When Ian Player won the first Dusi in 1951, he did so without much in the way of outside help. Last weekend more than 150 policemen and dozens of soldiers, sailors and firemen helped to make the race safer for more than 2 000 competitors. Gavin Foster reports
Three helicopters, 39 pistol-packing motorcyclists and 40 armed horsemen. A couple of platoons of infantry, 40 qualified scuba divers, 12 South African Police Service (SAPS) special task force members and a German Shepherd named Rolf who specialises in recovering dead bodies.
But these policemen, soldiers and sailors weren’t making war last weekend – they were keeping the peace during the three days and 120km of the Dusi, South Africa’s longest and toughest canoe marathon, between Pietermaritzburg and Durban.
“We start planning around July every year,” says race co-ordinator for safety and security Derek Howe of the Natal Canoe Club. “We liaise with the local chiefs, and monitor other races that go through the Umgeni valley to see if they have any problems, which they often do if they haven’t made proper provision for security.
“We also have informers who tell us what’s going on down there, and put together our operational plan well before the time.”
Involved in the process are the police, the South African Navy, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and Durban disaster management.
In the decade or so that the security forces have been involved in the Dusi, the motorcycle and equestrian units of both the army and the police have proven invaluable at getting where even 4x4s can’t. They serve mainly a crime-prevention role, and have proved very effective at that.
Despite being the biggest yet, with 2E239 competitors and thousands of seconds and spectators, this year’s Dusi was exceptionally quiet.
“Of the incidents we had this year most were minor,” says Superintendent Herman O’Connell, who was in charge of all police units for the first half of the race. “To stop [the incidents] you’d have to have a policeman virtually every 50m of the way. Most of the crimes are simply opportunistic – people park their cars in the bush with cellphones and cameras lying on the seats.”
Then of course, there are the caps – it’s become almost tradition for local villagers to snatch the caps from the heads of the competitors as they pass by, and not much notice is taken of this any more when compiling crime statistics.
Captain Anton Myburgh of the SAPS’s special task force followed the Dusi the hard way this year – by bicycle. “We rode the entire route that the support vehicles did – probably about 250km,” he says. With traffic backed up for kilometres in places he and his two cycling colleagues could often get through when their mounted friends couldn’t, simply because their lightweight bicycles are easy to pick up and carry over terrain that horses or motorcyclists would be reluctant to tackle.
The task force members are all qualified divers, and much of their work involves assisting paddlers who have capsized while negotiating the many rapids that punctuate the Dusi.
“We try to reach the places where there aren’t any other security forces,”said Myburgh. “It’s tough going – you have to make a real effort to get there, and when you do there aren’t many other people around to help you if the canoeists get into trouble.”
Inspector Jack Haskins of the police search and rescue unit has done six Dusis with his canine sidekick, Rolf, who can sniff out decomposing bodies under water by detecting minute quantities of the body fluids that rise to the surface once decomposition begins.
So far his skills in this area have never been needed on the Dusi, but his real value lies in his ability to quickly track down the living – competitors who find themselves lost during the portaging sections, for example. “That’s where we can be really useful,” says Haskins.
Most of the servicemen involved in the Dusi look forward to it as a break from routine, and an opportunity to meet the public under circumstances rather different to the usual. “This is one of the few events where you really have a fantastic relationship between the security forces, the [competitors] and the public,” says O’Connell.