The 2007 Adventure Race World Championship
Getting to Inverie in Time
Rob Howard / 28.05.2007
The village of Inverie is a row of whitewashed houses on a single short road overlooking Loch Nevis, and whether you turn right or left it’s a dead end road, so this village outpost of Knoydart is only accessible by boat. There are many visiting yachts, cruisers and paddlers but last night it was the teams from ARWC 2007 who came into the village, paddling round the headland up the loch, to a transition in the woods just by the main group of buildings. These include a village hall, a post office, The Old Forge pub and the Knoydart Foundation office (which houses the public satellite internet facilities we are using to update the leaderboard and send reports).
The teams coming in at night were easy to spot with their bright headlamps acting as beacons, and it was during the hours of darkness (at 03.00) that the first race cut-off was applied. With the difficult wind conditions on the paddle, the hard micro-nav stage and time penalties being served at CP4 it was a race to make it in time.
The transition was reached by crossing a boulder covered beach and set in a boggy piece of woodland which was ideal for midges, a factor which hurried teams through transition even more! Here teams had to get their boats ashore, change and repack for the long trekking stage to come, and they had to leave before 03.00 to make the cut-off.
InterSport raced in and then tried to convince the marshals that they understood it was the check in time which applied, but the marshals pointed out that to them the word ‘depart’ is the same in French and English, so there could be no misunderstanding! It didn’t help that the relevant page on the team’s route book had blown away!
There may have been some misunderstanding for the Brazilian team, Mitsubishi Quasar Lontra, who missed the cut-off, but argued with marshals for 45 minutes that they should be allowed to continue on the full course. They explained they’d gone to sleep out their penalty at CP4 and found a tractor shelter away from the transition. While they slept the marshals woke other teams and told them they could go and the remainder of their penalty would be served later ... but the missed the Brazilians. In the end the team unhappily accepted they should go on the short course and set off down the road.See All Event Posts
