The Savannah River/Augusta Canal Adventure Race was our last AR of 2007. We did this race as a 2-person team. We did race with our sometimes teammates Mark and Jeremy. The race started at 730am at the Savannah Rapids Pavilion in Augusta and had a 3pm cutoff to finish without penalties.
It started with a two-mile road run with our legs connected with a rope. Halfway through the run we picked-up our maps. The maps were pre-plotted, so we didn’t have to worry about doing that.
The first leg was about a 20-mile bike down the Augusta Canal Tow Path. We had to find four CPs on single track trails off the tow path and return to our starting point at the Pavilion. On the way to CP 2 we found a bunch of people looking for the CP but they were looking in the wrong place and we were nice enough to let them know. We decided to take a short cut to CP3. It was not a short cut, since the place we had to get access to the CP was fenced in and off limits/no trespassing. After wasting 20 minutes it was back to the trail to the next CP and the Transition Area.
On our return to the transition we did a 50-foot rappel down a cliff,
and a swim across the canal.
From there we transitioned to the canoe for the 10-mile paddle section which was longer than we expected. First we had to portage the canoe over a bridge to the river. Shortly after we started paddling we ran into a series of class 1 rapids. Cathy was nor happy. CP6 was on an island in the middle of the river with a nice muddy uphill climb to the punch.
After CP7 we had to portage back to the canal. To reach CP 8 we had to go through a lock on the canal. Then we had to go back upstream on the canal into a lake for the canoe take out. We decided to cut across a small sliver of land to get to the lake faster. Unfortunately, we had to portage our canoes another quarter mile before we could find a place to get into the lake where there were no weeds and grass growing. We landed at the canoe takeout at 1230 pm.
We had 2.5 hours to return to the finish and 7CP left to find. There was no way we would be able to find all in the allotted time so we decided to skip four of them. We went directly to CP14. It took almost an hour to reach it. CP15 was on an island we had to reach via river bouldering. We did a lot of running on the way back because our time was running out. After CP16 we ran hard the last mile as we watched the minute hands get closer and closer to 3pm. We crossed the finish line at 256pm. We finished 1st place in the two-person coed division.
No comments:
Post a Comment