There was lots to do at this TA and we were a little sad to say farewell to our support crew as we knew we wouldn't see them for a minimum on 7 hours. This next leg consisted of a bike section with a pack raft in the early stages and Gina and Jan carried pack rafts and paddles in big packs., that were quite heavy. I have some back issues so I chose to use a pack rack on my bike which worked a treat and meant I could fit Jan and Ginas' shoes on the pack rack easily.
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Off we go, Gina with her bunny ears and Jan with her antenna and Michele with a bike that was much heavier than mine even with a raft on it.
The Cowgirls are ready to ride. |
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| After a short ride we arrived at the pack rafting and began blowing up our rafts, we had two foot pumps one of which didn't work very well and a small electric pump, so it took quite a while to pump up the rafts, one of the rafts was easier to blow up by mouth than use the pumps. While we were getting our rafts set up we saw a number of different pack rafting methods...some more successful than others. One team tried riding with a blown up raft...this didn't work, one team had a pump the size of a car battery...it worked really well, one team didn't have paddles...that didn't work at all! |
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| Gina ready for the pack raft. Yes that's a dry bag on her foot. Gina had a very large oyster cut on her big toe and she had to make sure it stayed dry. As soon as we finished the race Gina went to hospital and the doctor cleaned out some pieces of shell but couldn't put any stitches in ( eventhough it could have used them ) as a flap of skin was missing, this is one tough cowgirl! |
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| We tied all the bikes onto one raft - note the towels between the bikes for protection, it doesn't hurt to go to the little bit of extra effort to protect our loved ones. |
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| Jan and Gina paddled one raft and towed the bikes |
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| Michelle and I paddled the other raft. We had to negotiate a 700 m channel through oyster leases, luckily it wasn't very windy but the rafts were very hard to steer and it took a long time to complete the rafting. |
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| Some local blokes were set up for a long weekend of camping right where we had to get out of the water, the sun was about to go down and we were starting to get cold so we opted for the easy deflation method - Gina stabbed the rafts and you can see by the smile she enjoyed it! |
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| Back on the bikes for the long ride out to the night rogaine via some nice big hills that helped warm us up. On one of these hill we found a very large, very wet salamon shoe so I strapped it to my pack and as luck would have it found the team that was missing it before they headed out on the rogaine - you're welcome.! This was just one of many things found on the tracks but much more interesting than an accidentally dropped energy gel packaging that tells all adventure racers they are going the right way. |
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