San Marcos, Tex. ? The Texas Water Safari begins with a gunshot that sends 200 paddlers madly thrashing across a murky pond.

Multicolored boats, ranging from six-man scull-like canoes to single-seat kayaks, barrel into each other, tipping and tossing their pilots into the water. The bigger boats slam into the smaller ones, driving them toward rusty pilings.

Once the paddlers traverse the pond, they jump into the mud and drag their boats through thick brush to portage a dam churning with whitewater. They twist ankles and skin knees as they carry their boats down an incline of sharp rocks to the mouth of the San Marcos River near the center of Texas.

Team Cotton Mouth Racing paddles past the GBRA salt water barrier during the Texas Water Safari race. The event was June 10 in Tivoli, Texas.

And that’s just the beginning of the 262-mile endurance test that takes most entrants two to three days to complete and has enough danger lurking along the way to give Indiana Jones nightmares.

Poisonous water moccasins fall from trees. Carnivorous fish jump out of the water without warning. Wasps and fire ants are constant threats, mosquitoes and mayflies swarm at night.

In fast water, logs turn into torpedoes and trees tumble like boulders. In high water, hanging limbs snatch water jugs and knock competitors unconscious.

Exhausted and weak from paddling for more than 29 straight hours during the Texas Water Safari, Jonathan Yonley takes a power nap at the Riverside Park check point.

Paddlers navigate rapids in the first half of the race and fight off hallucinations during the second. They cope with the broiling heat of the Texas summer in the daytime, then fight off hypothermia at night.

There are 12 classes for boats entered in the race, but competitors can use any kind of craft, as long as it’s human-powered. No sails or motors are allowed.

No wonder it’s billed as the “world’s toughest canoe race.”

“There is so much that can happen to you out there,” said eight-time Safari winner Joe Mynar, “and not a whole lot you can control.”

The San Marcos feeds into the Guadalupe, and if the paddlers overcome the first 250 miles of winding river, their reward is a grueling, climactic crossing of San Antonio Bay. Whipping winds and choppy waves hammer the boats as the paddlers struggle to stay on course. In past years, competitors have fallen out of their boats and drifted aimlessly for hours. Others have found their way only to step on venomous stingrays within sight of the end.

Remarkably, no one has died in the race’s 44-year history.

But many have come close.

‘It changes you forever’

“It’s a race, but it’s more of an adventure,” said Safari stalwart John Bugge, who builds canoes for the race and finished the journey for the 26th year in a row last Monday. “Every time you finish it, it changes you forever.”

A flagpole in Seadrift marks the finish line, and those who get there slump out of their boats in utter exhaustion, their bodies sun-baked and raw to the bone.

Their hands and feet are white and numb, their backs and fingers won’t straighten for days. Some peel several layers of blistered skin off their palms. Within weeks, their fingernails turn black; eventually they fall off from being deprived of blood by long hours of gripping a paddle.

Many who finish vow they’ll never do it again. The heartiest souls can’t wait to try it again.

“You learn what’s within yourself at the deepest level,” said Erin Magee of San Marcos, one of four women who went solo this year. “You basically live a miniature life. For those 50 or 60 hours, this is all there is for every person in the race. You experience things and go through emotions that are equal to the most profound things that will ever happen in your regular life.”

No prize money is offered and the only reward for the finishers is a patch, aptly emblazoned with a picture of an alligator and a devil sharing a canoe.

Among paddlers, the patch is a coveted badge of honor.

“There’s no money. Nobody’s doing it for that,” said Jeff Wueste, a veteran of 10 races who drove an unlucky six-man scull this year. “That patch represents a major accomplishment. It’s a hell of a thing to have.”

‘It’s about the discipline’

Last Saturday, just hours after the race started, Wueste’s boat crashed into a fallen tree. The 43-foot craft, made of carbon fiber and Kevlar, spun sideways and snapped in half like a celery stick.

Safari rules prohibit outside help besides an assigned team captain, who follows the race by land but can only deliver water and ice at each of the 12 checkpoints. Each canoe is equipped with emergency flares, but firing one means automatic disqualification.

Instead of quitting, Wueste’s team squeezed the chunks of the boat together, secured them with wire and re-entered the river. At the next checkpoint, an impassable 15-foot dam, the team braced the crack with slats of wood and duct tape, did the portage and continued.

They miraculously finished on Monday night, with two crewmen bailing out water with plastic containers while the other four paddled. They plugged leaks along the way with foam from their seats and mud they scooped from the river.

‘It’s like NASCAR’

On the San Marcos, paddlers arrive at Cottonseed Rapids, a sharp bend scattered with giant rocks and logjams. It’s a popular annual spot for spectators to see crashes and about 500 gathered on the banks last Saturday with picnic baskets and lawn chairs.

“It’s like NASCAR,” said race official Shannon Martin, who has finished the race four times with his father, Michael. “People just come here to see the wrecks.”

Some of the vessels can weigh more than 1,500 pounds and teams will have to get out and carry them around obstacles more than 20 times. The portages can be as treacherous as the waterways.

Most of the trails around dams are overgrown with weeds and thorny bushes. Poison ivy is everywhere. So are wasps’ and hornets’ nests and colonies of fire ants.

“If they get on you, Lord help you,” said Michael Martin. “And it’s not just one that bites you. It’s more like they all get on you and one of them sounds the dinner bell and they all dig in at once.”

Withstanding the sweltering heat is the race’s most persistent challenge.

But the real horror begins when the sun goes down.

Mating mayflies form swarms so dense the lead paddler must don a bandanna and goggles or a beekeeper’s net to protect his face. The bugs crunch and crawl beneath racers’ feet and between their fingers. By sunrise, the boat bottoms can be four inches deep in insect carcasses.

Clouds of mosquitoes can turn exposed arms and legs “pretty much black,” said 24-year-old William Russell, a member of Wueste’s team. “They absolutely annihilate you.”

While the insects are annoying, larger creatures can be downright dangerous.

Alligator gar – carnivorous, bottom-feeding fish with long snouts and dagger-like teeth – grow to three to four feet in the river and have been known to launch out of the water and hit racers. One of the fish once broke a woman’s rib, said Allen Spelce, a veteran of 11 Safaris and the race’s lead organizer. Russell said one hit his shoulder and just missed his head.

The Safari’s most notorious nocturnal menace is the water moccasin, the only poisonous water snake in North America. Few racers have suffered bites, but every canoe is required to carry an anti-venom kit.

The snakes, also called cottonmouths, can grow to five feet, and they’ve been known to wrap around the headlights on canoes or slip out of trees and fall onto paddlers. After a few seconds of panic, experienced racers scoop the snakes out of the boats with their paddles. The less-initiated tip over their canoes, hoping the snake swims away.

Closer to San Antonio Bay, alligators begin to appear. Though attacks on boats have been rare, the gators can grow to 12 feet and just their presence can be unnerving, even for veterans.

“Mostly, you can just paddle right by,” Wueste said. “At night, you shine the light and there are alligator eyes everywhere looking back at you.”

‘You’ll see Mickey Mouse’

Paddlers see plenty of other strange things, not as dangerous, but no less unusual – floating roofs, refrigerators, cars, even bloated cow carcasses perched in trees.

“Some of them have been up there so long, they’ve become their own ecosystems,” Prochaska said.

By the second sleep-deprived day, some of the sights turn imaginary. The 30-mile stretch between Victoria and DuPont is known as “Hallucination Alley.”

“You’ve been out there so long, the trees start to look like cartoon characters,” Russell said. “You’ll see Mickey Mouse playing a guitar, Godzilla walking into the water, people watching you from the banks who aren’t really there.”

In 2000, a two-man boat entered the “alley,” and one of the men started seeing people on the banks with machine guns.

“He stood up, stripped off all his clothes, swam to shore and disappeared,” said Spelce.

The man’s partner summoned help at the next checkpoint, and rescuers found the half-crazed paddler that night, naked, staring at the sky and muttering that a helicopter was chasing him, Spelce said. He was rushed to a hospital and treated for severe dehydration.

The top teams and paddlers complete the Safari in under 40 hours.

“It’s the worst thing that happens to me every year,” Bugge said, “but it makes me appreciate everything else in life a little bit more.”