greyson, me, tino, sam, dan and jason
with the bliss-stick sprinter van and trailer loaded down with boats and gear, the crew of michael and greyson briere, sam fulbright, tino specht and myself left north carolina around 5 am on thursday morning for the long drive to vermont. 15 hours later we arrived to a cold and snow covered middlebury, vt and just in time to catch some hot tub action before it closed for the night.
friday morning was practice time. the plan was to spend a few hours on the course learning the fast lines and trying to link everything together. the course was about 1/2 mile long and consisted of a few larger rapids with lots of bobbing and weaving through boulder garden boogie. the water level was pretty low causing the river to be a little bonier than normal but it was still a really fun course.
me, testing out some alternative lines
tino boofing on the last rapid of the race
sam airborne
after getting about 6-7 good full runs we decided to call it a day. it was now time to celebrate sam’s 21st birthday. we headed over to this little tavern for some dinner and drinks...and a shot ski of patron.
celebrating sam's 21st with some tequila
rise and shine was about 7 am. we grabbed a quick breakfast and hit the road to the river. before i go any further i want to talk about the previous years race. the new haven race is a local, grassroots race. last year the number of racers was something like 20. there were no sponsors, no prize money, just a hand carved trophy by another boater, which is quite amazing. the format is boater-cross style with 4 people per heat, double elimination. this allows for everyone to race a few time before getting eliminated. now...
racers meeting
prerace wandering.
...back to this years race; the bliss stick u.s. open with a total cash prize of $1750 turns this race into more than just a local boys friendly competition. we had 59 racers total. boaters from all over the northeast and canada came out to try and win the money. the format stayed the same, which turned out to be a mistake...lesson learned, hopefully. double elimination with 59 racers takes more time than there is daylight not to mention can be a bracketing nightmare, which it was.
tino with a huge lead on one of his many laps
jason coming through rooster tail
blue angel style on toaster
daps all around.
dan looking good through the course
me getting ready for the launch
round 1: went off really well. the bliss stick squad dominated winning all their heats by a large margin.
round 2: tino and sam won their heats while me and dan burke came in 2nd and 3rd. no worries because its double elimination. time turn on the power for the next heat.
round 3: nope. round 3 for some folks was canceled. wait?! what?!
so this is when this really amazing day starting spiraling down. apparently the organizers realized that they made a mistake in keeping with the double elimination. the rules said that if more than 64 racers registered it would go to single elimination rounds. that would have sped things up. they chose not to do this and learned this mistake really soon into the race. instead of trying to fix the problem they decided to switch the race to single elimination in the middle of the race which knocked out several racers from the competition with no reason.
not everyone got cut though. just the people who had won round 1 and lost round 2. if you lost the first round then you were safe, which really makes no sense. it caught a lot of racers off guard. we didn’t get disqualified nor did we loose. we just had to stop racing for no justifiable reason other than they (organizers) decided on it. not cool or professional at all. especially when people travel and pay money to attend their event.
it was a bummer for sure and got heated for a bit. its to be expected when someone tells a group of racers they can no longer race...just because. i only got to race twice and wasn’t given a fair shot at the winnings...along with a number of other racers who just got cut.
the remaining racers ended up racing the same people over and over due to a malfunction with bracket system. they also raced the course about 6-7 times which is absurd. it definitely made everyone feel pretty beat-down. the winners were: 1st hugh, 2nd joel, 3rd patrick.
overall the race was lots of fun despite the confusion and errors. it was great to see so many people fired up on racing. bliss stick was well represented and i am proud of the bliss stick team and everyone else who participated. thanks for a great event. hopefully the organizers will get some things worked out for next year. all in all they did their best and apologized at the end for the mixup.
nature is what unites us
–trent thibodeaux
0 comments:
Post a Comment