National Champions Again

The 2008 Canoe Orienteering National Championship was held on the St. Joseph River in Bristol, Indiana. The weather was beautiful, as was the river. We were the defending National Champions, so the pressure was on to defend our title.

Canoe orienteering is different from other canoe races. In some ways, it mimics the way you might navigate on a wilderness canoe trip where you navigate from campsite to campsite using your map. While there are no campsites in canoe orienteering, you are given a map and you do use it to navigate.

Just before starting, you receive your map and a small sheet of paper with numbered boxes. The map highlights a number of locations that each competitor must visit. At each location, there is an orange and white marker and a punch with a unique pattern. The punch is used to mark your control card to prove that you visited the location. The person or team who visits the most control locations wins. In the event of a tie, the fastest time wins. It isn't always the fastest paddlers who win. The key to winning a canoe orienteering event is choosing the best route.

The course in Bristol required travel both upstream and downstream. It included island clusters and shallow water and a meandering stream near Hermance Park. There were plenty of opportunities for creative route selection.

The teams started two minutes apart with some paddlers heading upstream and others heading downstream. Seth and I decided to start downstream. We reasoned that the long upstream paddle against a fairly strong current would be better if it were earlier when we were still fresh.

We paddled directly to control 1, ducked under the tree it was attached to and headed for control 2. We quickly decided that the best approach would be "split and go". Seth, who was in the bow, jumped out of the boat and ran to control 2. Meanwhile, I also jumped out of the boat and ran through the shallow channel between the islands with the canoe in tow. When Seth rejoined me, we started paddling again.

At this point, we spotted the team who had started two minutes before us. They were wading upstream through the shallow water while we were trying to paddle in the same water. We briefly considered wading ourselves, but Seth observed that even though the paddling was tough, we were going about the same speed as the other team.

We continued paddling upstream punching controls along the way, though we decided to save control 5 for later. Control 11 was in a channel splitting an island in two. We reached the control at about the same time as another team and we decided to "split and go." Again, I ran with the canoe through the channel and waited in the middle of the river for Seth to rejoin me.

Next was Control 10, which was tied to a partially submerged tree. When we arrived, another boat was busy punching their control card, so I instructed Seth to jump out of the canoe and wade to the control. This way we wouldn't have to wait for them to pull away from the submerged tree. When the water went up past Seth's waist, I knew we had made a bit of a mistake. He was going to have a hard time getting back in the canoe, especially if I didn't get in the water, too. After a minor struggle, we both re-boarded the canoe and finished collecting the upstream controls.

All that was left for us was to decide what to do about control 5. There were a couple of options we considered. One was to paddle to the control and then portage to the finish at Hermance Park. The other was to paddle to Hermance Park and have Seth run to the control and return to the finish.

We decided to paddle to the control and it turned out to be the right move. The control wasn't as far up the stream as the map showed, so we punched the control and quickly returned to the main river and paddled to the finish. Others, who decided to run to control 5 encountered stinging nettles and came out of the woods complaining. I could relate since I had a similar experience with saw grass at the National Championships in Peshtigo, Wisconsin.

Throughout the race, we had no idea how we were doing against who we considered our primary competition. They had started at different times and we never saw them until the finish. In the end, we finished with the fastest overall time - 54:09. We were relieved since we had set that as our goal beforehand.