Text: Dave Macleod. Photos: DO IT NOW. Article from the April/May 2012 issue of DO IT NOW Magazine.
Paddling the DRAK is like having an affair with a really wild, stormy and tempestuous lover. When it’s good, it’s insanely good and even when it’s bad it’s just as intense and memorable.
You learn to take all the extremes and love them, as well as get used to the cold shoulders and icy stares because it goes with the turf. After all, you know why you are there …
Now into its 19th year, the Global Trader Drakensberg Challenge canoe marathon remains the fastest growing canoeing race of its kind in the country. For the first time the organisers at the GT Canyon Kayak Club in Underberg had to enforce the threatened cap of 1 000 paddlers.
Paddlers love the trip to Underberg for the weekend. They love the fact that it is uncomplicated, well organised and presented with a beaming smile. The air is fresh, water clean and the river offers a truly unique mix of adrenaline-laced excitement and gob-smacking serenity. The club is also hell bent on offering the paddlers the best value for money, anywhere, and when you look at the modest entry fee against the quality race garment, free set of tie-down straps, entertainment and so much more, there can be no quibbling about this fact. The good farming folk of Underberg (and Himeville, Kokstad and Matatiele) lay on a superb show, and everything they arrange they do with aplomb. But there ain’t a lot they can do about the water…
The event website is slick and has daily river level updates. After a summer season that has been desperately dry, the local club got out of jail twice when its other big races were rescued at the eleventh hour by sudden rainstorms, because the Big River (Umzimkhulu) was running pitifully low.
On the eve of the 2012 race, with a new record field converging on Underberg, it looked like the gods were going to desert the race for the first time since 2007. You see there is no dam in the mountains from where water can be released and so the race is wholly reliant on the rainfall in the 24 hours before each day’s racing. Like Forrest Gump says, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” The paddlers now understand that and in the great old canoeing tradition, you paddle the river as you find it. The officials will however allow you to change a K2 entry to two K1 entries the night before the race, and many wise old dogs arrive in Underberg with a K2 and a pair of K1s on the roof, just in case.
With the race committee mowing the grass at the Trout Hatcheries for a low level start that would have shortened the race by 15km of steep creek paddling, there were reports of a sudden downpour on the golf course at the Drak Gardens Hotel. Just what the doctor ordered. Before dawn on the first day of racing, local farmer Dave Barnett confirmed that the river had risen 30 centimetres to a just-paddleable level at the start at Castleburn bridge.
The DRAK is highly sought after title and the creme de la creme of South African river marathoning were on the starting line all eyeing out the new world champion Hank McGregor, who had won the last two editions of this race. Hank versus Len Jenkins, and Grant Van Der Walt, and Ant Stott, and, and …
At the start, Len Jenkins (Hank’s partner for the Unlimited Dusi) shot off into the lead, gambling by not fitting his splashcover. For the next two hours the elite racers traded places as they slid and slithered between the rocks in the steep Valley of a Thousand Rapids until two boats arrived at the new overnight stop at Sinister Pool together – Hank McGregor and Len Jenkins. The ladies race was even harder to call. Abby Adie had a day one ‘mare and finished fourth after a number of unscheduled swims, while up front Robyn Kime had worked really hard for a huge seven-minute lead over Gautenger Jen Hodson. For the rest of the field, the river was dishing out a lesson in humility and patience. The hotheads that opted to charge each rapid like a bull that has sighted a red rag were cruelly punished, and at the repair station at Ekhutuleni, 14km into the race, battered and shattered craft were queuing up for riverside repairs!
Saturday afternoon and the attractions and distractions of the area were massive and included a radical new MTB ride alongside the river, tubing, cheese tasting, craft shopping, trail runs and the festive annual inter club golf day around the nine-hole Underberg Country Club course. And then the heavens opened. Even the locals were fishing out their Ark plans. Hundreds of paddlers slept fitfully, despite the forays into the Himeville Arms and the festive Hansa beer fest, because everyone knew the river was going to be totally different in the morning. It rose overnight by half a metre. The clean turquoise stream skipping between a collage of rocks was replaced by a writhing brown python of water bullying its way seawards.
At the day two start, the big field watched Jenkins and McGregor set off first towards Early Mists Farm near the Coleford Resort, 38km away. Some followed them through the Underberg gorge, down the Mineshaft weir and the legendary Glenhaven rapid, then raced ahead to see them bounce through the Heaven and Hell rapid together before McGregor produced an extra gear that virtually no other paddler on this planet has, and powered clear of his doubles partner to become the first person to win a hat-trick of titles in a K1. In the women’s race, Robyn Kime got a massive monkey off her back by winning, after years and years of setting herself up in a good position to win, only to blow it by capsizing repeatedly on the second stage. Her well wishers lavished praise on her perfect day, but she would later confide that she did actually swim. Once. In the middle of nowhere. But she had done more than enough to win the title she so desperately wanted.
The record field whooped and shrieked through the standing waves and churning holes that now dominated the river. Grinning, they all headed off home afterwards vowing to be back next year and make the 1000 paddler cut in the country’s favourite canoeing race.
| More info on the town of Underberg | More info on the Drakensberg area |
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