Torture By Canoe

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