Heart of Darkness, Apr. 30

Heart of Darkness was the first all-nighter for Stephen and I. The event started in Hope with first car out at 23:00 and first car in around 8:00 the next morning in Chilliwack.

I have to say from the outset that all-nighters and me are not a great combination. I had planned on sleeping most of the afternoon prior to the rally but most-of-the-afternoon turned out to be just a couple of hours. Anyhow, the rally got off to a good start and we ended up with one of our best point-totals ever.

As is usually the case with low point-totals, there aren't many stories to tell. The transits and regs were spaced nicely enough so that there was plenty of time for calcs before each reg. The most exciting moment of the rally was when, as is our tradition, we had our late start (camera fidgeting, I won't name names). On the particular reg that we started late, CAS was very difficult to maintain let alone catch up to where we should be. It was 12 km before we finally hit a school zone (CAS 27 km/h) where we were able to get back to the right position. Our late start was something like 20 seconds and we couldn't catch up!! I think CAS was a little too high for this reg or perhaps the pre-run was performed during daylight hours. Anyhow, it was almost 1:00 when we got to the school zone so we made the assumption that children would be in bed and sped through the zone to get back on track.

My energy level had been good until 4:00 rolled around...sometime around then I finished up the last of my calcs for the rally and my only duty after that was to read the route instructions and do time/odometer checks. Sadly, since I no-longer had to think (no calcs to do), my brain went into hibernate mode quite quickly. The last couple regs were quite a struggle to stay awake. When the instructions were fairly close together it wasn't too bad but on the long intervals I was pathetic. My usual strategy for long intervals is to note our odometer when we pass the last instruction and then check the time each km or 0.5 km afterwards until we get to the next instruction. So we'd pass a cattleguard at km 6.55 at 21:44 past the hour and I'd think to myself, "OK, we should hit 7.1 km at 22:24 past the hour...waiting...waiting...crap, we've passed 7.3 km...OK, next one is 7.6 km at 23:04" and so on. I think, on average, I managed to actually make 1-2 out of 3 planned odo checks on each long interval that we came across once I had gone into hibernate mode.

I was glad when we finally pulled into rally HQ at White Spot in Chilliwack. Strangely enough, I was able to stay awake through breakfast and the awards. We managed 7th overall out of 11 cars, 1st in novice and 2nd in calculator (there were only three calculator cars including the two novice cars).