Race story ARWC Brazil, part 2

Following the trek/ wading section into the remote Sao Luiz farm the team left intact and in good spirits on the pack rafting section that is the most demanding section we have ever done in an adventure race. It would keep us busy for the next two days and nights and give us plenty of time to develop technical terms for swamp items.

The challenge here was 40km through a flat swampland, known as the Shubiswamp after race director Shubi Guimares. The cattle tracks all looked the same on the map but are classed by us as Fat Cow Track (the cattle have ploughed a 5m path through the waterweed that can be paddled in a pack raft), Skinny Cow Track (too narrow to paddle effectively and hard to follow, even harder to see if trying to intersect from the side) and quite a lot of Mystery Cow Track (a track that still can’t be found in spite of us knowing exactly where we are and hunting around for an hour). There were small pockets of forest marked on the map however these were extremely unreliable as there were mapped in the 1960’s when farming was more viable in the area, and have changed in size and shape considerably. In the 1970’s a large flood drowned 200 000 cattle and most of the ranches have been abandoned. The trees quickly became named nice trees (good to look at) and lookout trees (trees that could be climbed to try to see any navigable waterways close by). There were also small waterways, Corixos, however these proved to be navigable for a short distance, often about 500m, before being filled with various varieties of water weed. The four main varieties of water weed in the area are fastwaterweed (500m/hour), slowwaterweed (<500m/h) and shitwaterweed (=can’t move) and our favorite but unfortunately vary rare type called nowaterweed. If we managed to stay on an existing cattle track or corixo we could reach a top speed of 2km/h, and where we lost them or they ceased to exist we maxed out at 500m per hour if we managed to keep to the pockets of fastwaterweed and push very hard. The swamp was generally waist to chest deep. The rest of the map was white apart from the odd fence, and small collections of farm buildings spaced consistently at 10-12 km intervals.

We found the Shubiswamp section very challenging but at the same time it was a cool experience where we pushed our skills and fitness to the limit. It was the deciding section of the race and after that the field was so spread out that none of the positions changed at the top of the leader board. Six teams went into the Shubiswamp, first Seagate, second Haglöfs Silva and third Swedish Armed Forces came out unassisted. Fourth and fifth Colombia Onoco and Estonia Adventure Team received navigational help by sending text messages on their emergency locator beacons (there was a lot of discussion after the race but the race jury decided to impose a time penalty instead of disqualifying these two teams for the assistance they received). The sixth team turned back after spending 8 hours coming nowhere and managed to convince the race organisers to cancel the section for all of the remaining teams. This was probably a wise decision from a safety perspective, even if several of the teams that weren’t allowed to start the section would have been well capable of completing it there would likely have been many teams that would need to be rescued.

The crocodile incident occurred of the seventh day. On the last 200km MTB section Rob stood on a rather large crocodile as we were carrying our bikes across a swamp. The croc got a big fright and jumped clear out of the water. This amused the rest of the team greatly and kept our spirits high, which was welcome as we were attempting to push through the last night of the race without sleep.

The team continued biking and made it all the way to last transition. Finalizing this brutal race course was a short paddle in a local boat which took team Haglöfs Silva to the finish line as the 2^nd best team in the world! First place to Seagate (NZ) and 3^rd to Swedish Armed Forces. Congratulations to both! This race goes down as one of the longest and most challenging, but also one of the most interesting and beautiful races the team has done. The Pantanal area is amazing and well worth a visit (as a tourist).