Luminescent AR

The summer months are hot in Florida, so Greg from Pangea Adventure Racing moves the races to the night.  The first of the two night races is in July, and is named the Luminescent in honor of the bio luminescent plankton that can be seen glowing in the intra-coastal waterways along Florida’s east coast.  Bill and I, along with our friend Gerald, raced once again as We Blame Javan. 

Bill and Gerald have raced together once before, but this was our first time as a trio.  During pre-race, it was obvious that Gerald was going to make for a great teammate.  He had pretty extensive experience in the area we were to be paddling – Mosquito Lagoon, and he also has a lot of experience with navigation in general.  He  has a very calm and easy going manner, as well as a logical and analytic mindset, all of which are beneficial in adventure racing.

The prologue to this race was a bit different than usual.  There were eight controls scattered throughout the park near the main TA, all of which had a corresponding letter attached.  The objective was to determine the eight letter word that the letters spelled out, return to the TA with the correct word, and receive the boat passport.  We found letters 6-8 (k-t-o-n) and quickly realized the word must be plankton. No need to find the other four so we rushed to the TA and were one of the first teams on our way out to the paddle.

Paddling with three people in a canoe can be an advantage speed-wise, but it can be a bit of a challenge as well. The elite teams are allowed to bring their own paddles, so instead of using regular canoe paddles, most teams use  double bladed kayak paddles instead.  We had never paddled together as a team before, so getting our strokes coordinated was the first order of business.  Gerald and I clashed paddles about every third stroke for the first few minutes.  Once we got in sync, we paddled pretty well.  It was designed to be a long paddle section, and there was a four hour cutoff.  We used all but 15 minutes of those four hours and collected 8/10 controls.  One we just missed, the other we bailed on due to lack of time.

After checking in at the TA, we hopped on our bikes to finish out the race.  Basically, the bike leg was split into two sections, north and south, and the trek was located in the middle.  We chose to go to the north section first, easily collecting all six of the points available.

The Trek TA was located at the water treatment facility for Volusia County.  Here we turned in our bike passport, and picked up the maps and passport for the trek. The first CP was fairly easy, but from there it took us a while to get our bearings in the orange groove that we started out in.  Once we got that next CP, and realized exactly where we were, it was a pretty fun experience traversing trails along groves of oranges and eucalyptus. From the treatment facility, we took off down the road a ways to find the remaining trek CP’s.  We collected three of them (which duplicated as bike CP’s – good to know exactly where they were) and bailed on the last two as we were getting short on time.

After returning our trek passport and retrieving our bikes and bike passport, we headed off for the last leg of our journey.  We knew we would not have time for all six of the CP’s in the south sections, but we knew we should easily get three or four.  The first three we picked up were very easy, as they were the same points as three of the CP’s on the trek.  We got them quickly and headed for the next one.  The clue was “culvert” and we had to shoot a bearing, but were not told how far from the waypoint the CP would be.  Bill had his odometer running and at 1.4k we came upon a culvert.  We were allowed to keep one person on the road with the bikes, so I stayed while Bill and Gerald went hunting.  After a bit of tramping around, they came out of the woods empty handed.  Bill wasn’t sure we went far enough up the road, so we went a little further and quickly came to another culvert.  Again, much tramping around and no CP.  At this point we only had about 20 minutes left to get back to the main TA to finish on time.  We decided that it was better to lose the CP than be late, so we hightailed it on our bikes as fast as we could.  It was a long ride on the road back to the main TA, but we made it with about seven minutes to spare.  Bill and I were actually feeling a bit dejected at this point, as we were anticipating a fairly low finishing place.  Turns out that though we made a few mistakes and we *could* have done better, many other teams were in the same boat.  We ended up finishing 5/14 teams, and in the end I felt really good about that!

Points recap:

Paddle – 8/10 points found

Trek – 10/12 points found

Bike – 9/12 points found

Total — 27/34 points found in 7:53.00