Costal Assault Adventure Race 2002

The Coastal Assault was our first attempt at a multi-day race. Jenn and Jeremy volunteered to be our support team. The race started on Saturday morning with about 31 teams at Hooters in Casselberry, outside Orlando. The finish line was 110 miles away on the beach in Daytona.First up was a 20-mile bike with a police escort.

 

 We arrived at the first transition point in about an hour and quickly began portaging our kayak a half-mile to the EconRiver.  Unlike the BEAR our wheels worked great and we got to the river easily. Little did we know that 16 hours later we would still be kayaking.

 It took about three hours to navigate the Econ River, which took us into the St John's River/Puzzle Lake. We expected to see some alligators bit never did until the next day.  There was a lot of flooding in the area, so PuzzleLake was way up, as well as the river and other lakes in the area. There was a head wind blowing as we made our way southeast to CP 2. It was slow going but we made much better progress than the canoes and passed many of them.

After three hours on the lake and weaving our way through narrow passages we arrived at CP2 in 14^th place. Here we had to separate and Cathy went on a 12-mile run to our meeting place at a bridge. Zach had to paddle the kayak back the nine miles to the bridge. He teamed up with another team's paddler and the two of them got both boats to the bridge in three hours. It was dark by then and Cathy arrived a short time later.

We now had to continue up the St John's River into Lake Harney and at the northern end of the lake enter back into the St. John's River channel, make a right on another river and a left into a canal for a two plus hour paddle to CP3 and transitioning to our bikes. Little did we know that we would never make it to CP3. It was a three plus paddle across LakeHarney and we paddled most of the way with another team, Scooby-Doo. We arrived at the location we thought should be the entrance to the river but it wasn't.  Because of the flooding the maps were pretty much useless to try to figure out our location. For the next three hours we searched fruitlessly for the river. We lost Scooby-Doo but during the three hours ran into a least a dozen other teams looking for the river.

 

 

At 3:30 in the morning we pulled into a landing with two other boats to try to figure out where we were. There was an airboat there with gator poachers. The boys had lived in the area all their lives and no two of them could give us the same directions to the river.  About the time they disappeared a deputy sheriff came up looking for poachers thinking we might have been them until he saw us closer up. By this time we had decided that we couldn't find the river until morning. Our options were to sleep in the kayak on the shore or in the lake. Neither option was good. On the shore we had to be wary of mosquitoes and gators, especially since there were two sitting 20 feet away from us at the time. In the lake we would not know where we would drift to and could be run over by an airboat.  We ended up sleeping in the back cargo space of an Aztec, which was the support crew of one of the other teams at the landing. As soon as we got in the back of the Aztec we were not allowed to finish the race since we had received outside help. There were not any other good options at the time. We were really cramped but were safe from the gators and mosquitoes. At daylight Jenn and Jeremy arrived to bring us to the finish line. At the finish line we found out that only 14 teams made it to CP3. Of those 14 teams only five finished the race. It wasn't the first race we didn't finish and it won't be the last, but it is always disappointing not to finish.