Explore Sweden Monster - Atlantic to Baltic
Second and Third Have Finished
Malin Andersson / 16.07.2010
Team Sweco Karlstad have now arrived at the finish line in a second place. The sleepmonsters struck the team when entering Piteå when a team member with a broken kayak decided to run for a while along the shore while the three others were pulling his broken kayak through the water. After the runner had passed a fence and came back to the shore he asked his paddling team mates; "Have you seen three people in kayaks, dragging another kayak?" He was unaware that he was talking to his own team mates!FJS reduced the distance to Sweco more and more in the final stages, but were unable to catch them. Leaving TA8 the time difference was six hours but after TA9 it was only four. The team was brave during the last kayak section and paddled through the rapids (where it wasn't mandatory to portage) so when they came in to the finish in the centre of Piteå, they were only beaten by 53 minutes.
“We raced at the speed we had planned from the beginning. When we heard that we were only about 45 minutes behind Sweco we started towing and kept up a high speed. We wanted to catch up enough to see our rivals, but when we didn't do so we slowed down a bit,� said team captain Daniel Hansson.
Early Friday morning Statkart finished in fourth place. Their kayaking took over 20 hours to complete, and they even had to break for some hours on an island to get some sleep. The Finnish team Karsu.fi rode a really good mountain bike leg, when they raced the 192 kilometers in eight hours.
“We put some effort into it. We did a really slow trekking section, we must have lost something like 10 hours, because we have one team member injured and it's hard to speed up,� said one of the team. They left for the last kayak section as fifth team expecting to take about 12-14 hours.
Sport Nature VLG is chasing just behind Karsu and can reach them if they are lucky. Only four kilometres separate them so everything points towards a really exciting finish. Which team can step up and push the last energy out of their bodies?
Robinzonada from Lithuania are fighting hard as the last team in 9th place and are now out on the long trekking section. The GPS tracker however tells us that they have some problems with the navigation. Going to CP11, they have chosen a very different (and worse) way compared to the other teams and on top of that missed the control. With this mistake, they were forced to go down a very steep hillside. They are now on their way to straighten up their mistake and continue their race.See All Event Posts
