A resident of Victoria, Texas, Ken Startz, finished this year’s Texas Water Safari, a 262-mile race, in a 9.5-foot Heritage Featherlite Angler. Took him 58 hours and 41 minutes. He set the record for smallest boat to finish the “world’s toughest canoe race.”
Another feat: a team boat broke completely in half only 11 miles into the race, and the team managed to finish in that boat 60 hours later.
Wow,
thats a small boat for a marathon. And how did this canoe break in half??
Boat broken in half
I don’t know how the team boat broke in half. I was reading about this in a newspaper article, and it didn’t say what happened. But it had this quote:
“They literally had to use baling wire, sticks, mud, foam from their seats and they limped the boat all the way to Seadrift,” Spelce said. “It was just an amazing effort.”
what newspaper did you read it in??
They used duct tape too according to
– Last Updated: Jun-20-07 2:29 PM EST –
one of my buds who was a team captain and saw it done. Quite a feat condidering that except for the duct tape, every thing else was scrounged from the riverbank ans adjacent land.
The Guadalupe was running fairly high and there were tons of log jams for the racers to deal with. Many boats sustained damage. Some of the safari boats are not much thicker than two or three sheets of paper, so it does not take much to break them even portaging. The one in question was apparently broken in two when it ran over a partially submenged log.
Newspaper article
The article was in the Victoria Advocate, the local newspaper for Victoria, Texas. Here’s the link:
http://www.thevictoriaadvocate.com/308/story/76140.html
On the home page of this newspaper’s Web site is some video from the race, too.
For sake of reference
what were other finishing times?
for sale…9.5 ft featherlite–used once
Mr. Startz has placed his winning boat up for sale…
http://www.luv2paddle.com/cgi-bin/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5812
race info
you can find links to the race at www.luv2paddle.com the texas paddlers site.<br />
There are pictures of the 6 man boat that brok in half (more like 2/3 and 1/3)
They run this every year. come on out.
Bill reitzersmith
video
there are also some links to video of the race. mostly at some of the rapids. Worth watching just to see the 6 man teams manover those long boats thru the rapids.