Keeping with our tradition of introducing a new person to adventure racing at each Blue Ridge, this year Mark Bell was our teammate. Mark was on our support crew at Blue Ridge last year. This year Mark’s wife Lori and his sister Sara and her husband Gerry were our support crew. We stayed at Mark and Lori’s cabin near Blue Ridge. The night before the race terrible storms rolled through Georgia with high winds, heavy rains, hail, and tornados. In the morning as we were loading our gear into the support vehicles the rain was still falling and we noticed we had a very flat tire on one of the support vehicles. No need to panic. We had an hour to change the tire in the rain and drive to the start. The tire took about 40 minutes to change and the ride to the start was about 25 minutes. Yes, that is more than an hour. We arrived at the start late, after all the other 90 plus teams were gone.
The first leg of the course was a running/trekking section. We started out with a 45 minute climb up to the first CP. After that we found CPs 2, 3, 4 without any difficulty. Since there was a 4pm cutoff in the middle of the bike leg, we wanted to beat the cutoff and cross the finish line; so we decided to skip CP 5 and head directly to CP6 and the first transition. On our way to the TA we arrived at the swinging bridge over the Toccoa River and saw how fast the water was running due to the rain from the night before and also saw boats flipping and swamping in the rapids that started just under the swinging bridge. It was not a pretty sight and we knew we would be in it soon. We traveled a half mile past the bridge to the TA and arrived at 11am a half hour later than planned.
Our support crew had already deposited our boat and other paddling gear at the TA. The wheels were already attached to the canoe since we knew there would be a half mile portage back to the river. Wasting no time, we headed back to the river passing many teams struggling to get their canoes to the river without wheels. We tied down everything in the boat; except the middle seat which was a plastic insert, knowing the rapids were sending most teams into the 55 degree water. We put in 10 yards above the rapids on the left side under the swinging bridge. Our plan was to paddle to the right side and follow a line down on that side of the river. Zach underestimated the sped of the water and we were not properly aligned to successfully navigate the rapids. Before we hit the rapids Zach yelled out, “We’re screwed, we’re not going to make it.” and a few seconds later the water pushed the canoe hard on the right side and Cathy and Mark went for a swim. Zach was able to stay with the swamped boat and rode it through the rapids at one point slamming into a big rock. At the end of the rapids he was able to get the boat into an eddy in the middle of the river behind the safety people and dump the water. Everything that was tied down was still in the boat. The plastic seat, however, was no where to be seen. Plus there was a huge dent in the canoe, a five inch gash on the left side and another hole on the bottom; all from the encounter with the rock.
A few minutes later Zach was able to paddle the canoe to the right bank. Soon Mark showed up making his way through the underbrush; but without Cathy. Mark went back to find Cathy while Zach tended to the canoe. About a half hour later Mark returned, again without Cathy. About the same time we heard an almost imperceptible voice in the distance calling “Zach”. Cathy was on the opposite side of the river and there was no way we could get to her because the water was running so fast. We were clueless as to how she ended up on the wrong side of the river. We yelled for her to work her way downstream until she found us. We struggled as best we could to reach the other side as quickly as possible but Cathy still had quite a ways to work through extremely dense underbrush to reach us. She finally arrived at the boat not very happy.
We were able to start paddling again but were taking on a lot of water from the gash. We had Gatorade bottles we used to bail with to no avail. We had to stop and empty the boat. Shortly thereafter we became stuck on a rock and Cathy climbed on the rock as Mark and Zach worked to free the canoe. They freed it all right and barely made it back in as the current grabbed the canoe and pushed it quickly downstream; however, Cathy was still on the rock. Mark and Zach crossed to the other side and emptied the boat again and Cathy once again had to travel downstream for us to reach her. The first place she waited for us the current blew us right by. Shortly thereafter, Zach was able to grab a tree branch and stop us long enough to get her back into the boat. Again we had to empty out the boat and that’s when Cathy came up with an ingeniously simple idea to fix the boat. She stuffed a plastic shopping bag through the gash which effectively slowed the leak to a trickle.
We were not finished with the paddle yet. As we approached CP 7 the current was racing and as we made our move to shore we were pushed under some branches. Everyone had to lean to the right to keep from becoming decapitated and as we did the boat swamped again. We couldn’t get any traction since the rock was slippery. Mark had to let go of his paddle to hold onto the boat and keep his foot from becoming entangled in a rope while Zach held his paddle for someone on shore to grab, which they did. We were barely able to keep the boat from going down river without any passengers. The team that helped us bring our boat to shore had just swamped theirs before we arrived. After we had punched the CP and were getting into the boat, two other teams came in and did exactly the same thing we did. We were able to help then and their boats ashore, but we watched some of their gear float down the river. We then finished the paddle section with out any further difficulties with one less paddle. Cathy had the foresight to put our name on the paddle and another team found it down river and returned it to us the week after the race.
It was now time for the bike section and it was 130pm. We were an hour late of our expected arrival so we only had two and half hours to make it to the cutoff to be able to continue to the finish. W knew we still had a lot of single track to travel and still had to swim our bikes across the river. Our support crew worked as fast as they could to get us ready for that leg. In the middle of the bike leg was a three-mile run leg with two special events including the 12-foot wall climb. We knew that it would take us about an hour for this section. We also knew that if we did that section our race would be finished at the 4pm cutoff and we would never be able to make it to the finish line. We decided to skip that run section and thought it a good decision at the time because we knew there would be many teams not making the 4pm cutoff and no matter what we would be ahead of them at the finish. We learned several days after the race that the 4pm cutoff had been extended and we would have able to complete that section, however, we were not notified of that decision by the race officials during the race.
The bike to the finish was rather uneventful but long except for the river crossing with the bikes. We were each provided an inner tube and had to transport our bike, gear and ourselves about 300 meters across the river in the 55 degree water. Fortunately, the sun was out at the time. We put our bikes on top of the inner tube and our gear on top of that. We swam behind pushing the tubes across the river. After warming up on the other side we headed out to the cutoff CP and arrived there at 330pm. From there it was two more hours of riding on single and double track and paved road to the finish. Just to make things a little miserable it rained most of the two hours back.
We crossed the finish line in a little less than nine and a half hours.
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