at 8am Friday due to his kids being sick, undeterred we rang around trying to find a 4th team member before heading off up towards Whakatane at lunchtime. We hadn't sorted anyone by then, so grabbed a single and a double planning on racing as a 3. It's a long way to Whakatane from Wellington, especially when it is bucketing down. Liam slept most of the trip as he was only 3 days back from the UK and we had a couple of offers for teammates but by now didn't have the right boats for a 4 person team, and Sakkie had decided to split from us and compete in the new solo category.

Despite missing briefing and being somewhat unorganized we made it to bed by around midnight to grab a few hours sleep before a 6am getup call. The rest of the team was intact with Sakkie having represented us at the briefing, Helen (now Sakkie's support crew) having come up with us, and Mum and Kaz making better time than us coming down from Auckland.

Saturday dawned much better than forecast and the torrential rain of the night previous seemed to have past, although rain still threatened enough to start the race in jackets. We headed out to the start - a Mt Bike mainly on road and estimated at 3 hours. At around 7.30 the race director asked the time and said 'right head off' despite their being a number of teams still getting sorted at cars - good AR style! I heard in the bunch one team lamenting that a teammember had been caught on a toilet stop!

The pace was pretty steady from the go - OrionHealth were at the front keeping it ticking over. I wasn't feeling great, and struggled on some of the rises to stay with the bunch. I was annoyed with this - only to find later that most of the field had already dropped off due to the pace and those in the bunch were finding it reasonably tough. Liam came back and paused to check a direction and we ended up just off the back of the bunch which then disintegrated as Whakatane Hiab dropped a chain and Orion had a couple of punctures. 2 ˝ hrs later we got to the transition, having found a few checkpoints on the way, ridden road, gravel and a bit of single track and come across some teams in unexpected places.

We transitioned into the kayak which comprised 2 lake sections with a 3k portage in between and didn't bother trying to attach the sprayskirts to the deck as the lake was glassy. We left them off for the remainder of the paddle even though the conditions got progressively worse. Due to the size of the waves coming in from the side and the rapidly increasing wind strength I didn't want to take my hands off to try to put the skirt on despite the fact that the seam was rubbing badly against my leg. As we approached the beach to get into the portage section we noticed Whakatane Hiab who had passed us early in the paddle in a very strange configuration - it appeared that one team member had got out of the front of the double and was lying across the stern of the kayak. We found out later the front paddler didn't have a sprayskirt and the boat had filled with water and started sinking!! Fortunately our Fabrum was significantly higher so we hadn't taken on anywhere near as much water!

We were dreading the portage - being slightly pissed off with the organizers for not advising us that wheels could be useful. It wasn't however too bad - fortunately Liam and I are almost the same height and that seemed to make carrying the boat on our shoulders not too bad. It took us 41 min to get through - nowhere near the flying Sakkie with his single who ran past us and completed it in 29min. The only slight mishap was when a runner came past and I stepped to the side to let him through - when Liam did the same the boat moved over and I lost my balance and fell onto a fallen tree, boat landing on top of me…

The second paddle was reminiscent of the first, calm at the start, big waves in the middle and very calm at the end. Our support crew couldn't work out what the big deal was! We got through with only one big brace and a spurt of adrenaline somewhere in the middle of the lake, but other crews weren't as lucky with one boat being lost completely when the team fell out and the boat was blown away.

Next up was another gravel road based Mt Bike. We had one slight navigation issue on this leg with Liam searching a corner for a control that was about 100m up the road, and also had to deal with a slowly deflating tire. We raced into transition, and were back out again within a couple of min, having paused only to top up food supplies and change shoes. The officials were very surprised to see us in and out so quickly. Liam was pretty pleased with me though as transition speed is one of his particular bugbears.

The trek started over farmland and required us to follow (not entirely clear) signage. We managed this fine, but came across Sakkie and the Whakatane U23 team who had experienced a few issues looking lost in a field. The next section went well, with us all moving quickly on our feet and heading towards the series of checkpoints. We had failed to read through the notes in enough detail though and probably approached the checkpoints we could pick up in any order the wrong way making our departure from this area slightly more tricky than it needed to be. Navigation got a bit trickier from this point as we found ourselves at the first of many points where the notes said to follow farm tracks, none seemed to be heading in the right direction, and none were marked on the map. Liam led us through to the next checkpoint by a slightly circuitous route, past the checkpoint after that. We probably should have stopped and had a closer look at this point, as picking up the checkpoints out of order would have been the right call, avoiding the backtracking we did. We met up again with the U23 and Whakatane Hiab at this point, as all teams were taking slightly different routes through the farmland. Continuing on to the transition we missed a checkpoint which was higher up the stream than we thought, and after a good 20min looking we gave up (fortunately this was only a 15min penalty). We came into transition before a number of the teams we had been out with, so our route choice hadn't ended up as bad as we thought it might have.

Another speedy transition enabled us to pass Whakatane Hiab and head out on the final Mt Bike before them. This 45km road ride was all slightly downhill, but the headwind took away any chance of it being super speedy. Liam was starting to show the first signs of fatigue from his trip to the other side of the world, and I shared the load with him, taking equal turns at the front. So much for my expectations of being dragged through! Soon Whakatane Hiab came flying past, with Chris Morrissey displaying great strength to be on the front, as well as towing Sophie Hart. We jumped on the back, but we were both still finding it tough going to stay with them. Fortunately for me, after about 10k one of their team started to fade with cramp and they stopped to regroup. They came back past us not long later with this guy on tow and we jumped on again. They had to stop a couple more times, giving us time to regroup before being caught again, and we all came into transition together. Transition was at Neil Jones's house and we had our first observation of the value local knowledge was going to play in this race as Chris turned straight into the drive without consulting his map, as we were trying to keep an eye out for possible tracks.

I got up to the transition looking for Mum and the car only to find that the rider I thought was Liam on my tail wasn't. He arrived a couple of min later completely bonked, stumbled into a chair and started eating. 5 min later he hadn't yet changed his shoes for the final trek and was still plowing through the food. Somewhat cheekily I announced I was ready which he didn't find amusing.. So much for speedy transitions. Not that I am unhappy to now have something to hold over him when the time comes for it to be needed.

Once he'd recuperated a bit we headed off into the dark (it was about 7pm by now) - at the same time as Whakatane Hiab. The trek headed up a spur through bush, over some forestry roads, through farmland and down into Whakatane. We tried to stay with Chris as he led his team up the spur, but Liam was struggling with the pace and we lost them, and then ourselves. At this point it started to get interesting. We knew we were heading in approximately the right direction, but we lost the possum track we were on and so decided to follow a bearing through. We ended up in a stream which was reasonably bluffed out, but managed to shimmy down into it and decided to walk up it until we found somewhere we could climb out. This wasn't looking likely until we came across a fence across the stream heading straight up the bank. Figuring fences were likely to head to roads or similar we used it as a ladder, literally climbing up the batons. At the top was the end of a forestry road, unmarked on the map, so we took the chance, followed this and it paid off, with it joining up to the road we were looking for.

We met up with another 2 person team at the checkpoint at the top and followed them off in the next direction. We were using an additional map at this stage, which had been photocopied so many times that the contour lines were completely invisible. Most of the tracks were also not marked. We were looking for a right hand turn off the main road, then needed to head in a 'generally northerly direction over farm tracks'. Issue number 1: finding the right hand turnoff… we followed the other team down the hill for too long, with Liam continually questioning the direction we were taking before deciding we were going the wrong way and heading back. We found the turnoff, and headed 'north'. Issue 2: again we seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, but we hadn't seen any other tracks to take. Finally we came to a paddock and realized we really were in the wrong place. Another team joined us there and decided to try to head across the fields, but we made the call to backtrack to where we knew we were in the right place and try again.

Heading back up the track again we came across Sakkie, merrily making the same mistake we had, so we joined forces again. We found the right track as we headed back, not sure how we missed it on the way through as coming from the other direction it was quite obvious. We headed through some farmland and ended up in logged forestry on one side of a deep gully, needing to be on the other side. Issue 3: we were now faced with an east/west road choice, and it was pitch black so we couldn't see which might take us across the gully easily. We got it wrong. Ended up at a dead end and backtracked again. Fortunately this was the end of the navigation issues as we came across the next checkpoint, manned by a very friendly lady who offered us food, drink and detailed directions. That orange tasted great!

This section had been very frustrating - we lost over 2 hours in wrong route choices, not helped by the tracks not being marked and a map with no detail. This frustration was alleviated the next morning by finding most teams lost at least this amount of time trying to get through, but compounded by Chris Morrissey mentioning that he knew where the route went so well he hadn't even used the map! We should have stuck with his team!

The final section consisted of following a lovely DOC track down through bush into Whakatane. We finished around midnight, a couple of hours later than our support crew had hoped, but they were glad to see all 3 of us coming in together.

We found out the next day we had placed 6th and 7th overall - we lost 15 min on Sakkie due to the missed checkpoint. We were the first pair home and were beaten by 3 individuals and 3 teams, being Orion, Whakatane Hiab and Whakatane U23 - the latter 2 both having the advantage of home knowledge. Orion had also had navigation issues in the last section and were passed by Whakatane Hiab on the home stretch - finishing 20sec behind them after 14 hours racing.

Overall a successful day out - we got through with no arguments, first pair, a few nav issues but we recovered from them - lesson to stop earlier when we were uncomfortable with track direction noted and some great transitions. Our support crew were as usual fantastic, big thanks to Mum, Kaz and especially Helen who also drove most of the way home…