River Rat

Last year after the Origin of Trails we decided to take the long way home and we popped in at Loxton. Ramses had not come through yet and we had coffee at the Rooi Granaat which featured in the opening scene of the Mnet series Trackers. We also met the family of Thinus Redelinghuys they were expecting big things from him and I'm sure they're mightily pleased with his sterling performance this year.

So 14 scratched and it looks like NC and GB are out as well. AAs tracker has him all over the place so he might be out as well. That's more than 10% of the field gone and we still haven't finished a full day, it must have been brutal out there. Edit: I see there are another 4 riders QO,WM, WV and KC in cars on their way to De Aar.

Rangers are special people.

Another rider gone Trevor Sienen is in a car.

Does anyone know if the Goosens are related?

Pity I was hoping that we would have 3 previous winners dueling it out with dark horses like Benky and SM. But there's still enough in it to make it very tasty.

Interesting strategy for LVDN looks like he kipped for 2 hours at WP1, I suspect to get out of the heat and rather ride in the cooler evening. Will he pass through RV1?

AVD back on course and no damage other than extra kms.

I have never seen an explicit explanation of the criteria they apply perhaps some of the old Munga riders can give their input. But imagine how this plays on your mind by day 4 you need to push yourself to the finish but you might get DQ'd anyway

In the past the organisers have exercised an element of leeway with the back markers, in his case he gained no advantage but we'll have to wait and see.

LM is at the crossroads literally and figuratively does he go back along the route to where he left it (+15km) or continue and face the wrath of the organisers. edit: it's the latter I hope they're kind to him.

Yip but he did stop for about 10 minutes.

No need to panic his Tracker has not updated for 11 minutes although it did show him stationary so watch this space.

AVD is making the same mistake as LM, I bet you that he's following LM's tyre tracks and not his GPS.

That's exactly what they have to do and if memory serves Hannele Steyn went 75km off course in the first Munga and went back adding 150km to her event, I think she only finished less than 4 hours behind the eventual winner Amy McDougall. The good news is that LM has realised that he is off course but now he is going to have to go backwards on the route and that could be a problem too.

Looks like Nico Coetzee has a mechanical he has been walking for the last hour, I hope he can get it fixed at the WP. He's got 10km to go!

I think we'll only know tomorrow, in the past I have seen a number of riders that appear not to have got out of the starting blocks suddenly appear on the leaderboard.

If you look at his full history he was in a car and never in the race, looks like AA will suffer the same fate.

So we've reached the stage where the leaders have covered double the distance of the back markers and will be interesting to see how many of the back markers make it before cut off. It's fantastic to see John Ntuli moving up the field, I think we're in for an interesting night.

I might have been too quick scratching this rider as he seems to be back on track albeit at the back. Perhaps it was just his tracker that went walkabout in a car, hopefully it's the same for DW who's tracker is showing that he is already at WP1.

Looks like we have another one scratched Darryl Wilson going at 97.5kph, must driving to water point 1 to cheer the rest on.

Who is cat i in real life?

Looks like we have two previous winners tracking each other Marco Martins is right up there with Ramses. Is going to be the battle we missed last year with MM falling ill and I wonder if John Ntuli is going to be in the mix.

Arnold Aldous looks like our first scratched rider he's traveling at 112kmph

I know the feeling we've just got back from Gonarezhou, the maps are out planning the next trip and the ammo boxes are still not unpacked!