Dave and I arrived early at the starting area confident and excited about getting in the water in a position to give the team a chance to win the race. Listening to the race updates on the radio we knew that we'd be one of the first teams to get on the river right with the perennial powerhouses.
The public address system wasn't working well at the canoe venue so when Barron's team came running to the water they needed to dodge unsuspecting onlookers blocking the path to the river. About three minutes later Dave came running along stride for stride with a canoer from team 347 (POS-X). POS-X wasn't on our radar as a team to watch out for so I was a little surprised to see them start with us. We made a smooth entry in the water slightly ahead of POS-X and before we knew it we were paddling upstream and around the turn buoy and down the river.Within the first kilometre it was clear that POS-X was not able to stay with us and it was looking like a long lonely paddle ahead. The water had definitely dropped from the week previous and we had to work hard to maintain the same speeds that were easy in our practice run. Whenever the river would straighten out we would see Barron's up ahead and it appeared that we were making some inroads into their lead.
All along the river we received much appreciated encouragement from people camped out on sandbars and bridges. It was definitely neat that many spectators had Ski-to-Sea programs and were calling out our names. It was
pretty clear to us that the crowd wanted to see a new winning team this year - chants of "Beat Barron's!" were heard at several points along the river.
As we neared the last third of the race the water slowed and we were paddling into a punishing headwind. By this point we no longer saw Barron's on the straight sections and our thoughts turned to maintaining as much of a
lead as possible on the chasers. We were never able to see the teams behind us but we knew that the chasing teams all had strong canoers (especially Clipper Canoes and Beaver's Tree Service) and that it was likely that the chasers were working together to catch us.
The I-5 bridge was a welcome sight as we knew we were almost at the finish. We put in a final effort and made it into Hovander still in second place shead of the chasing crews. Dave's foot had fallen asleep making the short run up the river bank a little more interesting than we had hoped. We made it up the hill and Mark took the handoff and was off in a flash. We collapsed in exhaustion knowing we couldn't have paddled any harder.
Once we regained our breath and muscle movement our attention turned to getting to the finish to watch the kayakers ring the final bell. We didn't quite make it in time to see Peter come in, but we heard the exciting stories of the three way battle in the bay.
It was really exciting to be on a team that gave it their all and almost upset the heavy favourites. It was really a great team effort that I was proud to be a part of and would love to have the opportunity to do it again.
