Nocatee Challenge

I was lucky enough to race with FL Xtreme this weekend in the Nocatee Challenge, a great little 30 hour race with team-mates Darrell, Kim, and Wanda. Here is a quick rundown of our course with some maps to help out. I'm going to keep this brief, but if anyone wants to know how I attacked or found any control simply email me and I'll give details.

- The first leg was a bike - paddle - bike. I estimated it would take about 10 hours, so we decided to bike the Guana leg first, paddle, and then do the road bike back around A1A. We hit CP 21 first coming from the parking area to the southwest. 3 teams decided to do the loop this direction. After 21 we went to CP 16 (not on map) and did the bearings course. Kim had a magic compass and literally nailed every single one. We usually have each team member independently shoot the bearing, increasing our chance of finding them quickly, rather than having only the navigator shoot the bearings. The rest of the navigation was working backwards and hitting CP 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, and 9 in succession and making it to the boat TA in 4 hours after a relatively easy ride.

- The paddle leg was also easy, we nailed each control quickly, however I should have decided to do CP 6 (the one south of the boat ramp first). The tide was going out and the north section was dam controlled, while the south section was tidal. After getting all the north control, the tide was very low in the Tolomato and this necessitated a 200 yard portage through knee deep black muck to get to and from the boat ramp. We had muck to deal with on almost every control, though the funniest was when Darrell jumped out of the boat into waist deep muck to get a control. We were more careful about checking the solidity of the ground after that. A quick road ride with 3 control put us back at the TA and we quickly prepared for the next section of the race, a trek-paddle-trek-paddle-trek.

 

Back at the TA we took a quick photo and headed out to use the remaining daylight. We had some sandwiches waiting and I drank a Pepsi. it is amazing how something I don't normally drink (soda) can taste so good in the middle of a race. I quickly realized that the scale on the next map was off as we arrived at CP 23 at an amazing speed. I was hoping to make the trek between CP23 to CP24 in daylight to help with a direct route, but we lost light and had to use the road to the east of CP24 as a backstop and go around adding about 25 minutes to the trek. We hooked up with Nature Calls here and decided to finish the trek together. The only control to give us trouble on the trek was CP29 - it was described as being on a firebreak - as it turned out there were at least 6 firebreaks in 300 a meter range near the control location. We knew there were at least 6 as that is how many we searched.

We got to the boats around 12:30 PM and headed for CP31. I was not paying attention to the maps real well there and using only the aerial map completely overshot it. After some frustration I pulled out the USGS map noticed it was about 600 meters south of the light (which was flashing at me) - and we headed to it with now 3 teams (Eco-Choice, Nature Calls, and FL Xtreme. We started in towards CP 33, unfortunately the route from the south was completely clogged with grass. This time I pulled out the aerial (I had switched to USGS at CP31) and noted that the route from CP32 looked to be the best clear route - which it was. We spotted Team Punch Junkies coming out as we headed for CP33 and an orienteering loop (CP34-CP38). We made quick work out of the orienteering, no real problems with 3 teams together.  

The picked off CP32 quickly (the nearby light made it pretty easy). CP 39 was a real challenge - by now the tide was incredibly low and the small creek lacked water. We trekked the bed of the creek - we were pretty good at slogging through mud by now, and the control was in what could have been described as a junk yard. It was pretty funny slogging in a deep salt water marsh in the darkness - but we had a great group of racers.

We made it to the TA shortly after that and the sun just started to come out. It was a quick few miles back to the TA and the last bike section. The sun was now up, which was good as the first couple of bike controls would have been challenging in the dark. As it was only one control, CP48 gave us trouble. We had run back into Nature Calls and Eco-Choice at this location  again - so we all worked together to find it. The challenge was looking into a large group of trees in thick palmettos for a "Tree Cluster". After that we had one more control (CP39) which was easy and a 6 mile ride back to the TA. Easy stuff.  We got to see a lot of teams that were out on the sport course.

We got back to the TA - Punch Junkies and Appalachian were both in the TA and gave us a few words of encouragement as we headed out onto the last trek - the trek course from the sport course. Another hour of easy jogging/walking and we were done - woo hoo. 3rd place and a happy team.

I have a little bit of footage from the course (I'm  just getting used to my sport camera so bear with me) here is at least what it looks like in the day on an elite 30 hours race.