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Surviving the Southern Traverse

Nick Gracie / 26.11.2003

Sitting at the race briefing in the Dunedin Town Hall was probably the first time the real fear and nervous anticipation of the week ahead started to sink in. The incredibly professional registration and race briefing had made us confident of a great and well-organised race – we just wondered if we would survive it.

Day 1:

We got off to a flying start from the town centre of Dunedin and were the second kayak to leave the harbour, however we soon realised that Kiwis are born with paddles in their hands – we paddled hard and had decent boats but were overtaken by just about every kiwi team in the race – it was a slightly demoralising start and we just had to accept we would make it up on the run and bikes.

The coasteering section was amazing – it was a physical battle against waves, rocks and seals – apparently someone even got a bit of a peck on the cheek from one!! The trick to the section was to stay on the land for as long as possible, not knowing the terrain we were in and out the water a lot which took more time as we swapped fins for shoes, however we made decent progress, all had big smiles on our faces and kept saying, this is true adventure racing! I hope one of the races in the UK includes this soon – coastline is one thing we have plenty of.

It was good to get on our feet and the first trekking section sent us through some superb terrain, by the end of the day we were high in the hills and everything appeared golden in the beautiful sunset – it was the first of many ‘Lord of the Rings’ moments! However, by 2:00am we were bushwhacking through dense forest and walking down stream beds in the search of the last 2 check points – our feet were cold and it was really tough going – luckily lots of teams got lost on this section and by the time we set off on the first mountain bike section we had moved up to seventh.

Day 2:

As daylight rose we set off on our bikes on what was to be a truly epic ride – it was either straight up or straight down, a lot of the hills were to steep to cycle up and one was even too steep to cycle down! It was really hard work but again incredible scenery that kept you going. We finally made it back to the transition and jumped back into the kayaks to paddle down stream – as usual we were overtaken by a few teams but paddled on and enjoyed the sun.

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