About 16km from Durban, the Umgeni River divides into two. Paddlers take a channel along the left-hand bank of the island, which runs into a dead end. You have to take out and portage about 50m along a rocky path where you put back into the river and shoot the rapids below.
The portage will take the top crews just a minute, but race leaders Ant Stott and Wayne Thompson last weekend elected to paddle on the right-hand side of the island, braving a rapid known as Island Two, which few Dusi paddlers ever see, never mind tackle.
Not that the competition was anywhere to be seen. Martin Dreyer and Hank McGregor, who between them have won the event six times, were at that time running over the mountain known in Dusi parlance as Burma Road.
It is so steep as you near the top, your partner’s head is below your feet.
Most Dusi veterans have portaged Burma Road at least once and most swear they will never, ever do it again. There are two exceptions. The one is if they arrive at the take-out with a badly damaged boat. The other is if there is no water in the river.
But the top contenders know that if they run the whole thing — it takes about 30 minutes — they can save a minute on a fast crew paddling around and shooting the biggest rapids of the three-day event: Little John, Graveyard, Molweni, Island and Five Finger.
Two-time winner Stott, who has been off for much of the year after a bout of glandular fever, only teamed up with Thompson, who had been overseas, in December and they were ”not in the best of form”.
They were still leading the race by two seconds at the end of the second overnight stop, thanks to aggressive paddling, shooting fearsome obstacles such as Washing Machine, Gauging Weir and Thombi, which the more cautious Dreyer and McGregor opted to portage.
Unlike the Comrades, for instance, you will not find foreign athletes dominating (or even participating in) the Dusi.
It’s not that other countries do not have long-distance canoeing, the marathon distance is an established Olympic discipline, and a number of countries hold long-distance river races.
But the top international paddlers who have visited have been gobsmacked by the size of the rapids South African competitors shoot in their fibreglass craft, originally and essentially designed for flat-water racing.
But the Dusi is much more than just challenging rapids. There’s the matter of the portages, about 20km in all, even when the river is full.
You have to understand the history of the race to know why people would want to carry, rather than paddle, a canoe. It is a race from point A, Pietermaritzburg, to point B, Durban.
Where the river meanders around a bend and it is quicker to get out and run the shorter route, you are allowed to do so. Well, some of the time. There are other places where it would also make sense to run rather than paddle, where portaging is expressly forbidden.
Yet other portages — Ngumeni on day two, for example — are there because the portage means you get to miss a waterfall not friendly to limb or fibreglass.
Some — such as Guinea Fowl on day one — have monsters of their own, in this case the dreaded Devil’s Cauldron about halfway into the 4km portage. The Cauldron is deep in the bush. The air does not move and temperatures often get to 40°C. Narrow paths take you in and then you traverse steep dongas to get out.
But this year the Dusi is uncharacteristically overcast after a massive downpour the previous night. Now we are literally being sucked into the Cauldron as the mud pulls us deeper and deeper. The downpour brings a flash flood, but the river settles down to a full level by morning. Many paddlers come down with Dusi guts, probably the result of overflowing sewerage systems; some do not finish, others are hospitalised.
One paddler, Tim White, spends 80 minutes trapped against a rock on day three until the water rushing from the nearby Inanda Dam is turned off.
The big water means chaotic scenes at the major rapids, long swims in turbulent water and many destroyed boats. Of more than 1 200 starters, only 950 boats finish.
Stott and Thompson elect to shoot Island Two to save a minute. Stott, who has an ethereal quality to his paddling, lines up beautifully, but the pair are knocked over by a giant stopper wave. Their boat is badly damaged.
They portage every rapid from here, finishing six minutes behind Dreyer and McGregor in second place.
My partner, Mike Wadge, and I manage one small swim in the three days although we portage four of the larger, boat-crushing monsters and finish in 12 hours and 32 minutes.
Island Two is not on our route. We take the 50m portage. In 16 Dusis, I have never even seen it. Stott tells me that the portage was not an option as they had decided they were not racing for second place. ”It was all or nothing,” he says.
”We thought that paddling on a full river we would arrive at the Burma put-in at the same time [as Dreyer and McGregor], but we would have saved energy.”
But how big is Island Two, how does it compare with Mango (the last rapid on day three and one of the largest drops)? ”It’s five times bigger,” says Stott. ”Top’s [where White got stuck] is nothing. It’s very, very big.”
Kevin Davie now has 17 Dusi medals and has no inclination to portage his canoe to anywhere other than the Umsindusi and Umgeni rivers again next year