Last early morning training paddle.

My last early morning paddle. Raining but not that cold this morning at 5.30. Difficult to stay dry while I put on my spray jacket and skirt. Worse in reverse, trying to get into dry gear in the rain.

This is going to be the biggest problem in this race. If its raining setting up the tent and more importantly keeping my sleeping bag dry. Once wet there will be no opportunity to dry it. I have a very light fly, that I will set up first. Then I can pitch my tent under it and  keep the tent door dry. In the morning before I get out of the tent I will stuff my sleeping bag in a dry bag. Put my spray jacket on in the rain if I have to. My thermals will be wet after an hours paddling anyway.

Picked up my maps this afternoon, the printer had stuffed it up, bound on the wrong side, and only copied in black and white. Laminated and everything, all 104 of them. No time to redo them. So there is something back on the list. I will try and color them on the plane or get them redone in Whitehorse.

Going through the first aid kit, to see if I have everything. Lots of stretch sticky bandage, Band-Aid,things for chafe and blisters, and saline solution for if I get Yukon water in my eyes. I am carrying also a small boat repair kit. In the repair kit is a small tube of high strength, epoxy glue that sets almost instantly, even in the wet. I have another tube in the first aid kit, if I happen to break off a tooth.

One More Cold Morning

Last cold morning 5.15am at Clontarf. Then I can wash and dry all the paddling clothes.

I will be taking three sets. I wear SKINS under everything, that except for a pair of Budgee smugglers. I find the SKINS stop muscle stiffness and aching, especially the next day. So paddling 7 days in a row makes that important. Also the skins wick off sweat, so you skin stays dry. After 18 hours paddling they are going to stink a bit.

Over the Skins I wear pure New Zealand made Merino thermals (from Mountain Designs). Top and bottom, full length. Sometimes 2 sets on the top. These are soaked from sweat and condensation after paddling an hour or so, so wool is absolutely essential because it stays warm even when wet.

I wear a light spray jacket over the SKINS and thermals, and a pair of quick dry board shorts. Slippery ones, for rotation with no pockets, or seams that would chafe during rotation.

I wear a skirt all the time to keep water off my legs and the inside of the Kayak warm. The PFD also helps keep my top warm. In North Canada and Alaska they get afternoon thunderstorms with freezing rain, so I have a big Parka that I keep behind my seat in the cockpit. This I can put on over the lot PFD and all.
I also carry a light weight but pure wool jumper to put on if it gets super super cold.

I don't wear gloves, they give me blisters. I Vaseline my hands each morning before I start and that stops them getting soft with the water and blistering up. I do have some woollen gloves with a palm and finger grip, but I will only wear them if it is extremely cold.

On my feet I have pure woollen socks inside neoprene booties. On my head I have again a pure wool, Icebreaker skull cap under a paddling cap. The paddling cap keeps the paddle splash out of my eyes.

So the routine each night when we stop will be to get out of the wet gear and put on "fresh" skins and thermals and sleep in them. I will hang  that days gear to dry over night. Remember it is sort of 24 hours sun over there.
I have to hang that  "smelly washing" a bit away from the tent because it will attract bears. I reckon if I get a picture of a bear with my SKINS it will be worth a fortune so probably I wont hang them too far from the tent and hang bells on the clothes line to wake me up, and keep the camera handy.

I will probably take a pair of Crocs to walk around the camp site in and generally chase bears with my camera.

My list of things to do seems to be getting longer rather than shorter. I broke one of my front teeth yesterday. I kept the bit and tried to Superglue it back on but that did not work. Probably wrong glue. So I had to add to my list, going to the dentist.

I tried to get a look on the label of the glue the dentist used. You know why the dentists have all their evil instruments behind you. It not so the instruments you cant see wont scare you. It is so you don't get to see what brand of glue they use.

Medibank could save a lot if they advertised on their web site what glue the dentists use. Then we could all glue our own teeth back on.

Paddling the equivalent of Sydney to Alice Springs

This is very scary. I put a map of Australia over Alaska at the same scale and found out we are paddling from Sydney to Alice Springs, and we hope to do that in under 6 days. The driving alone is a bit of an expedition. Starting at Anchorage, ie Adelaide, we drive to Sydney via Alice Springs and back again to Adelaide.Follow us on this blog or on the Yukon 1000 web site. Our"team" name is "Ausy Toms"

More detail about Steve's run across the Sahara

MARATHON DES SABLE

*240km through the Sahara Desert
*They say it's one of the toughest foot races on earth.
*You carry all your own food and get 9litres of water per day.
*My overall ranking was 179th of 731 starters with an aggregate time of 34hrs 50min.
*The race winner, Lahcen Ahansal of Morocco, won his 8th consecutive race in a time of 17hr 14min (Freak)
*146 competitors withdrew from the race. This was the toughest MDS on record. Only 46 withdrew in 2005 and a mere 34 in 2004.
*I lost 4-5kg over the 7 days
*I started the race with a pack weighing over 10.5kg. Including 1.5L of water, I was carrying almost 12kg on the first day.
*I stopped at only a few Check Points throughout the entire race. It was a huge physiological boost to pass on average about 20 runners at each Check Point who were either looking after the feet or grabbing a bit of shade getting organised oe resting up for the next leg.
*62 competitors were administered with IVs (drips) - a record.
*An Irish competitor, John Cahill, was repatriated to a hospital in France after collapsing from hypothermia on Day 3. He spent several days in a coma but word is that he’s on the mend and doing well. 2 others fell into coma's but were revived and stabilized without repatriation.
*The 3 Japanese models/actresses were very tough. They all made it.

The Steve Pizzey Story

Rough Water and Wash Riding.

This is me negotiating Five Finger Rapids in 2006. The water here is traveling at about 15 kilometers per hour. We hope to average about 15.5 k/hr, speed through the water at about 9k/hr. Which is not very fast but we have to keep that up foy 18hrs. The Horizon Flyer goes nicely at that speed with no real strain on lower back or hands. Over 9k/hr my hands begin to blister up.

We get a big speed bonus over this section of the river, clicking along as fast as 24k/hr. Any wind on the river, particularly against the current picks up a steep chop, and this river in many places is over a kilometer wideand straights up to 10. A bit like Sydney Harbour in a southerly and a fast in coming tide.  While it is tempting to get out of the wind and chop, that is where the fast current is and to go fast, you need to stay with it.

I will focus my last days training on paddling in rougher water.I had a bit of a session this morning with super coach Yanda Nossiter (www.ipaddle.com.au) doing a bit of diamond wash riding. That is with four boats. One in the front, two each side and a bludger tucked in behind the lot. I wonder when teams of kayaks will be doing these races a bit like the Tour De France, where the top cyclists are towed for most of the race, the rest of the team sharing the load up front and letting the top guy go out toward the finish of each stage. There are Voyager Canoes in this race, with 10 paddlers, so good to get tucked in behind and pulled along. But I won't be too confident they know where they are going. In 2007 in the Yukon River Quest, near the finish, I followed a Voyager into some slow water for about an hour, when I woke up that they were going the wrong way and got out of there up a side shute back to faster water.. They finished a couple of hours after me. I asked them why they went that way. They reconded they had no hope of getting a place in their division so they took a slow path looking for moose.

These adventure races are all about lists of things to do, and lists of gear. Silly things, like a dry bag for my Passport. A dry bag for the toilet paper, and how I organize a pillow for the night. That will probably be my sleeping bag stuff bag, with a jumper inside it. I need to run a gas bottle for the micro stove right out so I can calculate how many gas bottles I need to take. (We can only afford ten minutes for cooking dinner and breakfast.)

Maps and Rough water training for Lake Laberge.

I spent the morning finalizing the maps. I am using a combination of Mike Rourke's river maps and Topographical maps which I got from Mac's Fireweed Books in Whitehorse and Google Earth.

What is critical racing on a river as fast as this is knowing where you are. Finding the fast water and the shortcuts. Paddle smart and you don't have to paddle hard. There are 110 maps, each map covers 15 to 20 kilometers. About an hours paddling. I am reducing them to A5 size, to make them manageable on my lap, putting them into sets and getting them laminated and bound, At some points in the river the river basin is 10 kilometers across, with 6 or 7 different channels and the best channel up to a kilometer wide.
Taking the wrong channel will find us in very slow water. So I am clearly marking the way through with the fastest channel. Which is not necessarily the widest.

I was able to use my times on the river in the three times I did the Yukon River Quest, at 760 kilometers that is less than half this race, but I have also used as a comparison the times of last years competitors, and in particular for the second half. So to navigate we will use both time distance down the river from known points, as well as way-points, Latitude and longitude. So I know where we should be time wise the whole race. Provided we can maintain those speeds.

One critical time on the river is Lake Laberge. Lake Laberge is only about 2 hrs after the start, it is about 4 kilometers wide and 50 kilometers long. The other end of the lake is well and truly over the horizon and it can get very rough. As an idea this part of the race is equal to about two Twenty Beaches races or about the same length as the Molokai . If the wind is against you as it was for me in 2005 it can take 7 hours. In 2006 it was behind me and I surfed the lake for 4 hours with the GPS often clicking at 18 k/h. So that 3 hours difference may put my ETAs way out.

I took advantage of the stiff south westerly on Sydney Harbour this afternoon to brush up on my rough water skills I need on Lake Laberge. Under Dean Gardner's (Ocean Paddler) guidance I have been paddling racing skis for a few years now, graduating from a Fenn XT to a Fenn Mako 6. The difference between paddling these skis and the Horizon Tourer is that once on a wave they take off faster and track straight. The Tourer needs much more aggressive handling, requiring big sweep strokes to keep straight on a steep wave. The other difference is the weight. The Mako 6 weighs in at 11 kilos, fully loaded, even with super light gear for the race, the Tourer will be about 35 kilos.And of course the Yukon is fresh water so the boat will be lower.

To give me more power with less strain for this race I have lifted the seat about 70mm. This of course reduces stability a lot, so I have been combining straight smooth slog training with a bit of rough stuff.

Anyhow there was this afternoon, a good steep chop, and a swell building through the heads. So I was able to battle up wind from Manly to under South Head, Then scream back down wind to Manly Ocean World.
Three times crossing the heads I was confident in the boat and able to hold over 17 kilomers per hour on a few steep ones.