After a year of trying to get together for a race, I reunited with fellow Red Wolf David Heyting and his team Superfly Snuka (Roger and Julie) for "Challenge the Port" held out at Port Gamble.

After all the planning had been done, we decided to meet at 5:00am Saturday morning in Lynwood in order to catch the 5:45 ferry to Gamble. For me, this was especially an early start as I opted to stay at home in a comfortable bed and drive down in the early AM. This decision was great as by taking the ferry I was able to get to know the team a bit more and have a feel for what the overall day had in store.

The race started with a short "O" section, where we all had to be tied together and hit 4 cp's. The controls weren't all the challenging, but they served their purpose, seperate the field a bit. We came into the TA in I think 4th, which gave us a great opportunity to see who our main competition would be. As expected mergeo.com were the ones in front of us (however they wouldn't be our competition for long). Into the kayaks we go (A BIG THANKS SEA KAYAK SHOP!) off to the next 4 cp's. The wind played a factor in this one as the water was quite rough. We managed to stay upright and maintain our solid overall position.

After a short portage, Julie directed me (blindfolded) through an obstacle course and then a small balance beam act before we were off and riding our bikes. I was about a mile into the bike that we realized who we were really competing with... ourselves. David busted a chain (where's AAA?) and looking to Roger for the tool, Roger didn't realize that his bike tool didn't have a chain tool on it. Doing so well, it could've been easy for us to self implode right then, but fortunately that didn't happen. Roger and I hopped on the bikes and rode back to the cars and grabbed my tool and headed back to our teammates. A quick fix and we were off again, playing leap frog with a number of teams that had passed us during the brake down. We must have lost 25 minutes.

Next came the orienteering section where we kept a pretty good clip going and had some great navigation by David. We finished the section learning we were in 8th place overall going into the final bike leg. Spirits revived, we took off and were able to snag 6th place overall and a surprising 3rd place in our division (we made the podium). Of course the two mergeo.com teams finished ahead of us, and I don't know that if we wouldn't have had the technical issues if we would have been able to beat them anyways.

Overall, it was a great race and a ton of fun.

Thrive AR and Superfly Snuka ATTAWAY!!!

-case