In typical West Coast fashion, heavy fog sat over the lagoon and surrounding hills in the wee hours of Sat morning. On the banks of Langebaan lagoon was the usual hive of activity as competitors went about plotting from master maps and getting boats off and bikes ready. All the navigators were hoping for the mist to stay, at least for the 15km paddle, but sadly it lifted revealing big sand banks and a heavy outgoing tide. So it was on a perfectly still day in bright sunshine that the hooter finally went and teams raced out over the sand flats with boats on shoulder to find some water.
The edge of the channel was deceiving with the shallow sand banks formed in waves making it look like the channel was closer than it looked. We had scouted before and our strategy was to run out onto the end of one of the peninsulas and thereby gain direct access to the channel. Not only did it work perfectly, we were the only competitive team to do so and gained an immediate 300m advantage as the other teams struggled to get boats going in shallow water.
It was full steam ahead around the course, knowing full well that Martin Dreyer and Jeanie Bomford (Team Land Rover Gear/USN) were going to be very fast on the paddle. True to form Martin and Jeanie blitzed the paddle and came in a good 25min ahead of us. However we had spent a good 20min searching for PC 15 which had been accidentally been plotted on the master maps in the wrong place! Team Land Rover Gear/USN didn’t get this PC.
After a very quick transition onto the bike we de decided to collect all the PC’s en route to the hike transition, leaving us with only a straightforward 12km dash back to the finish. The first PC was a stunner, right on top of a viewpoint overlooking the whole lagoon and surrounding nature reserve. All the bike PC’s were very straight forward after roughly 24km we found ourselves at the run/hike transition.
The run was a blast, the highlight being the ‘roaring’ dunes – although not roaring in winter, it was still a spectacular experience running across pearl white sand-dune ridges with great views all around. From the sand dunes to the next PC there was an option to short cut the corner and shave 1.2km off the distance. So we tried it and all I have to say is if you think fynbos is ‘painbos’ then you need to try running through the bush in the West Coast National Park – it makes fynbos seem mild in comparison. Suffice to say the two routes were probably equal in time, just a little more blood spilt on the short cut.
The rest of the hike was very straight forward leaving us with just a short 12km back to the finish. We happened to get on the bikes just at the same time as Team Gust, but in the transition I overheard they had left out PC 3 on the bike leg and still needed to claim it on the return leg. PC 3 was an 800m dog leg up a short hill 2km before the finish, so we knew that all we had to do was stick with them on the bike and when they turned off to get PC 3 we would get ahead. To our added advantage they missed the turn off to PC 3 and had to back-track another 400m on-top of the extra climb!
This second win in the men’s pairs gives us, Team K-Way/Montrail, full points so far in the series, leaving only the final at the Palmiet River Festival to go.
Our thanks to Ugene for another fantastic race experience. To all the sponsors of this event, it may be relatively small event but the heart is big, thank you all for giving such great prizes. Thank you also to National Parks for allowing this race to happen, we certainly saw a piece of the park that we had never experienced before.
And finally a big thank you to our sponsors K-Way and Montrail for their support.
