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Final tube - trek punishes field.

Steve Cooper - SleepMonsters Australia / 07.06.2009

The top 9 teams had gone through the trek in 3hrs.19 to 5hrs.15, but as dark fell those times blew out to near 9hrs in some cases.

While crews waited patiently at CP19 little did they know that more than half a dozen teams were in the same spot looking for tracks and CPs.

Girls on Top had been building a lead on the Cowgirls but some raft building hadnt helped the girls and Cowgirls clawed back alot of valuable time, what time the girls saved building the raft they more than lost in the paddling of them to the Cowgirls, a quick transition and good 2nd paddle saw Girls on Top get back 50 mins increasing their lead in the class.

The Tube-Trek to Sandbar and up the coast to the sailing club blew out to 7hrs and some, but even still allowed Girls on Top to catch Gu Rus and a couple of the other mixed teams who had left CP15 with a good break over them, this put Girls on Top into 12th overall, a position they stayed in to the finish line, again the Girls proved their strength in beating all the All Male teams home.

Shackleton VI decided on a return visit to the Sailing Club after convincing themselves that they had 3.6km to go and upon arrival at CP20 found no finish, but this was were their map finished, in an earlier error the last 9km of the map had been removed, this misadventure had them power to the imaginary finish at CP20, only to return to 19 to discover the error of their ways.

This was probably not the only error of the weekend between the teams as Blackheart Events/Peak Adventure found themselves with a great lead on the trek leg to CP12 only to discover they had incorrectly placed a checkpoint on the map in the wrong spot(and by about 4km, a very costly error for the team.

Good luck did befall teams though, one such instance was Girls on Top being told by a local fisherman that if they walked around the point abit further from CP15 they could walk pretty much all the way over to Sandbar, this they then did, and the water never reached their PFDs or tubes.

For full results and more news click on Mountain Designs GeoQuest.

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