Cyanosis leads Expedition Africa after Day One

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Tuesday, 10 May 2011 10:19

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Merrell hunting down Cyanosis at Expedition Africa

Lisa de Speville (www.ar.co.za)

There is not much difference to the top three places overnight at 500km Expedition Africa in the Southern Cape. It's still Cyanosis (Clinton Mackintosh, Nicholas Mulder, Jane Swarbreck, Nathan Thompson), Merrell (Graham Bird, Tatum Prins, Hanno Smit, Donovan Sims) and Accelerate (UK; David Spence, Andy Mitchell, Kim Collison, Caroline Bullard) jostling for position.

The race started with a 14km beach run, then a 20km harbour paddle – into crazy headwind, then a 30km hike (seems like quite a bit of it on beach). Coming off this hike Merrell had the lead (17h00 – real time) with Cyanosis and Accelerate not even 15 minutes back. PennyPinchers AR (James Stewart, Jeannette Walder, Garth Peinke, Jeff Wilcox) and Castle Lite (Adrian Saffy, Ina Van Tonder, Deon Du Preez, Craig Powel) took 4th and 5th place and hour or so behind.

The teams then got on to their bikes for the longest stage of the race, a 140km cycle and as of 04h00, only the top three had completed it. Cyanosis first at 02h54, Accelerate in second at 03h34 and Merrell in third (03h49) after taking a wrong turn during the night. As it took these front teams almost 10 hours to complete the cycle, it is certainly taking those behind even longer.

Photographer Jacques Marais said this morning (at 08h50) that teams were all over the place on the cycle leg. He said that it isn’t a technical section – all on dirt roads – or navigationally difficult, but that for the “less organised” teams out there, they’re finding it challenging to pick the right roads because there are so many district and farm roads and sign posting isn’t good. He says he can’t even begin to guess at placings of the other teams until they emerge from the bike section.

He also thinks that the front teams “overcooked it a bit yesterday with the ding-dong battle between Cyanosis and Merrell”, which is why the cycle took them longer than expected.

Front teams are currently on a long, 46km hike. He says it is quite a difficult one, especially in as the trails are not clear. The last few kilometres are in the Salmon’s Dam Nature Reserve (I’m not sure whether this is the right spelling of the name) where there is a hiking trail, but again it is not necessarily very distinct.

Follow all the latest news on the race on www.ar.co.za

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