Despite having the purple turtle K2 in the backgarden, we chose to use surfski’s on the lagoon. Fair enough, you don’t want to tip a K2 when you are 3km from shore. The masterplan of staying at Yzers the night before backfired when we realized we were a helmet short, luckily we have connections and a spare was shipped to the race early next morning.
Ok now, Langebaan, is actually not 20-25 mins from Yzerfontein; somehow more like 45. Like rockstars we arrived 15 mins before the scheduled start, and somehow got ready in time. There were 45 teams running around getting everydamn everything in order. The cool things were that; being a peach of a day not all the required thermal gear was mandatory, and some teams were given GPS tracking units from Sportstrack. Fancy pancy as spectators could follow race on a laptop/big screen!
A monkey see monkey do approach to the paddle saw us following Landrover man Martin Dreyer to PC16, a wreck severely lost from some terrible navigation (not dissimilar to the stuff witnessed on the day in the mist!). With single ski’s we had no chance of keeping up with the leaders, but lead the chasing pack to come in about 5th. The logical second PC15 was not where it should have been, and after the mess with it being disallowed we were now pretty much last after ditching skis to run to the PC on foot. Anyway, now sitting so far behind meant we got to overtake teams for the remainder of the race in a game of catch-up, always a mental boost.
We came into the transition after a seriously painful portage, carrying canoes of any form is soooo overrated. Even worse, the precious map was somehow lost by yours truly! I managed to talk my way into getting a spare from the admin lady, so lucky we were at the transition. Onto the MTB leg we picked up quite a few places, but the PC’s were all pretty obvious. We all missed the sneaky route of saving half the bike PC’s for the return leg after the run. This would have given a lot more fast tar riding, but came down to not planning the course and just blindly following the numbers like sheep.
The run leg ended up being quite a meneer. We opted for the sand dune first, it was a wild goose chase on soft dunes, and not easy to find the PC. We had to put in some walking on this leg as we were now into the fifth hour of the race, but were at least on the way home. We came in with the seasoned Team Tension Structures, and headed out first with our support crew waving pom poms for us from the Geelbek restaurant deck.
On the slog home we let them pass us, but they remained in sight. Then disaster struck, as they pulled up with a broken seatpost bolt and we flew past. With maybe just a km to go, we followed the wrong turnoff, fooled by some MTB tracks and ended up on the beach. Looking at the return route we saw two teams had followed us, and had just leapfrogged as we all turned around. Hard lesson to learn that you can never let your guard down and lose concentration.
We pulled into the finish at 6th overall, but 4th in the male pairs - Not bad considering all the mistakes made, and out of a large field of 45. This put us just out of the prizes, but at least in the points. Jamie had come within 3 minutes of winning the hydration pack he’d bought the day before. We made up in the lucky draw as we won a pair of fancy sunnies and a headlamp between us. The patriotism in us got to the Tropicana bar next to Mykonos for the last quarter of the rugby and extremely well earned sundowners. All in all a good day out, see you at Palmiet Gravity Festival for #3 in August.
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