Durban - There’s a notorious rapid called Tombi on the 120km route of the MyLife Dusi Canoe Marathon.
At the approach to it, a pinnacle rock divides a left-hand and a right-hand route into the white water. Paddlers know they must respect Tombi by heading to the right.
“You must not go to the left,” Kevin Trodd of the KZN Canoe Union explained to the Independent on Saturday.
“You must go to the right because there is a siphon, a place where the water goes under the rock. It can siphon you underneath and that can be fatal.”
One canoeist has died there and Tombi “has almost taken quite a few experienced paddlers”.
But octogenarian Hugh Raw, the oldest entrant in this year’s Dusi and described on the race’s website as this year’s “boldest finisher”, has shot over Tombi taking the left route three times. It was in canvas canoes that he describes as being "like little corks", used by the pioneers of the race, which dates back to 1951.
This year, competing in his 10th Dusi but in a fibreglass kayak, he approached Tombi undecided about whether to go left or right.
“The boat and I went to the left,” he said.
Raw disappeared out of sight and parted from his canoe.
“It went through my mind that there’s a lot of history there. It once claimed a life. But I got out totally unscathed.”
Trodd, who was part of a team accompanying Raw that included Raw’s sons Shane and Darron, themselves river legends, and Raw’s grandson Braydon, found himself on the pinnacle. From there he shouted advice to the brothers who conducted a rescue operation on their old man.
“They had to do it to earn their inheritances,” Raw joked this week, home and dry in Pietermaritzburg where he has lived his whole life, having turned 80 in November. Like the other four in his team, he is a product of Maritzburg College.
Raw started watching the Dusi from the air.
“I used to fly and take people for flips in a four-seater at lunch time when the Dusi was in full flow. It was interesting watching canoeists threading their way through the trees (on their portages) from the air.”
Raw had been in the fibreglass business. Once he became self-employed and lost access to the plane, he ended up making watersport craft, entering his first canoe race in 1980 and his first Dusi the following year.
“The reason I have done only 10 is that I used to take equipment to sell to the paddlers at the overnight spots. Now it’s overdone. People come down with entire workshops and there are generators and grinders going while you’re trying to get some sleep.”
Raw is fond of the old canvas canoes and, in 2015, paddled the Dusi in one with Ian Player’s portrait painted on it, in honour of the canoeing and conservation legend who had died the year before.
“I was a very good friend of Ian Player. He was very kind to me and my boys; were all very interested in conservation. Luckily enough I was able to see him in his last years.”
Paddling with Raw on that commemoration race was a friend and contemporary, Ian Ross.
“It was onerous. Inanda Dam was painful. He talked solidly the whole way. He knew why he was doing it. It was to keep me going.”
Raw brought Shane and Darron up canoeing.
“I would take the boys down in a double, me in front. Within a year they wanted to go free of Dad.
“It was nice to have had them doing this together and not fighting the way brothers do. They got on well.”
Matriculant grandson Braydon and three others in his generation are also canoeists.
Raw is concerned at the amount of litter flowing into rivers, lining the high-water mark where floods have deposited it, especially in the Msunduzi – the first stretch of the Dusi before it enters the Mgeni.
“I don’t know what the future holds until there’s a lot of education around it and that’s really in its infancy. It’s a gloomy outlook.”
He said it was very sad people kept buying plastic packets each time they went shopping because these often ended up in the rivers.
But he believes the sport has a great future.
“I can see there is growth in canoeing. I cannot believe how little girls who look as young as 12, who are tiny and not very strong, are so adept at keeping themselves upright.
“I marvel at them.”
Raw said he no longer kept his balance the way he used to but, in spite of being “a little wobbly” plans to race on the Mkomazi River today in the Stihl Umkomaas Marathon.
“I am just going to float down in a plastic kayak. I’ll be able to take on the rapids with confidence.”
Trodd sums up Raw as “someone who likes seeing other people having fun and being part of it too”.
The Independent on Saturday