SRACAR 2008

 The Savannah River/Augusta Canal Adventure Race was our last AR of 2008. We competed in this race as a 2-person team; although we did race with our sometimes teammates Mark and Jeremy the entire race. The race started at 7am at the Savannah Rapids Pavilion in Augusta and had a 3pm finish deadline without penalty. The penalty was one CP for each 15 minutes late. The objective of the race was to acquire the most CPs by the cutoff; so there was no penalty for CPs missed or skipped.

We started with a two-mile trail/road run. Halfway through the run we picked-up our maps. The maps were pre-plotted, so we didn’t have to worry about doing that, which is not our favorite thing to do with too many chances for errors. We had to find one CP on the way back. It gave us a short pause since it was high up in a tree and we had to climb the tree to punch the passport.

The first leg was a 15-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. We had a little delay with one CP that was slightly misplaced, otherwise that leg went smoothly.

From there we transitioned to the canoe for a long paddle section. The first paddle CP was down a creek that was off the canal. Then we had to hike through a swampy area to the area of the CP. We were looking for the CP and walked within 20 feet of it, but missed it since the orange of the orienteering marker blended in with the orange of some temporary fencing next to it. We retraced our path and then went back toward the fence and finally found it. However, it cost us some valuable time. When we returned to the canoes we decided to skip the two portages and two CPs on the river due to the 3pm cutoff. Cathy was delighted since she doesn’t like to portage or paddle through rapids.

We still had a long paddle to the takeout. When we reached the lake off the canal where the canoe takeout was located we had a lot of headwind to fight. Then we had to paddle to the end of the lake to get to CP 9. This required us to paddle through some thick river vegetation under two bridges. We had to fight our way through the vegetation going to and returning from the CP. Finally, we made it to the takeout after way too long in the canoe without a break.

By our timing we needed to be at the canoe take out by 1230pm to have time to finish before the 3pm cutoff. It was 12:24pm when we took the canoe out of the water. We had about 10 miles to travel by foot to finish. We immediately decided to skip CP10 because it was an out and back and would take 30-40 minutes. We went directly to the rappel or so we thought. It was actually an ascent with a big backlog of teams waiting to go up so we decided to skip that as well because of the time constraint we had. By then we had less than two hours to acquire the other 4 CPs and finish. First we went to CP12 which was on a rope bridge

Then CP 13 which required a short climb up a tree on a rope ladder

Then CP 14 which required crossing over rocks to an island on the river.

Cp 15 was in a gully and CP16 was under a bridge. As we found each CP the clock continued to tick. At CP16 we had 20 minutes left to finish. We ran the entire distance back arriving at the finish line 4 minutes before the deadline. From there we went to the zip line across the canal. (That was not on the clock.)