Great Ocean Road Adventure Race 2007
A staged race in a beautiful area: the Great Ocean Road and the Otways. Jez is support crew for Marcus and Jude. On the second day we start with a paddle which turns out to be my most scary paddle ever. We leave the Bay of Islands sheltered area to venture in the Bass Strait on a calm day, but my goodness those waves are big!! And the surf is very impressive and hits hard when you break through. Thanks to Marcus we survive… Unfortunately we don’t finish the race, but we enjoy a great holiday following the race and exploring the area.
The 400km Keen Adventure Race took teams of two on an epic five-day, four-stage journey. Each stage had a distinct start and finish, with the field starting each new stage together, with the overall winner being the team with the lowest accumulated time. Each stage had many checkpoints, and failure to reach a checkpoint resulted in severe time penalties.
Prologue – Port Campbell
- leg 1 – jump off Port Campbell’s pier for a 400m swim
- leg 2 – 800m kayak then into the wind for another 2km to round a buoy before heading back to the beach
- leg 3 – 11km run / orienteering around Port Campbell where you had to pick up 10 out of 11 CPs
Stage 1 Bay of Islands to Cape Otway Lighthouse
- leg 1 – 16km kayak at dawn from Bay of Islands back to Port Campbell, where several kayaks were severely damaged in the carnage
- leg 2 – 20km mtb, along the Great Ocean Road coastline and past the Twelve Apostles
- leg 3 – 6km run / orienteering, a stunning, but technically difficult coasteering stretch
- leg 4 – 17km river kayak, paddling along the reedy, placid Gellibrand River
- leg 5 – 25km mtb
- leg 6 – 18km run
- leg 7 – mtb to finish at Cape Otway Lighthouse
Stage 2 Apollo Bay – Fairhaven
- leg 1 – 35km mtb starting at 7AM
- leg 2 – a rope course at Otway Fly
- leg 3 – 45km mtb to Blanket Bay
- leg 4 – 13km kayak including a swim to a CP at Marengo back to Apollo Bay
- leg 5 – 20km trek into the Otways to Sabine Falls
- leg 6 – 50km mtb through single track of Yaugher Forest to Jamieson River
- leg 7 – 20km paddle to the stage finish line at Fairhaven
In deteriorating conditions, only five teams were able to complete the stage 2 course in its entirety, with the other teams taking shorter leg options with time penalties after missing cut-offs.
Stage 3 Otway Forest Park – Torquay
- leg 1 – rogaining near Aireys Inlet with a start at 6AM
- leg 2 – mtb to Anglesea, this was set up ‘rally’ style, with teams having to follow detailed notes in order to find each of the 10 checkpoints
- leg 3 – orienteering course at Coogorah Park, picking up 8 CPs
- leg 4 – ocean kayak to Torquay
Twenty-two of the 28 teams who started the Keen Adventure Race made the finish line at Torquay.