Watch out, Robert Downey, Jr. There’s a new Ironman in town. Hot on the heels of his win at the Lord of the Fork race on the Russell Fork, Andrew Holcombe pulled off first place finishes at the Green River Narrows race in the long and short boat divisions, earning the overall “Ironman” title and setting a new course record in the process…
“All around, it was the best Green Race ever,” says Andrew, who paddled an aptly named Dagger Green boat to pick up the coveted stained-glass trophy and year-long bragging rights for the win. “Awesome still doesn’t begin to describe how I feel. That was my best race in a very long time, and the first time I’ve won both long and short boat classes.”
Still, it didn’t come easily. Paddling a made-for-the race Stinger from Liquid Logic, Isaac Levinston started before Holcomb and set a new course record at 4:24. But it didn’t last long, as Holcomb then blistered by less than a minute later, setting an even newer course record of 4:18. Following Levinston and also paddling Stingers, Erick Deguil and Eric Hurd took third and fourth.
Records fell in the women’s division also, with Adriene Levknecht crushing the women’s record in both the long and short boat categories. She was the first woman to break the 5-minute mark (4:59), and her short boat run would have won the women’s long boat race.
“The race was awesome,” says Liquidlogic’s and post-party host extraordinaire Woody Callway. “The weather and water level was perfect, about 9 inches on the gauge, and there were 168 starting times, the largest so far.”
It also drew the largest crowd ever, with more than 1,200 people hiking down to view the course at Gorilla. And most importantly, despite a few horrifying upside-down runs over Gorilla, no one got hurt.
As for the party at Woody’s house, that’s another matter, with more than a few brain cells getting annihilated, thanks to a huge bonfire, kegs of PBR and blues/fusion tunes by the band Johnny Floor and the Wrong Crowd. After that, a late night DJ provided by Red Bull rocked the house (literally), as people danced their derrieres off on the upper deck. “The party was off the hook,” says Callaway, adding that they fed at least 280 people. ”I actually got a little worried that the friggin’ deck was going to separate from the house. The cops came around 1:30 .am. — when the cops come to a party in the middle of nowhere and tell you it’s to loud that’s something to be proud of.”
Full results Click here
Notes from Shane’s Blog on the new Remix Stinger:
Read more here
With just a couple weeks before the Green Race Woody and I decided to make another version of the Remix 100. We are calling it the Remix Stinger. A boat designed to go as fast as possible down the Green. I met up with a group of our fastest racers and talked about what sort of changes we would like to make. We paddled the 100 and a few other raceboats to compare styles and performance and we came up with a plan. The Remix 100 was arguably the fastest of the race boats in a straight line but it is a little more challenging to maintain your line. So we decided to attack two areas of the boat. One I wanted to make it significantly faster and see if we could handle it, and two, I wanted it to track better but not limit the ability to turn as needed.
I really like the fact that this boat was made for one single purpose to go fast on the Green and after doing the work to make it happen the first water that all of these boats will touch is the Green. I was a little nervous when we first slid into the water. I knew the boat would be fast but you never know for certain how it will perform in the rapids. So there were lots of questions going through my head as I slid into the water. The question of speed was answered immediately by how far the boat glided out away from shore. As we moved downstream John and I smiled about the speed and got more and more confident with each rapid about how the boat handled. By the end we all bombed off Sunshine and raced all the way out to the takeout
The stats are 12’5″ long, and 23.5″ wide, and somewhere around 100 gallons would be my guess. As far as design changes go, I added 9″ inches of length in just the stern end of the boat so in reality you could say that its like adding 18″ of length to the boat because usually you would add length both bow and stern for balance but what we wanted for this boat was the speed of a long stern but the maneuverability of the shorter bow moving through the drops. I also worked on the entry of the bow through the water by tucking the chines under the bow a little more on this version of the boat. The idea behind the pintail and tucked bow chines was to make this version track harder while moving through the cross currents and hammering across the short flat sections of the race section on the Green. Basically we wanted to make a boat that had the potential to go faster than anything has gone before on the Green. After some serious calculations I think this boat is 9.654% faster than anything else on the river.
