December 11, 2001
By Susan McKenzie
The weather for the first day of Expedition BVI offered up as much variety as a meal in a tapas bar: a burst of sunshine, then a taste of rain, gusts of wind, a brief squall, and so on until early afternoon when the skies cleared and the sun was at its peak.
King Oscar/AdventureTraining.com, captained by Robyn Benincasa led virtually from the start. Most teams completed the first kayak section in less than two hours, swapping kayaks for boogie boards or, in the case of Nokia Adventure, inflatable cell phones (guess which brand). Nokia's members are not the strongest swimmers in this field, but the winds carried their inflatables across from Brewer's Bay to Cane Garden Bay, while the four Finns paddled and let their legs rest.
The first five teams, King Oscar/AdventureTraining.com, Nokia Adventure, Epinephrine, Red Bull/Buff, and NYFIX/racingahead.com moved in and out of CP3 within half an hour of each other, though Nokia's Elina Maki-Rautila may have been hurting more than she showed. After climbing out of the water, she slipped and wrenched her arm. She sat on the beach, immobile, for several minutes as her teammates and King Oscar's members tried to help her, offering to go for medical assistance. Instead, two minutes later she was up and running along the shore. If she is hurt, she isn't telling, and neither are her teammates.
Behind the lead pack, the other teams were pushing to make the first cutoff at CP2 at noon. Some teams were still only halfway through the first kayak leg as others were swimming to the coasteering section. In the thick of the pack, a large cluster of teams were meeting up with their yachts for the first time since the race began.
The number "4" emblazoned on the racing bibs of Team Bitter End Yacht Club was all that identified them as they stroked through the water. Their faces covered by snorkels and masks, their helmeted heads bent down and pushing, they swam slowly but steadily in the chop. A few boats away, Team Dupont Adventurewear spent a scant few minutes in transition on its Sunsail yacht in Cane Garden Bay. Kelly Wiglesworth laughed as her flippered feet slowly kicked her boogie board forward.
"I bet this looks easy," she said. "Did you notice Charlie and Harald are carrying all the gear?" In fact, Charlie Engle and Harald Zundel were sitting low in the water, their boogie boards weighted down with their own gear as well as that of Wiglesworth and Joel Klug.
TerraDiscovery/BrokerXtrordinair's four members kicked through the waves in tandem, with one unidentified team member kicking up water with hot pink flippers. Behind them, Team Merrill Lynch took a few minutes on its yacht to grab a bite to eat and check the maps.
Only eight teams made the first cutoff. They will continue on the original course, eleven teams will race the shortened Expedition course and five will race the even shorter Adventure category.
Team Metabolife/Challenged Athletes missed the cutoff by eight minutes. Still, they were in high spirits when they swam onto Jost Van Dyke at the foot of the rappel, with challenged athlete Willie Stewart in front, his right arm doing twice as much paddling to compensate for his missing left arm.
"We had a run in with a shark on the way," joked teammate Pierre Redmond when a spectator noticed Stewart had no left arm. "But hey, we decided to keep going."
Metabolife/Challenged Athletes Foundation was philosophical about the extra eight minutes.
"We got walloped in that first squall when we were in the kayaks. We put up a sail and then the wind came up and we dumped."
Redmond says the team's new motto is, "We're not as bad as we thought we were."
Stewart had probably one of his biggest challenges awaiting just a few hundred meters overhead: the rappel. With one arm, it was quite a challenge for the Challenged Athlete but he made it down the rope safely, though it did take him longer than most.
Initial calculations had the top teams finishing the race at Foxy's Bar (in Great Harbour on Jost Van Dyke) by six or six-thirty, but by eight-thirty only King Oscar/adventure training.com had finished the first day with a limbo at Foxy's Bar, giving them almost twelve hours to rest and recuperate before Day Two's yacht regatta start in White Bay off Jost Van Dyke. The teams will have to hope for better weather Wednesday also, since the grueling 40 mile mountain bike section across Tortola is tough enough without adding wet roads.
