By Clint Veivers

Shotgun!! That’s how we started the Fitzroy 50 and that’s how thoughts just leap out of my head when I try to think about how to start this article. This was the best barefoot weekend that I’ve had in a long time and the best endurance challenge that has been run yet. It’s almost exactly one year since the first long distance barefoot relay was run on the Fitzroy River near Rockhampton at Laurel Banks Gardens. It’s still a fantastic spot and as you can see, the calm water barefoot Gods really turned on the good weather!
 

If you read the story on last year’s event, the first thing you may notice is the name change to The Fitzroy 50. This was not on purpose...or was it Ross? The distance was supposed to be 40km if I remember correctly. Ross Angel, a barefoot veteran who was skiing before Brett Wing was even thought of and sponsor of the event, took heed of requests from last year and ran the event with a shotgun start plus a twist and extended the course. I think he may have got kilometres mixed up with miles somewhere along the line because by the time we had completed the course, our GPS unit read 51.6km! Last year we had a turnaround boat at half way and this year was the same. Video of our faces would have been funny as quite a few exchanges of “what the...?” facial expressions were going around when we hit the 20k mark and saw no sign of the turnaround boat!
 

I’d best start this yarn from the beginning though or else I’m gonna be all over the shop like the pellet spray from the aforementioned shotgun. Saturday saw us all muster sporadically throughout the day from all over Queensland. We failed to attract the big guns from NSW and VIC once again but they will have to make a point of getting here eventually; this is just too good to miss! The furthest afield was John Price, Gizella Halasz and Bendan Paige all from South East Queensland being the makeup of Team Barefoot Central including myself. David Bray and his team (Hakuna Matata) from Emerald, Peter Aquili from Glenden and myself from Mackay were the only others that I know of who were not local and we live only 3-4 hours away. I arrived late in the eve and decided not to ski the figure 8 (due to a partly strained heart muscle) and getting out of the car once I got there like a half shut pocket knife because of a sore back, so photo man I was. I’ve never taken much interest in the figure 8 stuff before, but the fun everyone had was a sure sign that I had definitely missed out. Our new BFC recruit Brendon Paige from Brisbane was the figure 8 champion followed by Brazy (David Bray) from Emerald and Mark Sutherland from just up the road a bit. The water was flat, the skiers competitive and it will be a sure thing next year.
 

Brendan Paige - 1st Place

Fig8 winners. Brazy-3rd on left, Mark in middle and Brendan on right

That evening was a great catch up and I learned more about our sport once again by listening to the yarns that Ross, John and Giz were spinning around the table after dinner. Like I said before, Ross was around barefooting in the days before Brett Wings time when Gary Barton was the big name in barefoot circles. Ross was saying that he finds it funny how most people these days who call themselves barefooters have not even heard of Gary Barton before. I probably fall into that category but I do know that Brett Wing looked up to Gary more than anyone else in his barefoot career. Among other things I think Gary actually invented the back deep start. (I’ll wait for the correction from everyone if that is not the case). Anyway, Ross probably still has the piece of timber that he flogged off Moses’ Ark to do his backwards step off!!
As I mentioned earlier, the start of the endurance run had a twist. Instead of starting with skiers in the water on a tight line, Ross had modified this so that the skiers had to start from the duck board (back deck) with handle in hand. I didn’t hear any reports of knotted lines, but all sorts of nasty images were coming to mind of my beautiful 100ft barefoot rope reduced to 50ft with a bunch of grapes somewhere in the middle. Jens Crew were off the mark the fastest and established near a boat and rope length lead. The twist at the start was really something new for us and certainly made the adrenalin kick in a bit more than usual. I didn’t think much of the idea at first however; I reckon that it made the start allot more exciting and less predictable than it otherwise may have been.
 

I remember chasing down Jens Crew which had Luke Van Denheuval (good luck to me If I spelt that right) skiing first with Mark Sutherland and Brett Harber following up. Luke was once the bright future of Open Men’s barefooting for Australia straight out of the junior ranks a few years ago. Like so many others before him though, getting a job out of school, leaving home and discovering the fairer sex saw him gone. It was great to see him back competing in some sort of footing and it would be great to get him back one day to carry on from where he left off in tournament skiing. I digress again...so we were chasing down Jens Crew; we must have had the jump on the others though for they were all I could see from the end of the rope. John had set a cracking pace and my out of condition feet were feeling it. (I hate it when you are also too unfit to ride one footers for too long, so just letting the feet burn becomes the only option.) The first big straight went for about 5 minutes or so and Luke reckons that his feet were fried and had no chance of going on. We didn’t see anyone again till the way back after going around the turnaround buoy and enjoyed every bend of purely flat, glassy beautiful water that there was.
 

Hopefully next year we see teams like Team Intensity and the Young guns make the trip so that we can run an A group and B group competition to make the field more competitive. In saying that, Jens Crew and Hakuna Matata were only a few minutes behind and a few more runs together would see them right there. Ross Angel at 1000 years of age also showed up most of the pack by skiing over 9 minutes and will surely be receiving his Masters badge at the next event. His team Top Attitude was the same as last year with Madison and Brother Ben Harber skiing again. Their team would have to be the most diverse. Ross used to play fullback with Jesus for Jerusalem and Ben and Madison only came down in one of the last showers in comparison. His boat is a super light 19ft Cyclone race boat with a dirty great 300 Merc bolted on the back with plenty of ‘get down that river now!!’ Team BFC and Jens Crew had 200 Mercs pushing and the other two teams, Hakuna Matata and Team Anchor were dugouts. (They are dugout like the Aboriginal canoe which is dugout of a tree so they can hop in and paddle the thing. This is the same for the inboards except they dig them out so they can put a car engine in them but much less reliable. See Cam Smith for the extended version of the dugout.) Giz also skied admirably doing 11 minutes easy, only stopped by the turn around point. On the last leg back she skied over 12 minutes and looked as if she could have kept on going then as well. I don’t know of anyone yet to stand up two 10 minute plus runs back to back in these comps. This must then mean that as far as Endurance skiing goes in Australia, the women (or woman in this case) are outdoing the men! Come on fellas, let’s get out there and catch her!
 

Team BFC in action

Last article I spoke a bit about David Kimber as our third BFC member. Now I must talk a little on the latest barefoot sensation here in Oz who was our third man at this event, Brendan Paige. Brendan has been barefooting now for less time than it takes to make a baby and see it walking. In that time he has managed to ski his way into Open Men’s and shows no signs of slowing down. Keep an eye on this space barefoot world! In the endurance run Brendan managed a bit over five minutes. He had to deal with three on coming boat washes though and the first time probably saw him with some adrenalin and nerves which seem to sap the energy reserves. Most impressively Brendan had a run later that day down to the barrage. The water was chippy here and there, and once again he had to ski through a few big Shark Cat fishing boat washes and deal with a couple of jet skis. He made the turnaround until I busted him off by turning too tight back into our wash. 14 plus minutes!! Not a bad effort for his first time ever at skiing long distance. Then to really make us feel old and decrepit, he had to go out and do all four turns and some side slides (all on the long line as well.) Looks like Giz and Brendan could combine to do a two up 30 minute run to smash Keith and Chucks 20 minute effort! And Dave, your spot in Team BFC is now looking a shaky old mate!
 

A big thankyou once again to the Rocky mob for running such a great event. I can see this becoming the premier event of Australian endurance barefoot skiing. Thanks again to Ross for his continued support and sponsorship of the event, it is very much appreciated. Well done to all the competitors especially, everyone did a great job to complete this difficult course length, and wasn’t it great? As we get better we could even run another 15 to 30 kilometers into it. If not then have an elite class do it with the top skiers? Is the Hawkesbury Hundred on the cards Mr Crouch and Mr Connors? The sky isn’t even the limit!

Clint Veivers.