Wānaka adventurer Bob McLachlan has charged to victory in one of the world’s great kayak races.
He and Whakatāne crewmate Gordon Townsend, collectively known as the Best Foot Forward team, won the Yukon 1000 on Wednesday.
The race takes paddlers 1000 miles (1609km) down the Yukon River from Canada to Alaska, paddling for a maximum of 18 hours a day.
McLachlan and Townsend, both in their 50s, finished in five days, 14 hours and 46 minutes, the second-fastest time in the event’s history and a shade under three hours off the record time.
Remarkably, they did it after breaking their rudder right at the start of the race and having to paddle about 160km with no steering aid.
That was "a truly Herculean feat, especially given the notoriously rough waters of Lake Laberge in the early stages", Yukon 1000 organisers said in a statement.
The weather was rough at that point, too, and a rival crew were forced to withdraw after capsizing.
McLachlan, 54, a vastly experienced kayaker as well as a longtime commercial rafting guide, looked fresh as a daisy after the race but acknowledged it had been hard work.
"This is by far the toughest kayak race you can do, and the toughest kayak race I’ve ever done," he said.
"You have to be racing when you’re camping, because if you do things slowly then you don’t get much sleep, and you’ll be falling asleep in the kayak.
"Then the paddling ... the wind can be so strong, and the long days of sun can be quite brutal."
McLachlan said he and Townsend had hoped to break the event record.
"We pushed hard the whole way, knowing the record was there. By the third day or even the fourth day, we thought it was manageable, but there was no chance with the wind over the last couple of days."
The rudder issue was a piece of freakish bad luck as a stainless steel cable broke.
"We knew other people would be hot on our tail.
"We decided we’d just go rudderless that day, which was quite physically demanding."
Thousands of people enter the Yukon 1000 each year but only 22 teams were accepted for this year’s race.
