2004-08-01 Muscoda Wisconsin Five State Challenge

Part of the fun of going to Muscoda, Wisconsin for the 5 state canoe race challenge is riding with fellow canoe racers for 5 hours and telling stories of races past.  Then there’s the fun of camping with your friends and eating a pancake breakfast sponsored by Doug Berg and his big coffee pot known affectionately as Mr. Whooshee.  This year, Marsh Jones even arranged for Eggbeaters to provide some food for the group.  Greg Zophy, who was paddling with Doug, helped cook sausages and feed the group starting at 6:30 in the morning on Sunday.

After gathering Ed Arenz and his dog Cocoa, Bill Kremer, and Devin and Brett Arenz, we didn’t make it to Muscoda until 5PM on Saturday.  Many of the teams had started downstream at 2PM to do the 21 mile course, but Ed and I only had time to scout the finish line.  There were two choices in the last eight minutes of the race at the end.  Cut between the last set of islands to navigate a complicated S curve and hope you could find the deepest water channels or stay along the far shore and cut across the shallow sandbars at a 45 degree angle.  We tried both ways with a GPS unit and determined that the far shore was 50 seconds faster.  Those 50 seconds may matter a great deal if we were battling with other teams at the finish.

Most of the Minnesota racers met at Pizza Hut for dinner at 7pm.  The wait staff was a bit overwhelmed as we took over an entire room.  The volume of talk kept us from hearing anything but the person next to us.  Everyone was excited about the race tomorrow.  Ed Arenz and I were paddling a Jensen 18 canoe in the 15 mile recreational C2 division that started at 10:30AM at Lone Rock and finished at Muscoda.  There weren’t really any recreational paddlers in this race, only canoe racers who didn’t want to do the whole 21 mile course and weren’t old enough to qualify for the 110 year old combined age “Over the Hill” division.  Those old geezer’s could do the shorter course and use a pro-boat canoe that was faster than the “recreational” canoes.

Worried about heat exhaustion on this shallow river in hot and humid weather, I made sure to bring lots of fluid.  I mixed a 32 ounce bottle of blue Gatorade with water to fill a 2 liter pop bottle with a plastic tube and duct taped it to the foot brace bar in the stern.  I also had a spare 32 ounce bottle of Gatorade in case I accidentally drained all the liquid from my 2 liter bottle.  Sometimes, if you don’t blow air back into the tube after drinking, it can siphon all the liquid into the bottom of the canoe after it’s dropped.  There’s also the chance you can flip your canoe and lose your liquid.  In addition to the liquid, I had a couple of snicker bars in the canoe in case I needed some energy. 

I also laid my GPS unit in the bottom of the canoe at my feet in the stern.  Even though I hadn’t marked any waypoints along the way, it did have the location of the finish line buoy marked.  That would tell us how far we had left to go and how fast we were traveling at any point.  This can be a big advantage because you can gage how much energy you have left and how much liquid you can drink and still have some left for the finish.  Just before the start, I jumped into the cold water to get my white T-shirt wet so it would keep me cool with evaporation.  I had also taped band-aids over my nipples to avoid recreating painful experiences in previous races when my wet T-shirt had rubbed them raw for several hours. 

It was the worst start of a canoe race I had ever seen because almost half the canoes were not even close to being lined up when they blew the starting horn.  Luckily, Ed and I were only a canoe length back from the pro-boat ahead of us. Several canoes that had been lined up ahead of us zig-zagged back and forth in a frenzy just in front of us.  We timed it right and passed several of them on the outside of the first bend to catch the wake of the geezer teams in the pro-boats.  We quickly ended up on the 2^nd stern wave of Lee Jarpey and Keith Canny with another pro-boat team zig-zagging between us.  

We were very happy to be able to pull up alongside and ride Lee and Keith’s 1^st stern wake.  A Wisconsin team was not pleased that there was a Jensen 18 canoe beside them.  I remarked loudly to Ed, “This is the hardest recreational paddling that I’ve ever done” and got no reaction from the Wisconsin team next to us.  They grounded out on a sandbar and we rode their side wake over it and passed them up, but they soon came back up beside us.

Every sandbar shallows, Lee and Keith would sprint and we would drop back several canoe lengths.  When we got back to deeper water, Ed and I were able to pull back up on their stern wakes.  We spent the next hour drafting the pro-boats for nearly seven miles.  This gave us a great jump on the other teams in our “recreational division”.  At about the seven mile mark, we started falling off their wakes to find Kenn Ketter and Dave Dahl climbing up beside us in a pro-boat racing canoe.  They had an exceptionally bad start because of the confusion and missed a lot of the wake rides we had enjoyed.   It wasn’t long before they pulled past us. 

About that time, Lee and Keith, up ahead of the pack, hit what they later claim was a log while Lee was looking at the spectators on the shoreline and flipped their canoe.  They were still floundering in waist deep water as we were the last to pass them up.  We asked if they were OK and they sputtered “Yes” pre-occupied in getting their wallowing canoe back to shallower water to dump it out.  They were both still recovering from their 125 mile canoe Ausable canoe race, but had been in the lead before flipping over.  It was unfortunate that they hit an imaginary log.

Since we lost our wake rides, I started calling out the distance to the finish line and our speed on the GPS to let Ed know how we were doing.  We got up to 8.3 miles per hour in the deeper water and dropped to 6 miles per hour in the shallower sandbars.  The distance to the finish line melted away quickly.  It only took us 2 hours and 1 minute to get to the finish line and first place in our division.  A team from Wisconsin crossed the finish line only 50 seconds after us.  It may have been the same 50 seconds we gained by taking the shorter route we had scouted at the finish or it may have been gained from riding the pro-boat wakes for seven miles.  Either way, it counts.

Minnesota won the challenge this year.  Wisconsin had won it the year before.  The other 3 states didn’t have enough racers show up in recent years.