(See the post below for more pre-event background)
Great to get out of the storage locker
Before and After setting up the boat. John showed up with a luxury picnic lunch
Setting up on Fort Desoto beach on the day before the race is a great part of the event, seeing the kindred spirits again and an opportunity to check out other people's set up. Even among the 7 solo Tandem Islands like mine there's a variety of approaches and always something to learn.
I want that compass next year.
Then Chief's briefing in the afternoon and a last supper
Supper opposite Colin and Mr Mako, Next to Lawless, Beav and Deke.
Beav, what a legend. That necklace is all awards he's won for races like the EC as well as crazy stuff like this
Then its early to bed and up at 4.45am Saturday to gt back to the beach for a roll call at first light and dawn start
Posing before the start when I should have been doing more last minute checks.
As usual I got off to a rubbish start, was just pulling her into the water when I wondered if I'd ever put the bung back in after the shakedown. Of course I hadn't so had to stop at the water's edge and fix that schoolboy error!
Here's Colin's video of me eventually getting going.
Captain Gnarly's stalker
Gnarly always wins our class. Before the start I warned him I was going to try and stay on his six, learn from the master. He laughed and said he'd be glad of the company. I stuck with him for much of the morning but around Anna Marie island he seemed to be going a long way west, everyone else had tacked in shore so, as you can see from that change of direction on the map, I followed the herd. When our tacks converged a couple of hours later Gnarly was miles ahead.
I'd just finished sending this pic on Whatsapp to the family when the front port Aka (cross brace) popped out and happily splashed into the sea. That was a shock, talk about 3 wheels on my wagon. I wasted 30 minutes on the water trying to force it back in. (It snaps into a spring loaded clip) and eventually beached her, loosened the rear aka and forced the front one back in with a big heave. Relief. That would otherwise have been game over.
The problem with wasting an hour in these conditions is that everybody's travelling at 5 miles an hour so the little flotilla that had been in sight of each other since the start was now all ahead of me on the horizon. The wind died towards the evening and I pedalled my way back. I caught up with Gnarly around dusk and rewarded myself with the last of John's chicken wings from yesterday. We had 30 miles to go to Checkpoint 1 which we'd normally get to around 10pm but this year with no wind it looked more likely 5 am. Gnarly wanted company through the night but I was feeling strong so I pedalled off after a double (2 man) TI, Colorado and his son Prometheus.
I'd been having the dozies all day. Late morning I'd even put my tether on because if I'd closed my eyes for a second I'd have fallen asleep. It's probably the sunshine, sea air, relative calm and quiet and relief at not longer having the mental strain of remembering 101 things on your checklist. Around 8.30pm I was near a beach with headtorches moving and saw one light up a TI mast, I knew these were my people and a text to Colin confirmed that this looked like a best bet beach to stop at. So I beached, met Poppy and Santosh in their double TI, set up the tent which got very flappy because the northerly wind that Gnarly had predicted kicked in at this point but my brain was too tired to realise that I should have gone back out to exploit it. Then I recharged my phone and updated this blog.
I woke up at midnight and thought I should restart because there was still a way to go. As I was leaving I saw Poppy and Santosh asleep 20 yards along the beach and thought I shouldn't go without warning them about the 10am cut off. I woke Santosh and he said "No, the checkpoint's open all day." I said I was pretty sure there was a 10am deadline. (In fact it was 10am for the 'ultra marathon' mini event within the EC which ends at Checkpoint 1 for those who cant take a week off work. Our deadline was noon.)
I told Santosh they'd pedal quicker than me (two of them in the same hull could do 5mph to my 3.5) but might not want to leave it too long. He rolled over and I had the strong impression that he'd go back to sleep and they wouldn't complete this, their first EC.
As I pedalled off I thought "I wonder if those guys will ever know I tried to do them a big favour?"
Yes they did!
Fast forward to the finish and they were all over me as "the man who saved our EC"
The worst part of the event
What followed was really horrible. I aimed to make Stump Pass which is just before Checkpoint 1 by 8am. This I calculated would give me some buffer for the 10am deadline in case conditions turned against me, or there was another problem with the boat.
It was 1am, flat calm sea and my Garmin GPS told me I was unlikely to make the 25 miles in 7 hours so I upped the pace, pushing hard on the pedals to squeeze 4mph out of them. Fuelled by anger at my stupidity for the sleep stop, I was shouting at myself when I fell off the pace.
It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I enjoy cycling through the night but the ergonomics are so much better. These Hobie pedals are more like a horizontal version of the stepper machine in the gym. You aren't displacing your body weight, you're displacing water but all the same it hurts. I only dared allow myself one 2 minute pee break in the 7 hours. It was like getting up at midnight and doing a 7 hour gym session. Plus the seat isn't designed for such a sustained effort, it's like cycling a long distance on a shopping bike. Nor were the clothes. Inside the drysuit, which I peeled down to the waist I was sitting in a pool of sweat and so were my feet.
I had my first ever 'exhaustion hallucinations'. Plenty of cyclists get these and I've ridden through the night reassuring a fellow rider that those are trees and bushes not giraffes and lions. I've always been slightly jealous of them having the visions. Not any more.
The brim of my hat seemed to be a bridge I was going under or sometimes a wall, The spinnaker bag was a person.
This became the hallucination I focused on because it was a happy one, I thought it looked like Anna asleep and told myself she was resting and it was my job to get her where she needed to go. I even whispered to her a little.
(I later learned that Gnarly had done it right. He'd used that brief wind while I was sleeping, even had both sails up for a while but otherwise pedalled steadily through the night until he hit the fog bank, furled his sail, lay down in his seat, feet up on the trampolines to catch 10 minutes sleep, woke up looked at his watch, found he'd been asleep for 2 hours, carried on. That's what I should have done!)
Eventually I reached Stump Pass just before 8am in fog. Just inside it I saw an EC double kayak which was a relief. As I was arriving at Checkpoint 1 Gnarly and Waterdawg were both coming out, amazed I hadn't been through ahead of them. Waterdawg said "we're heading to Picnic Island tonight" and I thought great, they've teamed up. Joining them would be the perfect EC for me. Morale improved big time.
Once I got out of the boat at CP1 I could hardly walk, staggered up to the marina restrooms and stripped off the drysuit under their shower and put on my beach shorts instead.
Had some chicken noodle soup, stretched a little and set off alongside a few other Watertribers who all seemed in much better spirits than me.
My effort had more then cancelled out the benefit of my sleep. Idiot.
It was painful to pedal but it was great to be around others again. Back in the game.
Coastie and Clamcounter had rigged up this pedal drive to their beach cat which made all the powerboats through Gasparilla laugh and point.
It was a scorching hot morning and painful to push the pedals but the winds stayed light until Charlotte Harbour when they filled in enough to make it worthwhile unfurling some sail and gave enough cooling breeze that I could pedal more comfortably. I could see Gnarly and Waterdawg's sails a few miles ahead and gradually hauled up to them. It seemed to be taking them a long long time to tack along past Boca Grande. Just before I rejoined them Waterdawg and another sail I suspected was Windtern (it was) headed south at this point to take the Matalacha route east of Pine island. Looks good on the map, I've done it before but I'd now learned the hard way that my 2019 mission was to get back on Gnarly's six and stay there till Key Largo. So I pushed the pedals some more (ouch) and caught him, we had some shouted conversation and tacked together past Captiva and Sanibel to Picnic island.
Gnarly is a phenomenal sailor. He had an older, heavier boat than me but was so much faster because he has the skill to trim the sail to squeeze more speed than I thought possible. I was pedalling steadily to keep up (It adds about 20%) whereas he had his pedal drive out on the trampoline. He reached Picnic island around dusk, I'd run out of energy and was 90 minutes behind him, during which night-time the hallucinations returned and now the spinnaker bag was a white corpse in a blanket, possibly my own corpse and the Hobie logo at the foot of the sail was a monkey in a tree, looking like it was going to cause trouble. Not nice.
We put our tents up, both agreed we needed to reboot and wouldn't shift until after dawn. When I woke up Gnarly said he had an important announcement to make, which I thought would be about wind direction but it was that he was dropping out!
He had a hacking cough and there was lots wrong with his leaky boat the was annoying him. He thought he'd have a better time exploring that area and his wife would come past with the trailer later in the week.
Bummer.
Off I went towards dear old Sanibel, home of a lovely family holiday in 2016, past the ramp where I first got this boat wet. I stayed off shore pointing at Marco as straight as I could on an easy east wind, stayed on one tack all day. It was the relaxing sail I needed to complete the reboot.
I didn't see any other 'triber all day. Colin's texts confirmed that apart from Jarhead a few miles ahead there was nobody else around.
Got to Marco Island and planned to cut through Caxahambas pass but I have an aversion to that monstrous condo block on the tip and I didn't want to be dodging channel markers in the dark.
I thought I 'd keep going to Kice island. It's a little longer but you're out of 'Condo land' sooner. and I wanted to camp soon after dark, not risk any more night hallucinations. I'd camped in an inlet here with Waterdawg and Bacon in 2016 but wasn't sure if Hurricane Irma might have re-arranged things since then. The GPS waypoint took me to a beach with no passage through but I heard waves breaking with a different note some way to my right, jogged up the beach and found the inlet, nice camp here for another full night.
There were lots of bugs around so I shifted a little towards the sea for the breeze and put up the tent by starlight, (getting slick at it by now) no 'bug magnet' headtorch.
No AT&T reception either and that was annoying. I'd hoped to power up the Navionics app and do some good planning but I calculated I'd be able to make the lunchtime high tide at Chokoloskee Checkpoint 2 if I got to Indian Key around 11am.
This turned out to be half way so end of part one.......
PS All my tracking is here, go to EC 2019, albatross, drop down on; "Show Tracks and all Waypoints", hit regenerate and there I am in great detail. A ping every 10 minutes so you cant quite tell when I'm tacking diagonals but the close spaced markers show the slow forward progress.