Read Matthew 8:23-26
Once again I signed up for the MR340 even though I didn’t have a partner locked in for the race. I was beginning to wonder if I had made a bad choice because everyone I asked couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to the race. Having done the event solo in 2010 I wasn’t excited about doing it solo again. There are a lot of demons on the river particularly after 40 plus hours of paddling without sleep. It is tough enough to deal with them when one has a partner so a solo trip really wasn’t on my radar for this year.
When my good friend, the Blacksmith, told me this spring his son was going to paddle from Boonville to the Gulf a light bulb went off in my bald head. I ask for his son’s phone number and then gave Daniel a call to inquire if he would be interested in the MR340. To make a long story short he was and we became a team, the latest variety of the Sons of Auxvasse Creek. This would be the 7th race for the Sons of Auxvasse Creek and each team has been made up of different individuals except for the two races Daniel and I competed in this year.
Daniel did make the trip from Boonville to the Gulf with Mark, a friend of his from Warrensburg, in 20 days. That was a pretty good training run to prepare for the MR340. Daniel and I scheduled a 30 mile trip on the Missouri River from Kaw Point to Ft. Osage to get used to my canoe and each other. My canoe is much more nimble and tipper than the canoe they took to the Gulf and I’m sure I paddled differently than Mark did on the Gulf trip. Nevertheless, it didn’t take Daniel long to adapt to the sleek canoe and me.
As a warm up for us Daniel and I entered the Race to the Dome on June 30, 2012, a 26.6 mile race on the Missouri River ending in Jefferson City. We took second in the tandem canoe division with a time of 3 hours and 40 minutes. Daniel pushed me the entire time but I managed to somewhat keep pace with him but I made it clear that I couldn’t maintain that pace for 340 miles once the big race on the river started.
At one point there had been 400 boats signed up for the 2012 MR340 but the hot weather and low water keep about a hundred boats away. On the morning of July 31, 2012 about 300 boats prepared for the start of the 7th annual MR340. For the first year the event was started in stages with the solo paddlers starting at 7am and everyone else at 8am. This was a good move and the start was much safer with fewer boats making that transition from the Kansas River to the swifter Missouri River.
With Daniel at the bow and me at the helm it became obvious to me that he was going to set the pace and I was along for the ride. In most of the previous races I have been in it was my goal to simply finish. Without realizing it, I had been paddling not to lose (which is a sure fire recipe for mediocrity) and I had set the pace accordingly in my prior MR340 events. A lot of folks drop out of the MR340 and I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t one of “them”. Not wanting to be a slacker I picked up the pace and decided I would stay as close to the pace as I could for as long as I could.
I had been working out at 5:30am 3 mornings each week with a good friend plus riding my bicycle on a regular basis to maintain some sort of physical fitness with the MR340 in mind. Within the first hour I realized that I hadn’t been doing enough to build up my core. I made a mental note to do more sit-ups and planks to prepare for the 2013 event.
That first checkpoint is always crowded because the boats are still pretty much bunched up and we took a tip from the “Anvil Toters” to make our first stop at the Corps of Engineers boat ramp, which is a few miles above the first checkpoint at Lexington, to avoid all that congestion. That was a good move they have indoor bathrooms with running water and air conditioning.
Because we were equipped with a “SPOT” GPS locater it wasn’t necessary for us to stop at the checkpoints. This was the first year for the “SPOT” option and it worked great for us. Not only did it free us up from physically checking in at the checkpoints our ground (crew which consisted of Daniels father, Wayne, and son, Jesse) could keep pretty close track of where we were on the river.
The river level is down because of the drought and I thought it was much more scenic than it had been in prior years. When I was going upstream with the Lewis and Clark boats it was a rainy year as well so the water was high then as it has been most of the time since. With the wing dikes sticking up out of the water and the sand bars it just looked more like what one might expect from a big river even though the view from the river above Boonville is mostly the back side of a levy.
We planned to stop at the Waverly check point, which is 74 miles into the event, to get our boat set up with lights for night travel. We actually got there at 7:45pm just under 12 hours after the start. We refilled our coolers, got fresh water and ate a burger at the boy scouts food stand and headed back out on the river at 8pm. We had not made any firm plans to sleep so we decided we would just play it by ear. The next checkpoint would be at Miami and we could decide if we wanted to take a nap or proceed on when we got there.
Once it gets dark the Missouri River becomes a new world. The race is always scheduled during a full moon and the moonlight reflects off the water which creates more light than one would imagine possible. It is easy to see any kind of debris on the river or the buoys marking the channel. Night is my favorite time on the river. The stars are much brighter, one can see lights of the river towns off in the distance, and occasionally a train’s headlight will reflect out on the surface. This year the big benefit of night was the cooler temperatures. With 100 degrees and no shade during the day the darkness and cooler temperatures was very welcome.
