Augusta Adventure Fest
Augusta - Adventures Await
Rob Howard / 04.11.2016
Now in its 11th year the Augusta Adventure Festival, sponsored by Act Belong Commit, returns this coming weekend with a new course layout, prize money divided equally between relay teams and solos, and a new State of Origin team competition for the best multi-sport athletes in Australia.
The races, organised by Rapid Ascent, still have the original successful format of run, ride, paddle, swim (in different combinations), just with a few new twists to spice up a sporting recipe that attracts 3500 competitors to the ‘biggest adventure race in the world’.
Part of that attraction is the setting at Augusta, a small town (with one main street and a few blocks of housing) close to the South Western tip of Australia and sitting at the mouth of the Blackwood River.
The town is on a low ridge above the river mouth into the Southern Ocean and just short of the most South-Westerly point of Australia at Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Ocean currents meet. It’s about a 3 hour’s drive south of Perth (where most of the competitors come from), and part of the Margret River Region, the weekend getaway destination for the city and one of the top tourist attractions of WA.
The beaches, bays, forests, rivers and hills are a mecca for outdoor sports and the first weekend of November every year is marked in the calendar for the Adventure Festival and some competitive racing!
Tonight the town is full to overflowing and the trucks loaded with bikes and kayaks flow steadily into town, with many more to come over the weekend. The adventure festival weekend does not just fill Augusta, it fills the whole region, and all the local businesses lay in extra supplies and are open longer hours.
The action begins on Saturday with the ‘Mini’ race, which includes a 750m swim in the Hardy Inlet, 15km of mountain biking, a 6km run and a 6km paddle. This shorter course option is to encourage newcomers to the sport, and to make sure there are plenty of those there is also a Junior Survivor Race on Saturday afternoon, including some fun OCR style obstacles.
The ‘main event’ is the 56km Adventure Race on Sunday, covering 13.8km of paddling on the river and ocean, 28.5km of mountain biking, a 1.9km swim and a 13.4km coastal run. In recent years the race has been dominated by Braden Currie of New Zealand, but he is now committed to Xterra and with some other elite athletes drawn into the State of Origin competition there will be an open and competitive race to find a new elite champion. (The State of Origin competition features teams from Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria.)
All of the races are open to teams of 2 or 4, or for individuals, and this is very much a family event with spectators welcome – as many as 10,000 are expected to converge on Augusta during the weekend!
SleepMonsters will be here reporting over the weekend, with photo galleries on our Facebook page, and to follow the event closely you can also download the event app, which includes live timing updates, course maps and social media feeds.
For more information on the race see www. http://rapidascent.com.au/AugustaAdventureFest
SleepMonsters
