Primal Quest

For those who want to follow the Primal Quest Action - our crew is going to try and keep news available on the Team Blue blog. The blog is at http://pqteamblue.blogspot.com/

You can also view the leaderboard at http://www.ecoprimalquest.com/wp-primal/ and click on the leaderboard or the tracking links.

Florida Coast to Coast in Pictures

If a pcture is worth 1000 words - this is a long story. Thanks to Abhijit who took wonderful photos and posted them at http://picasaweb.google.com/abhijit.in.touch - check it out there are lot more great shots.

We showed up and first thing was to paddle out to sea...

Tip our boat over - and get back in, this was the skills test.

Then we paddled back...

After the pre-race we started on the maps.

We also worked on preparing the gear.

This is us finishing up the short (4 mile beach run)

After the beach run we hopped into our boats and we were off weaving our way through the mangroves.

20 odd miles of paddling later - we showed up at the park on 520 in Cocoa and got on our bikes and left.

Our crew cleaned up, headed to the next TA and took shelter from the rain.

We showed up many hours later with 2 ailing team-mates. Julie and I decided to continue on as a 2 person team and headed out for a long trek, and a rainy bike ride (sorry no pictures) - but you can reaad about it the text version of the race.

Many hours later around midnight, we showed up at the TA at Hunt Club and Wekiva Rd. We ate. We got ready for a swamp whack and we headed out.




These are some of the critters we met in this long trek section. Most of these tried to either bite or sting me. I had lots of bites, there were lots of spiders.

A very welcome site, the TA at Blue Springs and the end of the trek.

Notice Josh is carrying Julie's pack here.

Ron chats with Gomez as we come off the long trek. It was pretty challenging trek.

Notice Julie going through her gear as I looked at dismay at the contents of my shoes. I was pulling swamp grass out of my shoes days later.

We were quite tired but we ate, we repacked. . We got in the boats - switching to the Amaruk and paddled off. Here is Julie adjusting the foot posts.

The end of the paddle at Blue Springs.

We had new maps that we had to mark at this TA. This gave us a rest, but it was tough to focus on marking maps while hot and tired.

We headed off on bikes from the Blue Springs TA. We are now in the afternoon of Day 2. Many CP's were removed from the course making the bike ride much shorter. We biked for about 10 hours arriving at the Oklawaha Dam at Moss Bluff around midnight. We slept for 30 minutes, ate and then headed off on the river some time before 2 AM.

Here I arriving after the paddle that was after the bike ride. We paddled from 464 at Moss Bluff to Silver River State Park.

There were lots of fish and spectators (animal variety) at Silver River State Park.

In the cool morning air, the trail looked inviting, our next leg would be a trek.

After a real shower and some oatmeal - we added Josh and Clay back to the team and took off on the next trek section. It looked short, it wasn't.

Julie and Ron check in after the trek to learn we have one more leg of the race, another long bike ride.

At Santos we took some time to eat and check the maps. I wanted to get a feel for how long the next section would take us. I estimated 10 hours.

Off we head into the Santos Bike trails. These are great trails and every Florida Mountain biker should hit these at some time.



A little before 7 PM (only 7 hours of riding) we arrived at the finish line - total time 60 hrs 57 minutes. We ate dinner and then it was off to home to dream about the next race - which for Julie and I would be Primal Quest in Montana.

At Dinner from Left to Right - Clay, Ron, Abhijit, Oscar, Heather, Josh, and Julie