The Texas Water Safari: How bad can it be..?

So...I'm a little late starting this blog. Yea, I was suppose to get this rolling a few weeks ago. What can I say? I'm easily distracted, I procrastinate (severely), and I actually do get tied up with other things from time to time. Enough excuses?

With that out of the way, I'll just jump right to it. For the next three months, this blog will be all about the “World's Toughest Canoe race” a.k.a the Texas Water Safari. Because I'm behind schedule here, I'll make a brief (half-assed) attempt at explaining what the race is and, in the next post or two, how the hell me and Matt got ourselves into this and what we're doing to prepare/train.

The Texas Water Safari is a 262 mile, non-stop, mostly unsupported river race. You have 100 hours to finish. The course starts on the San Marcos River and proceeds 85 miles to the Guadalupe River. After that, you're practically on the home stretch, just 177 more miles down the Guadalupe, into San Antonio Bay, and across the bay to Seadrift. No sweat.

You sure this is the World's Toughest Canoe race? Well, who knows really, but there are a few obstacles involved. Portages. Lots of portages. Portages in which you lift, drag, drop your 125+ lb (in our case), fully loaded canoe over and around dams, long jams, shallow sections and the occassional fallen tree. Speaking of fallen trees, the upper San Marcos has plenty of them. Some times, you just do your best to steer and bounce your way through the mine field. Other times, you don't see the little bastards until you slam into them and some one falls out of the boat. If you're really lucky, the tree will stretch across the entire river, leaving you in the shitty enviable position of deciding exactly where you want to smash into it. After that, it's just a matter of clearing the spiders out of the boat (there are ALWAYS spiders) and figuring out how to heave the heavy piece of crap over the log, before it gets swamped.

With this in mind it's fairly safe to say that the first 40 miles of the San Marcos are the most technical. If you're going to gouge, hole, or seriously damage your boat, chances are, this is where you'll do it. The real downside here is that if you're inexperienced (like us) and slow (like us) and in a slow boat (like us) you don't have a very big margin of error. The 7:00 PM cut-off at mile 40 allows for 10 hours to cover the distance. Not exactly a fast pace, but one too many screw ups on the upper river and we might not recover the time.

So, back to the “mostly” unsupported part. Your team captain is allowed to give you water and ice...that's it. Everything else you need (including the required safety gear) must be in the boat. I'm not kidding, if you drop your paddle at a checkpoint and your team captain picks it up, technically, that paddle is now out of the race. In the past, water and ice weren't even allowed, you brought as much as you could and when that ran out, you just drank the river water like a big boy.

Another thing I should mention is sleep. Keep in mind, this is a non-stop river race. Sleep or not, you're still on the clock. Among the experienced racers there are no “set in stone” rules for sleeping. You do what ever works. Some sleep in the boat (one at a time), some sleep at checkpoints, and some sleep where ever the hell they can manage. The fast teams won't sleep, they finish the race in roughly 2 days or less (much less in high water). We'll have to sleep. Our goal for the first day is to clear the San Marcos and get to the Gonzales 183 checkpoint (90 miles). This would be a good start and would buy us a little (30 minutes to 1 hour) sleep time. Beyond this, we'll have to see how it goes. Ideally, we'll go for 20+ hours, then take a short nap. A few paddlers (way at the back of the pack) might stop for 4+ hour naps, but none of the racers recommend this. You really do want to finish this race as fast as possible and limit your exposure. If a 30 minute nap is enough for a re-charge, then that's all you'll need.

Day 2. This is a big focus for me. I'm anticipating that the real race will be on day 2. The first day will be tough, but exciting. The third day and beyond, we'll be thoroughly whipped and slogging through some long, slow sections of river, but we'll also smell the finish line. Day 2...will be a grind. Hot, humid, tired, sore. Checkpoint 5 (Gonzales 183) to checkpoint 6 (Hochheim 183) is almost 40 miles. Nice way to start the day. Checkpoint 8 (Cuero 236) to checkpoint 9 (Victoria City Park) is 40 miles. If we don't train properly we'll be hating life by this point. Hell, even if we DO train properly we'll be questioning what the f*** we're doing out there.

If you do a bit of reading on the safari (highly recommended, some great stories out there) you'll come across several other “points of interest” which I haven't mentioned. For the most part, these don't concern me...much. Alligators? Yep, seen plenty. Alligator gars? A little freaky, but nothing new. Giant banana spiders? I hate those damn things, but not a concern. Hallucinations on night 2? I told you there were some great stories. Hallucinations are a very real possibility, but again, they're not on my “oh-shit-what-if” list. A rough bay? Last year, San Antonio Bay was, by most accounts, as rough as it's ever been during the safari. Races were literally won and lost in the bay. The thing is, a good portion of these boats are NOT designed for wind or waves. They're designed with one specific purpose: going fast in a straight line. If I'm correct here, at least one paddler had to be rescued in the bay, which of course, results in disqualification. Many others camped out on land to wait for calmer conditions. Some walked their boat along the seawall or through the shallows to the finish line. If our boat has any positive quality (debateable) it's stability. A rough bay will require one hell of an effort from us to keep that boat moving straight and at a decent pace, but we should have no major issues staying upright. If we do, I'll blame Matt. Not to mention, this is a shallow bay. Other than the barge canal, you're looking at 2-3 feet of water in most places. Not exactly an open water voyage across the Atlantic. We'll have some means of bailing water and probably a home-made spray skirt, so we just need to keep the boat upright and moving.

I'm sure that I've left some things out here, but as I said, I'm a bit behind and will take another couple of posts just to catch up, so you'll hear it all sooner or later. Next post, I'll try to explain how we got into this and what we've done to our tank, I mean canoe. Oh, and I will eventually post some photos.