Cyclepath Adventure Racing

We woke up early on Sunday and drove down to Joe Grant’s County Park for the Bay Area Orienteering Club’s Rogaine (Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance) meet, “for those unfamiliar with this type of event, teams of 2 or more participants are launched in a mass start to find orienteering markers distributed over a wide area. The markers are assigned point values, with highest values assigned to those markers that are hardest to reach. Each team’s goal is to visit whatever markers they can reach within the time allotted, in whatever order they like, to maximize their point total. If they return to the finish (typically the same as the start) after the time limit expires, they will lose points for each minute of overtime.”

Cyn and I were looking at this as a training event and not a race. We’ve been fortunate to travel/race with; Randy Franklin, Brandon Nugent (who was in attendance with team mate Chuck Fancher) and John Turner through the recent AR season and it was time to put some of the navigation skills learned during these lessons to practical application. Competitors were allowed to open their maps eight minutes prior to the start in order to plot various courses. We planned our course around what we considered a doable route, not one designed to accumulate points. Our goals were to learn as we go, find as many control points as possible in the allotted seven hours and interpet map to land features as much as possible even if that meant giving up points. Most of all have fun!

As it turns out we found every CP we chose to acquire, including two clean cross country attempts, with only two hick ups during the entire event. Each of the hick ups revolved around seeing other teams in the vicinity and making faulty assumptions. We had opportunity to do some compass navigation, map interpretation and travel over poison oak infested land. With the season being fall the oak was easily identifiable and thus avoidable, unless you happen to be me; then the evil stuff reaches out and grabs you! The local Adventure Race community represented well. Results can be accessed through the following link.
http://baoc.org/wiki/Results/2006/Joe_Grant_Rogaine

This past Saturday, Cyn and I competed in the Wavechaser paddle series. The race was staged out of the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club and was the first of their winter series. Racers had a choice of three races; the novice course was confined to the inside the harbor, the short course was estimated to be slightly less than 6 miles with the majority of it reaching out into the ocean and the long course (experts only) took place off shore.

Cyn and I opted for the short course. We were the only traditional kayak in attendance, which had us feeling a bit like outsiders. Most of the boats racing were outrigger canoes (ORC) with some surf skis spattered amongst them. All were high tech with carbon and Kevlar composites. We were way out of our league and didn’t think our Seda fiberglass tandem would match up well.

The race started with our sterns near the shoreline. Cyn and hung back (in a second row) thinking our hull speed would be slower. We didn’t want to get in the way of the faster boats. 53 boats were at the starting line. Within the first 10 strokes of the gun going off a guy in an ORC decided to go swimming (ahh, memories of last year’s futura). Much to our surprise, our hull speed held up well with the ORC. We dropped/lost our line/placement several times because we were being bumped by some ORC.

We took the right hand turn out of the harbor to open sea and raced to the first green (channel marker) buoy about ¾ of a mile away. The swells were higher than what we are used to paddling in the SF bay, but not too bad. A wind was blowing towards the Northwest off the shoreline, which made for some interesting seas. The white caps were blowing opposite the swells.

We found ourselves in the front half of the pack as we rounded the buoy. Everything shifted for us, instead of just training we realized we could do fairly well and the competitive juices kicked in. We headed to a buoy near the shore (about a 2-mile stretch) and passed some more teams prior to rounding and heading back to the green buoy. We held our position on this leg and then passed another team on the way into the harbor.

The final half mile was interesting because we needed to paddle like crazy to avoid being caught by two boats that were pushing hard! We held them off and finished finished 16^th out of 53 overall. We were the third mixed couple to cross and first within our division (only us).

The event offered up a great barbeque and social after the race. We partook of the festivities prior to fighting the pumpkin festival traffic heading home. It was all good this day.

 Results can be viewed here:  http://www.wavechaser.com/results/2007/HMB_WC_1_SHORT_102106.pdf.pdf

On Saturday I hooked up Thomas Bastis to compete in the West Coast’s largest, most popular, and (according to race promoters) definitely most fun sea kayaking event of the year! Widely considered the “Bay To Breakers” of sea kayaking; the annual Sea Trek Regatta and Paddle-a-thon is a chance for the Bay Area paddling community to share in a fun and challenging day of paddling on San Francisco Bay and raise money for Environmental Traveling Companions’ (ETC) accessible outdoor adventure programs. All event proceeds went to support Environmental Traveling Companions (ETC), a Bay Area nonprofit organization providing accessible outdoor adventures for people with disabilities and inner-city youth.We ran into Brian and Guy of the Dirty Avocados who were each racing solo. Cyn was in attendance (arm still healing) taking pictures and hauling our heavy packs around (I mean training.)

The start was about a quarter mile wide and three courses were established as follows:

· An out and back to Richardson’s Bay
· Loop around Angel Island
· Loop around Alcatraz/Angel Island

The start had the most kayaks I’ve ever seen in one place, from sleek and fast surf skis to the slow ponderous cobra tandems. I’m guessing nearly a hundred kayaks were on the water. Thomas and I were racing in a traditional tandem and chose the Alcatraz route as the torture de jour.

Being new to this sport we were uncertain as to the best starting position for our course. We compromised and started in the middle, picking a line that would allow us to use the ebb tide as a ferry. Once the race gun went off, it didn’t take long to realize most of the kayaks doing our course were well to the Sausalito side of us. I’m not certain they had the best line but they were able to draft each other. About half way to Alcatraz we spotted our competition. A team that hailed from Puerto Rico was in a Kevlar Seda Tango, we were in the faithful flying Platypus (Necky Nootka). They beat us to the island by about 100 meters. We were determined to make this a race and dug in as hard as we were able. We caught them by the time we rounded the island and started drafting.

In my mind I thought the race was won. We could save energy by staying in their slip stream and then out sprint them at the finish when they faded. The problem was they didn’t cooperate. On the back side of Angel Island they pushed and we couldn’t answer. We lost their slip stream and slowly faded over the remainder of the course until we were a minute behind at the finish.

We completed the course in less than 2 hours, and held up really well against these single sport specialists. We tried to convert some of the racers to the sport of AR, but there was little interest within this sub-culture.

It was a great day on the water.