A Luminescent Adventure

The folks at Pangea Adventure Racing hosted the Luminescent AR this past weekend, and since we could not compete in it as a team (due to scheduling conflicts), I decided to do the next best thing and volunteer myself to staff the race. The Luminescent was a night race, called so because of the unicellular plankton in the Indian River Lagoon that luminesce when the water is disturbed by boats, paddles or fish, which makes for a really cool paddle at night. The elite race started at 9pm, the sport race started at 1am and both ended at 5am.

Navigating the course at night, through freshly soaked terrain proved to be a fantastic challenging as no elite or sport teams were able to clear either the 8hr or 4hr courses within the allotted time. The course may have beaten the races, but that didn’t stop them from thoroughly enjoying the race. After the race, Pangea directors/staff heard lots of comments from racers about how much fun they had and how cool the bioluminescence was while paddling the waterway. Many racers, especially elite racers, expressed how much they enjoyed the challenge of the course.

After the awards presentation, just before dawn, Ron Eaglin and I paddled the sport and elite courses to retrieve the buoys and CP markers. We were able to catch a few minutes of the bioluminescence before dawn, also for the majority of our paddle in the main Indian River waterway; we were constantly surrounded by pods of dolphins. We think they may have been playing with the race buoys, as we were unable to locate and retrieve one, even with the assistance of GPS.

We missed out this year, but the Luminescent will definitely be on AR Militia’s race schedule next year.