Preparations in full swing as Southern 80 nears

The brothers will share responsibility both behind the wheel and behind the boat, swapping duties across two different classes.

“It’s a bit of a family thing for us,” Nathan said.

“I’ll ski the 80-mile-an-hour class, and then I’ll drive the eight-litre class, and Travis will do vice versa.

“He’ll swap with me, so we kind of take it in turns to ski and drive, but (we are) really looking forward to it.”

Despite having familial ties to the event, with father Peter having competed in the ‘80’, Nathan explained he is a relative newcomer to the sport.

“Our father did the event 30 years ago and was right into the sport,” he said.

“In recent years, we were down on the bank watching and we said, ‘we should do that one day’, and then next thing you know we’ve got the boat.

“We kind of got into it in the last three years and just got into it slowly, but it’s hard to not get addicted and get more and more carried away and go faster and faster each year.”

With the race just over two weeks away, Whitten admitted that the high river levels have impacted the team’s preparation significantly, although a great result at the Beehag 100 ski race in December has buoyed the side.

“It hasn’t been a great year for preparation, just because the river’s been so high. We haven’t really been able to practice like we would in other years,” he said.

“We actually won our class at the Beehag and ended up about 15th outright.

“That’s probably our best result we’ve ever had since we’ve got into the sport, so it was probably a pretty good practice run for the big race.”

While recent results suggest the Migraine crew is trending upwards, Whitten said he isn’t going in with lofty expectations.

“One thing I’ve learned about ski racing, it’s pretty hard for everything to go right,” he said.

“It’s basically just trying to execute and do everything right, and if we do that, we’re pretty confident we can put in a good result.”

The result for Migraine at the Beehag may have exceeded the crew’s expectations, but for those aboard Sportspage, it was the opposite, after an issue meant they failed to win their class.

“We did okay, we had a little issue with the boat,” driver Dean Johns said.

“We still got it home, but we ended up second which I know is okay, but we expected to win obviously.

“At least that gives me a little bit of time to fix the minor things that were letting us down on the day. I’m pretty confident we should be good to go for the 80.”

Johns, who is also vice-president of the Moama Water Sports Club, sympathised with Whitten and the Migraine crew about the river height interrupting preparation, but stressed that come race day, the river will be good to go.

“It (the river being so high) does hurt getting organised, for sure, but most of the teams have been training throughout the year at lakes,” he said.

“The river has only been out of action for a couple of weeks, so a lot of people have spent a lot of time on it including (at) the Beehag obviously.

“We expect the river to be good to go within the next week to two weeks, and people will get back out there and get practising again and get organised.”

With the river expected to drop over the coming days, Johns said the committee will be sweeping the course to mark snags and trees from next weekend.

And while he has an important role to play as an event organiser, Johns is taking his role as a competitor just as seriously.

“First up for us will be masters, which is the slower veterans,” he said.

“I’m not expecting much out of that to be honest, we’ll just have a bit of fun and have a few laughs.

“On Saturday afternoon we’ll be in the president’s dash for our top 40 position, and that’s where things get a little bit serious.

“We’ll hopefully have a good crack at that and end up somewhere pretty high in the results, that’s the plan. All going well, we’ll have a good start time for Sunday and bring home the win.”

The all-important top 40 was revealed on Wednesday afternoon, with a number of familiar names set to contest the president’s dash, which sets the start order for the main event on Sunday.

Two-time reigning champion Sapphire will set off as the number one boat, with last year’s fastest qualifier, TR, given the number two.

Superman, Brimstone F1 and Supernova round out the top five, while Hellbent, The Mistress, Temper II, Pumpindough and 99 Psycho Clowns make up the remainder of the top 10.