CARMACKS — The voyageur team Yukon Wide Adventures paddled into Carmacks at 7:29 this morning, 48 minutes ahead of the Paddlesports Mongrels in the 20th anniversary of the 715-kilometre Yukon River Quest from Whitehorse to Dawson City.

The six voyageur paddlers were assisted from their boat at the Coal Mine Campground dock, some needing a bit more of hand than others.

But all were still smiling, still enthusiastic after 19 1/2 hours on the water,

“The last three hours into Carmacks is just death,” team member Stephen Mooney of Whitehorse said in a brief interview after landing. “It just doesn’t end.

“It is (winding), it is slow, and it takes so much time. You just want to get here.” Following a huge party Wednesday night at the checkpoint to celebrate all volunteers whoʼve kept the race going for 20 years, things started to get going early this morning, sometime after 5:00 or sooner.

Race marshal Roger Hanberg was already dealing with a report of a solo canoeist who ran into trouble at Big Eddy, about 10 miles upriver of the Big Salmon monitoring station.

Peter Coates, inventor of River Quest’s live tracking system, had already set up the electronic board that provides the estimated time of arrival of the individual boats.

As the morning progressed, more and more boats of all types arrived, each met with by a team of dock workers who grabbed and secured them with the current still pushing. First aid officials asked each paddler if they required any medical attention.

Volunteers and race fans lined the river bank, sending out loud words of encouragement as the boats rounded the bend to the final stretch into Carmacks.

For Mongrels paddler Pete Kruszelnicki and his five colleagues in the voyageur boat from the United Kingdom, it was a first River Quest.

“It was tough but it was good,” he said. “Of course we did not know the river too well so it was nice to get here in one piece.”

As of 10 a.m., 10 teams had reached the halfway point for their mandatory seven-hour rest stop. Eight teams of the 103 who started had scratched, including Jeff Kay, a 38- year-old solo canoeist from Castro Valley, California.

“Paddlers Abreast came up on Jeff who was in distress and was hypothermic so Paddlers Abreast got him in warm clothing and warmed him up, basically rescued him, if you want to say,” Hanberg said just after 7 a.m. while having coffee in the Carmacks Checkpoint at the campground. “Theyʼre always helping out other paddlers.”

“Presently our understanding is Paddlers Abreast (a Whitehorse womenʼs voyageur canoe) is back on the river and the monitoring point from Big Salmon is motoring up river to pick up Jeff.”

Word early this morning was that the mixed kayak tandem of Alan Thomas and Harriet Boughton from Wales, U.K., scratched at the Thirty-mile monitoring point below Lake Laberge. One observer in Carmacks reported they were having steering issues with their rudder just before getting onto Lake Laberge after leaving Whitehorse.

The race record of 39 hours and 32 minutes – not including the two mandatory stops – was set by a voyageur canoe in 2008.

Mooney said his team, “a strong team”, started out chasing the record. They flew across a calm and flat Lake Laberge. When they left the lake, they were two minutes off the record pace.

And then they hit a Yukon River that was just so much lower, he said.

Mooney said they wanted to reach Carmacks at 6:30 a.m., not 7:30 a.m.

While they might be out of contention for a record, theyʼre still bent on being first to Dawson.

Last night, it was something of a gala event for the Yukon River Quest organization in celebration of itʼs volunteers.

Anniversary coordinator Sheila Dodd said there were about 350 at the Coal Mine Campground for the party.

“It was a celebration of volunteers throughout the territory over the last 20 years,” said Dodd. “It was a celebration of volunteers who have been doing this all these years right here in Carmacks.”

Dodd noted a couple if local girls used cupcakes to build a 20th anniversary cake the size of a picnic table – literally.