Adrian Tregoning

After an amazing season of consistent super-high flows on the Vaal (my home river), the water had been back down to usual low flows for a while, but further down the drainage, the Orange was still pumping at 1500 cumecs (40 000 cfs), and was looking like a good option for an Easter road trip. So, we piled 5 guys (myself, Philip Claassens, Lloyd Wallace, Hannes Pienaar, Adrian Vroom) and 2 girls (Jolene Fisher and my lovely wife Phia Longridge) into a Hannes’ dad’s Kombi and headed for Augrabies falls, one of the Northern Cape’s main tourist attractions, and one I’d never been to before.

The annual Hansa Powerade Fish River Canoe marathon has been around for a long time now. I fact, since 1982, the year I was born. It’s a well respected race in which ‘canoeists’ pit themselves against the river in a two day race. Day one is 46km and day two is some 25% shorter they claim on the website. It’s a big event hosting usually in excess of 1500 paddlers, or ‘canoeists’ as they like to be called.