ARWC 2015 Brazil - Pantanal
Talking to Godzone Adventure
Rob Howard / 21.11.2015
I caught up with the Godzone Adventure team over breakfast shortly after they finished as second team across the line. (Where they will be ranked we’ll have to wait to find out.)
When I told Sarah Fairmaid the photo of her back wheel held on by a stick was up on Facebook all she could say was, “My husband will see that and ask how that could happen. It’s a new bike!” Not anymore it’s not.
The team were still having biking adventures last night and explained they mystery of why the Merrell and Tecnu teams stopped overnight when they were leading the way back to the finish. “We got to a place that was really technical and sketchy,” Warren Bates said. “We had to carry our bikes through a mangrove swamp and navigation in the dark was very difficult. I think Merrell and Tecnu just couldn’t do it and stopped to sleep until daylight, even though at the point we had only 15km from the finish.
“Then some lights came up behind us and I knew it had to be Seagate. We had a chat and tackled it together with Chris (Forne) and Gui (Pahl) working out the nav between them to get us through. Luckily Gui managed to find someone to get a bit of guidance from.
“It was amazing to see Seagate in action, how they all worked and communicated together – they just all put forward information to help solve the problem in a positive way and off we went. Their performance was exceptional all race.”
The two teams arrived in the final transition together and after serving a 30 minute penalty Godzone waited a little, allowing Seagate to go ahead and cross the line first, rather than paddle in with them.
Godzone were at the middle of the action at AT6, when teams stopped and were later flown out and so I asked them what had really happened there – or their take on it anyway.
“We got into transition and left fairly quickly,” Nick Gracie said. “I think we left mid-afternoon and by dusk we felt unsure of our position and realised that the stage wasn’t really what we expected it to be. There was not much open water, just pool after pool full of vegetation, and although we thought we were on the cattle track Shubi talked about we couldn’t see it. (Talking to the other teams we all did the same thing to reach the same place, and they’ve told us they couldn’t really make out this track either.)
“So we decided to go back, and set off again at daylight after some rest. When we got back we heard on the radio Seagate were not even half way through after 15 hours or so, which was worrying, and in the morning they were still only two-thirds of the way through. We thought if they are going to take 30 hours or more, with the strongest team and navigator then we’d be longer, would never make the cut-offs and would run out of food.
“We talked to the other teams about this, and were perhaps more concerned that a whole bunch of teams already short coursed in the early stages of the race were coming into the AT – if they set off on that stage it might take them 3 days and would be pretty reckless to send them in there.
“We were told at one point all the AT closures and cut-offs were cancelled so we could go on, but no one did and in the end we were flown forward.” [Sarah Fairmaid said at this point that although the plane was a 4 seater that included the pilot … so teams were not flying out all together.]
“There was no discussion about how the rankings would work,” said Gracie, “so we just set off as soon as we could from the start of the bike ride.”
When the team heard the timings from arrival at AT6 to landing at PC20 were to be neutralised the team felt it would penalise them as they set straight off to attempt the pack raft stage while other teams, some on IV drips, never left AT6. They were concerned too about the idea teams may have used the YB trackers for communication during the packraft stage, and were clearly not a fan of teams having IV drips at transition and said they’d refused them feeling it was ‘unfair’.
There will be more of those kind of arguments later I’m sure as the organsiers try to come up with the fairest ranking after the complex events of the past week of racing (while at the same time getting all the teams safely back to Corumba today).
SleepMonsters
