Paddlers prepare for Texas Water Safari river trek

Being the river community that San Marcos is, it is no surprise that the annual Texas Water Safari makes a real splash.

The four-day canoe race starts at the headwaters here as the participants row southeast until the Gulf Coast town of Seadrift is reached–a 260-mile journey. The race has been held on the second Saturday of June since 1963.

“It’s quite an extensive race and one of the longest ones that I know of in North America,” Texas Water Safari board member Bob Spain said. “There’s a longer race, more mileage, but it's on a river that’s flowing really fast.”

Spain said that over the years, 5,243 people have completed the race.

“That’s almost exactly two-thirds of those that started. That’s the lowest completion race of any race in North America that I know of, because of all the obstacles we have. One year, only one boat finished. Another year only two boats finished–this was in the early years,” Spain said. “If you put together the number of miles that those 5,200-plus people have paddled, times 260 miles, it ends up being 1,361,000 miles.

That’s a lot, but to give you some perspective on that, that’s like paddling around the equator 55 times.”

The safari has several events throughout the year: the Safari Seminar in February, the Texas River Marathon–which can be considered a preliminary race, in May, the Water Safari in June and the Texas Junior Water Safari in September.

The preliminary race is not required but is recommended because the finishing position in the preliminary race determines one's starting position in the TWS.

“It’s voluntary, but if you don’t do it, you end up at the back of the race,” Spain said.

The safari is run and organized by a voluntary board of directors.

“We’re all volunteers,” Spain said.

Several board members are TWS athletes, as well.

“Four of us have all done the race. Three of us are in the [TWS] Hall of Fame. We created the Hall of Fame in 2012, and oddly enough, the 50th year of the race, 50 people had done the race at least 10 times.” One must complete the race 10 times to be inducted into the TWS Hall of Fame.

“So, 94 people have done the race at least 10 times. One guy’s done it 43 times and one lady has done it 22 times,” Spain said.

Race check-in begins at 9 a.m., June 9 at the Meadows Center. Spain said the fee starts at $175 and increases the closer it gets to the race. “We have 162 [boats] signed up,” Spain said. “I counted 350 individuals who are in the race this year.”

TWS attracts adventurers from all over the world. “Over the years, 44 states have been represented in the race. This year we have 26 different states represented in addition to Texas. We’ve had, I believe it’s nine different foreign countries [represented],” Spain said. “We’ve had Australians, people from Belize, Brazil, United Kingdom, but this year we do have two foreign countries represented. We have someone from Brazil and someone from Italy.”

To celebrate the fact that this is the 60th safari, there will be special awards given at the banquet: 60th boat to finish, the boat that finishes closest to 60 hours and the first 60-year-old woman and man to finish.

The winning team for 2022 completed the race in 40 hours and 53 minutes. Crew were Clay Wyatt, Ian Rolls, Gaston Jones, Logan Mynar and Weston Willoughby. The winning team for 2021 completed the race in 35 hours and 46 minutes with this crew: Tim Rask, Kyle Mynar, Nick Walton, Tommy Yonley, Kaitlyn Mynar and Landen Jiral.

“The record is 29 hours and 43 minutes. The slowest time is 99 hours and 59 minutes,” Spain said.

The Brad Ellis Spirit Award is given in honor of a safari participant who passed away during the race in 2012. “Brad was paddling with a good friend of his, Ian Rolls–an awesome guy, experienced, and it was the first race for Brad Ellis. They were racing in the aluminum class, and Brad started having difficulty in the race. I think he actually laid down in the boat because he was feeling bad. At some point he fell out of the boat, and of course, his partner helped rescue him. He was unconscious. Other paddlers came by that had phones and called it in. He was unresponsive, so the life flight picked him up on the river and took him to San Marcos. My wife and I were working the race. We actually got there before his family did at the Military Hospital, and at that point they were seeing no activity at all. They put him on a respirator and put his body in a heated suit, but he never regained consciousness. His cause of death was hyponatremia which is a condition that occurs when your body doesn’t have enough electrolytes,” Spain said. “As a result of that we created the Brad Ellis Spirit Award that we award–when there’s a good candidate yearly for an outstanding act of sportsmanship.”

In 2021 it was given to Keifer Mauldin, Jason Pruitt, Ethan Hannah, Luke Johnson, Ty Prince, Brian Jones, Travis Crow, Jim Gibbs, Joey Halbert, Vince Cline and Richard Oechslin. “The year before last, we had four different teams that actually stopped during the race,” Spain said. “A number of them have to do with rescuing people, jumping out of your boat, stopping. In one case, a guy actually left the race and went with a person that was just out of it and took him to help find his support team on the bank for a while before he went back and finished the race. He actually won his class even after doing that.”

Spain said they do not give the Brad Ellis Spirit Award for small acts.

“It’s not just pat someone on the back or make a compliment verbally. It really has to be something pretty extraordinary. There’s been several years where we haven’t even awarded the award,” Spain said.

Due to the difficulty of the race and the strain it puts on the body, many participants have hallucinations. Spain told a story of a race sabotaged by an imagination gone wild. “He’s done it 19 times in the same kind of aluminum boat, and he never trains,” Spain said. “Last year he was within eight miles of the finish, and he thought he was on a flying carpet, he said in a quote I got from him. He jumped out–he said like a cat as some people told him–ran and got in a car nearby–didn’t even know whose car it was.” This particular contestant was disqualified after this incident, just before completing his 20th race–a level in the TWS Hall of Fame. This story he said is just one of many. “There’s a section of the race called Hallucination Alley,” Spain said.

Spain and his wife, Joy Emshoff, are the authors of 'Texas Water Safari: The World’s Toughest Canoe Race,' which chronicles many of hallucination tales along with other facts and stories from the race. Spain said the book is available at Amazon and bookstores including Barnes and Noble.