Sylvia had the idea first. I don't know where my wife heard
about it but she suggested we enter a canoe race from San Marcos down to the
Texas coastal city of Corpus Christi. I was on board immediately. We would work
as a team in this unusual race that would require we go the distance powered
only by paddles, oars or sails.
The distance? 500 miles.
The race? The first Texas Water Safari
I was the Associated Press correspondent in San Antonio. We
were both young and adventurous. And it was the 60s.
We were making preliminary plans when we learned Sylvia was
carrying our third child. That meant she couldn't go because her previous
pregnancies had not been easy. But she insisted I could. I did not realize until
much later just how hard it was for her to say that. She really wanted to go
but I was a young dumb klutz who plowed ahead.
The San Marcos
Chamber of Commerce was organizing the race. San Marcos is north of San Antonio.
It’s noted for its crystal spring and the chamber wanted to attract more
tourists for the glass-bottom boats and tube rides. The race was to be down the
San Marcos River to the Guadalupe River; down the Guadalupe to Haynes Bay, into
the Intracoastal Waterway to Ingleside and finally across Corpus Christi Bay to
the Corpus Christi wharf. That would
combine narrow river, large river, still canal and open bay.
I grew up around water and boats and knew how to paddle a
canoe. How hard could this be? I needed a partner. I bragged about my skill and
very soon I had backed myself into a corner. Nat Gibson, a reporter for the San
Antonio Express, whose braggadocio was as great as mine, joined me in the
corner. We must enter this race.
In 1962 the general manager of the San Marcos Chamber of
Commerce, Fred Brown and a friend had explored a “route to the sea” from San
Marcos. Brown and his friend, Bill (Big Willie) George paddled to Corpus on
what would become the route for the Texas Water Safari
the next year.
It took them three weeks.
Nat was crazy enough to think it would be fun. I was no saner
than he.
Events moved apace and we got an official entry form and rules
package. You can read the original rules here
and know just as much as we knew when we entered. I had no idea I was signing
on for what would become the hardest task of my life. It was truly
transformational and probably had a lot to do with re-kindling in me a spirit
of adventure that had been awakened as a kid when I read “Kon Tiki,” the
chronicle of Thor Hyerdahl’s epic crossing of the South Pacific Ocean on a
raft.
One Tough Race
The organizers called the Texas Water Safari “The Toughest Boat
Race in the World.”
The rules seemed pretty simple.
- No motors. Just oars, paddles or sails.
- No outside help. None.
- All the equipment, water and food must be in the boat at the start.
- No replenishment of supplies.
- The race was to cover 500 miles.
The race is different now. It sounds easier. The race now ends
at Seadrift, Texas, rather than Corpus Christi and the distance is 260 miles
instead of the 500 miles advertised for the first race. The current rules allow for a
team “captain” to follow along on dry land and “deliver items of food, ice, drink or medical materials at any
time during the race which they, in their sole discretion, deem necessary
for the health or safety of the team.” That was ground for
disqualification in my race.
There have been many minor injuries over the years but only one
fatality. Brad Ellis, 30, died of hyponatremia, or low sodium, in 2012. Ellis
and his partner Ian Rolls, 34, were 98 miles into the race. Allen Spelce, of
the Texas Water Safari organization, said: “It goes against logic. You think,
‘Drink water, drink water,' but you're expelling all of that sodium, through
sweat and using the bathroom, and not getting the replacements.”
Nat and I were impoverished reporters with no cash to spare. We
could barely scrape together the $25 entry fee. So we went looking for
sponsorship. We were members of the San Antonio Press Club, in an old
Spanish-colonial building on the San Antonio River. A pair of less-than-sedate
public relations men came to our aid.
Our Sponsors
Aubrey Kline of the Pearl Brewery got Pearl’s approval to
purchase an aluminum canoe, paddles, life preservers, a kit that would covert
the 15-foot canoe into a sailboat. Pearl put its logo on our sail.
Jack Harmon of the Southwest Research
Institute offered his help. The scientists at his shop were working with
NASA and the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in
San Antonio on future manned space flight. He got some “astronaut food” being
developed for use in the space flights NASA planned in order to meet President
John Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
We learned new meaning for “tube steak” when Jack’s scientists
delivered food in tubes and vacuum-sealed packets. Some of the food was
powdered. Some was in squeeze tubes. None of it would make it past the kitchen
door in a one-star restaurant The scientists wanted to know if we could survive
on what they “cooked.”
The powdered orange drink Tang was used on John Glenn’s
Mercury space flight the year before but was still generally unknown in 1963
when we were offered a chance to test it. We used it. Tang became famous later
but not because of us. It was the drink astronauts used on the Gemini missions.
We mixed it with river water we purified with special purification tablets the
scientists gave us to test. Jack’s
scientists were as far out as he was. For fun they developed a “dehydrated
Martini” – just add water to the powder and, Eureka!, a genuine martini. They
made a brick which when soaked in water turned into enough gasoline to run and
automobile engine. Briefly.
The martini tasted better than the food but the gasoline brick
was too expensive to be practical.
Neither of those experiments made the Safari. Harmon, a free spirit in
tune with the 60s, introduced friends to lost weekend parties in an unknown
ghost town near San Antonio in the Texas Hill Country. The town -- Luckenbach -- would become famous a
decade later in a Waylon Jennings song.
Travel Plans
We planned to rest at night, sleeping on the river bank. It
never occurred to us that anyone would be crazy enough to make the trip any
other way. We opted to forsake a tent to
save weight but did pack lightweight sleeping bags that were soaked halfway
through the first day and never again dried until after the trip was over.
We put the canoe in the reflecting pool at the brewery for a
test paddle. It was a success even though the pool was only a few feet deep. We
made test runs on a much larger pond in a San Antonio park to learn to sail it
and made several practice runs down parts of the San Marcos river.
 |
| Competitors in the 2014 Race |
Small rivers like the San Marcos are beset by piles of tree branches and brush
that accumulate in the river. They are called logjams even though there may not
be any true logs in the jam. Some are so big you can’t see over them from the
seat of a canoe. The organizers said to expect more than 50 logjams and eight
man-made dams of up to 25-feet high. I think there were more but we lost count.
Logjams form on the surface when trees, branches and brush get caught at a bend
or narrow spot in the river. The river continues to flow under them so they can
be dangerous. Snakes -- especially big Texas water moccasins -- love logjams.
Snakes also hang out on the branches and limbs hanging over the narrow San
Marcos River. The river was so narrow in places we literally had our heads in
the trees. We had to make certain we grabbed an overhanging limb, not a snake,
and that no snake dropped into the boat.
Some of the jams we could pull the canoe over. Others we had to
portage by pulling the canoe over the jam or by beaching the canoe and dragging
it around the jam. Frequently we had to pull the canoe through a barbed wire
fence to get around a jam.
 |
| Typical Logjam |
Some dams were small enough we could simply stand on
top of the dam and lower the canoe into the downstream flow. But for most we
had to portage. We also had to watch for low bridges.
It is hard to describe how difficult it is to drag a loaded
canoe over those logjams and around those dams a dozen times a day. Some of the
portages were only a few yards. On some others we had to lug that boat a long
way. We turned over frequently. Our gear was strapped in the boat so we didn’t
lose anything but it all got wet.
The San Marcos is not normally considered a navigable river so
engineers didn't have to worry about water traffic when they built bridges as
cheaply as possible on small county roads. If the river was high the space
between the water and the bottom of the bridge was tiny and dangerous.
 |
| Low Water Bridge |
Roger Zimmerman, who was also in the 1963 race, wrote a brief history of that
event for the Texas Water Safari site on the Internet. His records show there
were 127 competitors on 58 teams. Only one competitor was a woman. His list
shows Gibson and I had the number 145 on our canoe. Although Big Willie George
and Fred Brown took 20 days, eight hours for their trip our race was planned
for 12 days. We took longer. Sylvia recalls it being 15 days. I bow to her
memory because it seems to me as if we were in that canoe a month.
Long distance canoe paddling is not for sissies. Even though we
had practiced and prepared we were aching when we pulled up on the bank for
lunch that first day. First the arms, then the back, then by dusk everything
ached. By dark we had already pulled the canoe out of the water to drag it
around three logjams. We called it a day just before dark and made camp on the
river bank. We watched some competitors paddle by as we rested. We knew some
were paddling much faster than us. Some
had rigged their canoes with oar locks for faster travel. But that was our
first indication of what the winners would do – paddle straight through,
stopping only to portage and to answer nature’s call. They were exhausted
beyond imagination by the end of the race.
Houston Cops Jim
Jones and Lynn Maughmer Finished First
In fact, only two boats are officially listed as finishing that
first race. All the other competitors either missed the deadline, dropped out
or --- like us – were disqualified. We were disqualified because we had some outside
aid for a helpful man who took pity on us as we struggled to get the canoe over
what seemed to be a huge dam. Nat and I argued afterword about whose idea it
was to accept that help but truth be known we would not otherwise have made it
over that dam in our exhausted state. We learned of our disqualification when
we reached the bay crossing but asked the race officials to let us proceed even
though we were officially out of the race.
We struggled on. Sometimes we waded in deep mud to drag the
canoe behind us. We finally got to hoist the sail, install the leeboards and
sail across the salt water. After we reached the finish point we sailed a
couple of big circles with the sail hoisted to show off the Pearl Beer logo.
That won us no favors with the organizers. But the brewery was
happy with the big front page picture in the San Antonio newspaper the next
day. Unfortunately that picture and others of us in the canoe have been lost on
our many moves.
Sylvia remembers saying a breathless WOW when she saw me at the
finish. She says she saw a tanned, bearded "hunk" with fine muscle
definition. The tan highlighted hair and beard whitened by the salt water of
the bay and by the sun. Our children Cathy, 3 and Sean, 2, had waited anxiously
for Daddy to return but they were shocked by what the saw.
Cathy's 3-year-old mouth trembled as she whispered "Daddy,
what's that white stuff on your face?
*All photos are from Internet sources
