Team Determination determined to do it again

By Jessica Coleman
Staff Writer
    “We just knew we were going to get to the finish line right about dark, maybe before,” said Martha Adame, recalling her time with her friend and workout partner Jeannie Hale in the Texas Water Safari. Together, Adame, a family nurse practitioner at the Jackson County Medical Clinic and her friend and workout partner, Hale, made up Team Determination. Her prediction would not come true. Dark would come and go, as would half of another day before the team was rescued.
    The two competed in the Texas Water Safari, widely known as the world’s toughest canoe race, that began June 18 in San Marcos. The competitors have just four days and four hours to battle heat, whitewater rapids, multiple portages and mosquitoes and arrive in Seadrift.
    A host of factors – dehydration, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, a harder, faster current than usual due to recent flooding – would eventually cause Team Determination to wreck their canoe and wind up stranded for hours, with Hale on death’s doorstep and Adame hallucinating vividly, trying to keep it together enough to either lead the pair out of Alligator Lake, a route they chose to take, or to at least wave down help, should it come. 
    “The current through there was tougher than in our practice run,” Adame said.  “We ran into a tree. We’ve smacked into that same tree before in our practice runs, and always before we’ve been able to lean into it and keep the canoe level, but we just couldn’t do it.”
    Hale went overboard first. She was so weak by that time she was all but laying down in the canoe. She hadn’t stayed hydrated enough and the grueling three days of rowing had taken its toll on the 61 year old. 
    “It just basically bumped her body out,” Adame said, “and if one person is bumped out of the canoe, the other one is going. That’s when she scared me.”
    Adame remembered her training and let her body slide down the canoe and come up on the other side, but she didn’t see Hale surface. Struggling to remain calm, she knew that panic wouldn't help the situation, so in seconds she made a plan.
    “I started counting to 10, very slowly. I had decided that if she isn’t up by the time I get to 10, I’m going to let the current take me to where it took her, and see if I can feel her down there. On the count of nine, her head popped up, gasping for air.”
    It turned out that a loop on Hale’s pants leg had gotten snagged on a branch, holding her under. 
    The events kicked off hours of being stranded. The team tried to hold on to their canoe, but the current was too strong.
    “J.J. Watt couldn't have held that canoe,” Hale said. “The current was just too strong.”
    Hale needed to rest, and badly. There wasn’t a moment to spare as Team Determination made their way to the muddy shore. Adame built hale a bed out of sticks and leaves so she wouldn’t sink in the watery mud, and Hale fell fast asleep.
    “She laid down and she was out for like 12 hours. She would get up to use the bathroom, and that was it. Her hands were just black with mosquitoes, and I would go shoo them off. When she shivered I would back up against her and she would stop shivering.” Adame said.
    Adame said she waited and brainstormed. How were they going to get out of this?  They had prepared for a long, difficult canoe race, but she had not prepared for being charged with keeping her friend alive with only the clothes on her back and a paddle for equipment. Their equipment to call for help had gone downstream with the canoe, and the water was dangerously close to a sleeping Jeannie, so she couldn't go far – definitely not far enough to find their canoe and retrieve supplies. She said she found someone’s lost bag containing drinks, so she hydrated herself, and hung the bag as a flag for rescuers to find. She never did fall asleep.
    Hallucinating vividly by this point, Adame said she had been hearing rock music in her head that she knew couldn’t actually be there. The pair had seen a nonexistent cat some time back in the race. Adame almost dismissed the next sounds she heard. 
    “Hut. Hut,” she heard. It was the sound rowers make to alert their partner to switch sides. “Hut. Hut.”
    “I could see a canoe, and two men trying to come against current, and in my mind I was thinking ‘I can’t tell if that is real or not. I said ‘hello?’ but they didn’t hear me,” Adame said. “When you’re in the current you can’t hear. But they saw me. They looked at me, and I realized this was real.”
    Rescue had arrived. 
    Adame said she pointed the rescuers, Jerry Cochran and Sammy Prochaska, toward Jeannie, still passed out on the murky bank. 
    Since, the two have rested and nursed their injuries. Hale is covered head to toe in mosquito bites, and Martha had abscesses and serious abrasions to her body and hands from her clothing rubbing and from rowing. 
    When they were rescued, Team Determination had rowed 240 miles. They were 20 miles from the finish line. For some, that would be their life’s crowning achievement, and they’d be done, but they didn’t call themselves Team Determination for nothing. Adame and Hale are already planning their training for the next Texas Water Safari.