Kevin Davie at the Dusi Canoe Marathon: Wednesday
Whatever stories you’ve heard about the water level for the Dusi Canoe Marathon, the first thing paddlers do on arrival in Pietermaritzburg is check out the level for themselves. There can be rain overnight or a late water release to boost the level in the river, but what you see is usually a good indication of what you will get on race day.
The rivers have been full, but the Dusi is at a disappointing level, about medium or even medium-low. One Pietermaritzburg-based paddler who has been watching the level all day tells me that it has actually been dropping.
An organiser I know told me he expected the level to be medium-low on race day. This means that there will be enough water to paddle the river, but that it is unlikely that the race record will be broken and that paddlers will not have the excitement that big water brings.
The lines through rapids are generally easier at high levels, and rocky conditions mean it is easier to break or damage your canoe if you get the lines wrong.
The biggest talking point here, though, is not the quantity or quality of the water. It is last-minute changes to the Commercial Road weir. More than 20 years ago this was the first obstacle canoeists faced on their journey to Durban. They would jump out of their boats and clamber over the weir.
Then the Ernie Pearce weir was built upstream. In my first Dusi we had to shoot this weir, which has become a much-photographed feature of the Dusi.
A canoe shoot was also built into the Commercial Road weir, which has come to be renamed the Witness Weir, but many canoeists have chosen to portage the weir rather than use the chute, as there were rocks at the bottom that could damage your boat. Later the bottom was concreted in but this created other problems.
A few days back work began to chop out the concrete, but canoeists found that the rough surface was damaging the fibre glass of their canoes.
On Tuesday a solution was found where two chutes built on scaffold have been installed. These have less of a gradient than the chute, but the one has a rock at the bottom that broke the nose of at least one boat during practice sessions on Wednesday.
The scaffold has some canoeists grumbling that the race is getting too easy, too soft. One canoeist wanted to know if the organisers would be building scaffolding on all the difficult rapids we will be encountering during the next few days as we make our way to Durban.
From 6am on Thursday, we get to find out.
See Martin Dreyer’s blog for pictures of the Commercial Road weir