Suffering and Enduring

Rob Howard / 16.11.2015

­It took the leaders far longer than expected to reach AT3 at the end of the first pack raft stage.

The leading team, Seagate, were the only ones to arrive in daylight on day 2 of the race, and through the night another 10 teams came in behind them. [The race boat Kalypso left AT3 then, so those leading teams are the only ones we have any news of.] Second to arrive were Godzone Adventure, some 3 hours behind Seagate, and they had wisely chosen a safer route option down the mountain from CP7, which paid dividends.

Most of those who followed them in had been lost on the descent, to varying degrees. I didn't see Godzone come in, but those who did said they looked in better shape than Seagate, though Nick Gracie was suffering badly from mosquito and ant bites and dived into the screened porch area of the ranch building for the whole transition. Godzone were the only lead team not to even try and stop to rest at transition. Bites are a potential medical issue here not an irritant and anti-histamine injections are available and being used. The mosquitos are particularly bad around the transitions, making them uncomfortable places to linger and they are affecting the race staff and followers as much or more than some of the teams.

It's not just the insects that bite either, a couple of teams have encountered large tarantulas, but there have been no reports of any encounters with snakes. Merrell Adventure came across a large tarantula on the trail and tried to move it with a trekking pole at which point it attacked the pole!! The team all screamed and ran off back down the trail a bit. The South African team also commented that moving into the jungle or bush offered no respite from the heat and was if anything more humid and oppressively hot.

Some European teams have said the they are used to being able to lie on the ground to cool off, but here it has the opposite effect, the earth retains the heat and lying down to rest just increases body heat. It is no wonder teams are finding it hard to sleep. Raidlight and Merrell were the 3rd and 4th teams to arrive, followed by Estonian ACE Adventure, who were surprised to find themselves in 5th place. Raidlight said they had seen a Panther eating a turtle and the sightings of big cats and trackes are increasing.

Mariann Sulg of Estonian ACE Adventure said the best bit of the day was the view from CP7 out over Pantanal, but she had to think a while to come up with a best option. Nathan Fa'avae had earlier said, "I rate races by how much fun I am having ... and I'm not having any yet!".

For the teams following the top 5 into transition the difficulty was compounded by losing their way in the trackless bush in the night as they struggled to find the trail into transition. Several of the teams who had been at the race front early on (Tecnu, Silva, Columbia) struggled to find the way and spent long hours without food and water in the night. They found a small waterfall at one point, but Tecnu didn't fill all their bottles and later regretted it. They said they'd spent 10 hours with no food and up to 3 hours with no water during the night.

Teams will be reassessing the advice that there is water available on the hill trek stages especially on the next stage which is 58km, mostly along a ridge line. How long they take on that trek today, and how long the teams further back take to reach TA3, will be critical with the race already behind schedule. It's a race for suffering and enduring, and into day 3 were are still on map one, with no short course options available for another few days and the hardest parts of the route still to come.

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