Hawkesbury Canoe Classic

Canoe Race: paddling 102.55 km in 18h:00m:44s

This is the final of the marathon canoeing trifecta; interestingly enough, we were sharing trailers with a team who are doing the 2011 Hawkesbury Classic as the start of theirs. They will do the Murray in December & finish with the Yukon next year. For obscure reasons, we're doing the shortest race last. In fact, there are only four of the Yukon team left, Liz, Angie, Tracey & Sue. The rest have retired from marathon paddling. Dilettantes :-)

This time the boat was an outrigger, the training boat for the Yukon. It's not so easy to transport; it has to be broken down into pieces, transported and then re-assembled. The aku (the 2 arms holding the actual outrigger) and the anu (the outrigger itself) are tied on with nylon rope, re-purposed inner tubes and/or gaffer tape. It seems weird, in a way, to be so low tech on a modern (fibreglass) boat, but the tying provides the right balance of strength and flexibility. A mechanical solution that worked as well would be hugely more expensive. (And these boats are already ridiculously expensive).

We stripped the boat down on Friday night & loaded it on to the trailer fro transport Saturday AM. Liz and I drove up to Windsor Friday night to spread the stress a little thinner, so at least on Saturday we woke up near the race start. One thing noticeably different about this event is that, because it's squeezed in over a weekend, there's no real chance to dedicate preparation time for it. Packing, sorting, checking, everything is squeezed in around work & whatever else. With, say, the Yukon, we had 4 days doing nothing except getting organised for the boat. Here, we had to be at the marshalling yards at 11:00 to re-rig the boat for the scrutineers. They didn't end up turning up until after 15:00; as is normal for these events, the big boats get - well, overlooked, so we spent 4 hours just hanging around a very hot (29 degrees) not particularly shady park.

Liz got bitten on her thigh by a bull-ant, not at all the right preparation for 18 hours of paddling. Sigh; nature, not entirely wonderful.


To the non-paddler, we might look like we're pretty serious, but in the marathon paddling community we are rank novices. People who do this regularly know where to park for maximum shade and minimum walking; they have fans, chairs, canopies. If we'd been scrutineered early, we'd probably have headed off to sit in an air-conditioned pub until the race start; regulars know that that is all an idle dream, so they bring their own waiting spaces. If you want to understand serious; one guy was paddling in his 35th instance of this race, at 70. Probably the oldest competitor was the 78 year old woman paddling with her 74 year old brother. It didn't look like it was their first race, either. Anyway, finally, paperwork and hanging around finished, the boat took off at 1630, in the "social" Brooklyn-or-bust version of the event. Cue final land crew meeting. Andrew off to buy water - I remember the Murray -, Brooke off to pick up Scott and swap cars, Antonia (Tony) to pick up some groceries, and Martin to head off to Cattai, the 1st checkpoint. It doesn't matter how much planning you do, there's a few last minute things that have to be done. My last last minute thing was to pick up driving instructions for the checkpoints, lucky since Tony was using the supplied GPS coordinates, and at Cattai they ended her up on the wrong side of the river.

This is just a glimpse of the entries lined up waiting for the start; most of the boats aren't very big ... More than 530 paddlers were entered, so that must be around 300+ boats, because there were certainly plenty of singles to offset the larger boats. More than 40 withdrew - even though it's significantly the shortest of the events we've paddled in in the last year, the night aspect, combined with the tides, makes it a long way from easy.

I don't have photos from the checkpoints. Cattai was not particularly significant; no-one stops there unless there is some mini-crisis, something overlooked, an

equipment failure. It was still light when the team passed through, looking good, and ahead of schedule. We had a lot of problems working out a timetable, primarily because of the tides which are significantly less predictable in their details, especially up a river, than I expected. Plus, there's the problem of the relationship between the tide and the current; plus the question of how many & how longs the breaks are going to be. We did have a pretty good idea of pace from the training runs, and I knocked up a spreadsheet to model a few possibilities. It was sort of OK - the tide was stronger than I modelled, the team took all their breaks at the checkpoints, we actually missed them arriving at Wiseman's Ferry (somewhat embarrassing) by 10 minutes, although at least we had the food hot once we tracked them down - but I was right to about 10 minutes with their arrival at Mooney-Mooney.                                                                                                                            

We proceeded in a leisurely fashion, pausing for a picnic dinner at Cattai, before heading to Sackville. At Sackville we had to park on a football oval that was, oddly to my mind, at the top of a hill. From there it was onto a minibus shutttle to the edge of the river in the middle of a caravan park. The beach for pulling up boats was about 20 meters long. 300+ boats; 20 meters. Something of a challenge. There's a standing instruction for the HCC land crews to not use lights so as to not to disturb the night vision of the paddlers. Did I mention the nearly vertical sand bank leading down to the aforementioned beach? Sackville was a pretty fair impersonation of total chaos, and we  hadn't managed to bring all the right bags for all the paddlers, so it was a bit tense. No-one could find the toilet, a couple of people nearly broke their ankles getting up the bank in the hopes of finding a toilet and we had a lot of trouble getting the boat off the mud - a big cheer here for Brooke who had to hurl herself into the water both to get the boat in and out. Then we had to grab everything out of the mud and queue for a minibus back, re-pack the cars in the dark and head off to Wiseman's Ferry. It sounds pretty bad, and it was pretty hectic, but the fact is that the Hawkesbury is NOT a very accessible river, and all the access is on private land. Really - and especially at Wiseman's - it's pretty damn generous of the caravan park inhabitants to put up with a nighttime invasion of 300-odd boats, 500+ paddlers, and probably 400-ish landcrew.

We did a much better job of setting up at Wisemans Ferry, although we had to park a long way from the beach an lug a lot of stuff a long way. Most of us managed to get an hour's sleep; somehow though, while cooking, we managed to miss the boat number being called as it passed through the checkpoint. (Due to the tide they arrived 15 minutes before the earliest point I thought was possible, so we didn't have anyone down at the landing) Fortunately the magic of mobile technology reunited us with the team, and apart from Liz missing some gloves, it was a very successful turnaround. Probably took a bit long, but everyone left in a very optimistic mood. They decided not to stop at the final pre-finish checkpoint (Spencer), which was a BIG relief to me, because the Spence checkpoint looked worse on paper than Sackville. Also, some rather smart navigation by Scott & Brooke meant that we could drive to Mooney Mooney without crossing Wiseman's Ferry, which, you can imagine, was somewhat busy. Mind you, it was a scary, scary road. Some of the hairpins had a recommended speed of 5 kph, and they were not joking. Any faster and you were on the wrong side of the road. OK, not a big problem at 4AM, but I'd hate to go along there at peak hour. It's not that easy to do 5 kph in a diesel in 2nd, and it's not that easy to change down into 1st.

We got into Mooney Mooney just in time to miss the last 2 spaces in the car park ( I can say that because Martin & Tony got them). I probably should have slept at this stage, but I find it hard to sleep at the end of a race. We had a great setup, we commandeered a picnic table next to the coffee tent, so I wandered around keeping an eye on things.

There was a dramatic moment when their number went up on the "30 minutes a way" board, but it turned out to be a transcription error. I didn't think they could be in before 9:00 AM, and 9:30 was my official estimate, but I wan't quite sure about the tide. They figured to catch some of the late low tide; it was a question of how much of it, and how strong it would be. They'd got in to Wiseman's very early, absolutely at their best possible time, so I didn't want to miss them twice in one race.

Fianlly at 9:00 we got the word they were 30 minutes out, and they really were quick in that last stretch. Sunrise, and the sight of the finish must have woken them up. In the end, their time was 17 hours, 4 minutes; 2 hours better than our pre-race estimates. A big success.

Good to finish. Smart move to sleep before driving.

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