DART-nuun News
presented by nuun

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 2:23AM (Pacific Time)
Again, from the Hotel Santa Isabella. Ensenada, Mexico, the Baja Peninsula. 74 miles south of San Diego California, on the Pacific Ocean.

Quick note: I have had word that team DART-nuun â?? NWkayaks made up of Ryan VanGorder, Jen VanGorder and Glen Rogers, is safe, but this is from an old Mexican who said he saw them on the coast line. I am still trying to source where they are. Team DART-nuun, made up of Cyril Jay-Rayon, Aaron Rinn and Jen Segger, were last heard of in first place heading into the mountains.

Todayâ??s moment: 24 FOOT SWELLS! Teams lost at sea. I still have not found DART â??nuun-NWkayaks.

Report: With 24 foot wells and 6-8 foot breaking sets hitting the beach teams were glad to arrive at the bike transition in La Bocana south of Ensenada. Only two teams were able to surf their kayaks in, the rest were punished by the frothing sea as they surfed into the beach. DART-nuun commented from the beach, while gasping breaths between spitting out salt water, â??That is the scariest thing I have ever done.â?? All three team mates said that it was terrifying. Were they 24 foot swells? Well let me put it this way. As I watched a Mexican Navy coast card cutter off in the distance pulling in an abandon kayak. I saw the entire vessel disappear in the troughs of the well, and I was standing on a sea cliff about 100ft or more above the shore. This was an angry see that just kept building.

I waited on lookout, from a high sea wall vantage point, for 14 hours waiting for any glimpse of DART-NWkayaks. Well into the night I became very worried as reports from teams landing on the beach ranged from, â??I have seen nobodyâ??, â??we lost site of the boat right next to us.â??, â??We saw a turtled kayak floating in the middle of the sea, but nobody with it.â?? It did not look good. Team Momar is driven into the Bike transition after losing their kayaks on the rock. One of Momar's team mates, Gary Robbins, reports to me he barely clung to rocks on the shore being smashed by the breaking waves and finally lifted by one and dropped on shore. He said he kept repeating to himself, â??hang on, hang on man, you can hang on.â?? In the end he could not but ended up on the beach with minor bruising and lacerations. He has resumed the race from the bike transition with his team. He also said the swells were so intense that he vomited 5 times before even reaching the island.

At this point as I write, this is what I have heard, I repeat, what I have heard. I will create a list of the statements in chronological order as they came to me.
About 8 hours in to the paddle teams are saying DARTNW left the last checkpoint ahead of them. They canâ??t believe they are not in yet.
About 11hrs in, it is pitch black now, an old Mexican drives up to the Bike transition, and through an interpreter he tells me that he has seen the team on the beach up the coast. He says they were capsized, some locals had found them, stripped them down because they were hypothermic, and placed some of their cloths on them. Very cool locals down here!
Then about an hour later I heard an ambulance was heading to get them.
Next I heard they were going to resume the race and be driven to me this was 9pm.
At 11:30 at night they had not arrived, I was the last person at the bike transition, all of the staff were leaving, so I left with one other team support crew, who has a team missing also, back here to Ensenada. I will await information of their location as going out to look for them is a needle in a haystack.

From the field, looking for my team, Erik Nachtrieb.