The mayor, a couple of town council members, and several other prominent local figures were on hand to wish us racers well. Whenever I attend an event like this I am struck by the contrast with my own city, where our "leaders" often seem to think they're doing us some great favor by letting us have a race on its riverfront.
After an opening ceremony and some instructions from race director Ray Pellerin and his assistant Tave Lamperez, we got ourselves ready to race. We had a gorgeous day for racing: sunny and becoming warm, but not too humid. It appeared that nature would provide a challenge of a different sort, however: the lower Atchafalaya is plagued by an invasive species of floating water hyacinth, and depending on the wind direction and tidal activity, at times the river surface can become choked with clumps of the stuff. When I first arrived at the race site there were hyacinth patches littering the entire course, but by the time racing was set to begin the wind had moved most of them out.
The Lower Atchafalaya Sprints is a series of three-mile races done in laps on a one-mile loop that's entirely visible to spectators in Morey Park. The races are separated by both boat class and gender. Women's single kayak was the first event of the day, so I got to watch the ladies compete while I warmed up for my first event, men's single kayak. Savanna Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas, took the early lead and methodically increased it for the win. During this race it became clear that the course was longer than the race organizers had intended--closer to four miles than three. Savanna's time was 35 minutes, 39 seconds; Kim Schulte of Mandeville, Louisiana, finished two and a half minutes back to claim second place. Susan Jordan of Lucedale, Mississippi, rounded out the top three in 40:10. The complete results of this class are posted here.
A pretty stiff wind was blowing upriver by the time I was lining up alongside my fellow men's single kayak racers. We would paddle into this wind to start each lap, round a buoy and have the wind at our backs as we paddled back past Morey Park to another buoy, then turn back into the wind to finish the lap. The starting official fired the gun, and into the wind we went. I was not at all surprised when Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas, sprinted into the lead with Christian Massow of Cypress, Texas, right on his heels. I sprinted as hard as I could to position myself on one of the wakes behind these two K1 paddlers.
We reached the first buoy, which was surrounded by clumps of water hyacinth. We threaded through the weeds as best we could and headed back the other way. I'd expected Mike and Christian to push the pace and leave me behind early, but as we made our first pass of the start/finish line back at Morey Park I was still hanging in there on their wakes.
As we made the second buoy turn, Christian ran into some bad luck. This buoy also had some hyacinth in its orbit, and Christian, whose boat lacked a weed deflector, got a clump stuck on his rudder and slowed to a crawl. At the same moment Mike threw in a hard surge coming out of the turn and opened several boatlengths on us. Knowing that Christian was in trouble, and that I would not be able to keep up with Mike, I offered to raft up with Christian and help him get the kelp off his rudder. But Christian insisted that I continue racing. Lacking the time to consider the situation in depth, I pressed on.
I spent the remainder of the race looking at a familiar sight: Mike Herbert getting smaller and smaller in the distance ahead of me. But monotony didn't carry the day. Mike seemed to pause a bit upon his return to the downstream buoy on the second lap. I discovered why when I got there myself: the wind had moved the water hyacinth so that the buoy was now enclosed in a thick patch of it. I tried to pick out the clearest path through it I could find, hoping all the while that my weed deflector would do its job. Fortunately it did, and I proceeded back upriver. Back at the upstream buoy I found it difficult to turn with the wind blowing against my surf ski's bow; I really had to crank the strokes on my right to get the boat around.
By the time I was approaching the downstream buoy on the last lap, a race volunteer had gone out in a motorboat and moved it out of the weeds. I made this turn without incident but was feeling the fatigue as the last lap wore on. I made the last buoy turn back into the wind and labored back to the finish line in 31:29, a minute and 21 seconds after Mike had finished. David Dupree of Rayville, Louisiana, overtook Christian for third place overall in 35:25. I later found out that Christian, who clocked 36:56, had dealt with an ailing back on top of the weeds on his rudder. When Mike had made his breakaway move after that fateful first-lap buoy turn, Christian had tried to give chase despite the overburdened rudder, and tweaked something in his lower back.
The men's single kayak results are posted here. I should note that Tave Lamperez was paddling an outrigger canoe (OC1) while the rest of us were in kayaks or surf skis.
With the solo racing in the books the racers began to form tandem teams. While this was going on the race organizers made some modifications to the course in response to the ever-encroaching masses of hyacinth. The buoys were moved out of their path, and the number of laps was reduced to two, resulting in a course that was closer to an actual three miles.
The ladies' tandem class was up first, and the team of Kim Schulte and Savanna Herbert squared off against Ryan Gillikin and Susan Jordan. I don't often talk about the types or brands of boats people are racing in because I generally believe the athletes paddling those boats are what count. But one simply couldn't ignore the unfairness of this fight. While Kim and Savanna paddled a sleek tandem surf ski, Ryan and Susan lined up in a much wider, much shorter tandem sea kayak--a fine boat for touring, camping, and similar activities, but not designed for racing. It really wasn't much of a contest as Kim and Savanna cruised to victory by nearly five minutes. The results can be found here.
By this time the wind had blown the hyacinth patch against the bank at the foot of Morey Park, making it quite difficult to get back to the dock. Here's a look at what Ryan and Susan had to deal with:
The final class of the day was a combined men's tandem and mixed tandem affair. I'm guessing that the rationale for lumping men's and mixed together had something to do with a lack of enough women to go around (a common problem in paddlesport around the world). The class consisted of five boats--four tandem surf skis and the aforementioned short, fat tandem sea kayak. Which boat was I in? You guessed it. Susan Jordan is the owner of the touring craft, and I had accepted her invitation to be her partner. Our competition consisted of the father-daughter team of Mike and Savanna Herbert; Lynn Buckalew and Wulf Hirschfield of Waynesboro, Mississippi; Kim Schulte and David Dupree; and Wendell and Wyatt Smith of Seguin, Texas.
The moment I got into our boat I realized how long it had been since I'd paddled anything other than a surf ski. The sea kayak was much wider--some 30 inches or so, compared with 18 to 20 inches for the surf skis. So I would have to adjust my stroke radically to work around the boat's girth. Even worse than that was the position of my feet: the foot pedals were spaced along the hull's outer rails, forcing me to spread my legs to a most unnatural degree. It was my job to work the rudder, and the pedals were designed in such a way that I had to sort of twist my foot forward to make the boat turn.
When the race got started I tried my best to maneuver our boat onto another boat's wake. Once we'd executed the first buoy turn, the race wasn't a laugher yet: we were still within several boatlengths of Wulf and Lynn. "Do you think we can close the gap?" Susan asked, and I replied, "Well... they might be beatable." As if on cue, Wulf and Lynn put on the prettiest little burst of speed you've ever seen, and we were all alone in last place the rest of the way. The results are posted here.
A while after finishing this final race I realized I was quite sore in my left lower back from paddling in such a weird position. As soon as the awards ceremony concluded I eased myself into the car for the long drive home. About eight hours later I gingerly extracted myself from the driver's seat, went into my house, and drifted off to sleep in my lovely bed. This morning I was just as stiff and sore as I expected I would be. I went downtown and paddled easy for 60 minutes. The weather was beautiful as I began the process of healing and looking ahead to my next race in just over a month.
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