AROC Canberra Adventures

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Canberra Turns on the Heat

Shane Russel of Team Terra X / 19.01.2005

We arrived at the start at 6:30am, 50 minutes before race registration, due to Krissi’s determination to be organised before race start for a change. Alina was there when we arrived and told us she and Tom had no sleep at all the night before. That made me feel a bit pathetic walking around yawning all morning. Amazingly the time just slipped away again and before we knew it we where sitting on top a Kayak ready for a mass start, in the midst of a bright yellow 60 boat flotilla.

The first leg was a rogaine style paddle where you needed to collect 3 of 6 check points in the first leg and the remaining 3 in the last leg of the race. Kudo’s to Tom and Alina for coming up with such a nice way to split the field early. There where two obvious paddle routes, one long (3 kms) and one short (2.2kms).

We opted for the long paddle first as we decided it would be better to chase teams later in the race than it would be to be pursued. But we soon realised that a very large number of other teams had the same idea. Worried about being caught in a rugby scrum of boats at the first checkpoint we decided to go very hard at the start and break from the pack. To this end we planted our boat right behind Millie, figuring they would be the fasted out of the start, hoping to hold onto their wake.

A Quick Getaway

The race started and everything went to plan. Millie got out first and we held their wake long enough to make a break from the pack. We hit the first checkpoint with a reasonable gap on the pack and got away from it without major incident. A few minutes later I looked over my shoulder and saw the rugby scrum had formed at the buoy which was the first checkpoint. Teams could have literally walked across a dozen boats to clip their card. It was a mess.

We finished the first paddle and hopped onto our bikes for a ride to Mt Taylor. Krissi and I formed up behind our team packhorse Wayne and we rode hard, passing many teams along the way. Our strategy of chasing seemed to be working well. We caught Millie, who had to back track for a checkpoint, and things all seemed to be going brilliantly.See All Event Posts