Coal Mine Creek campground had all but cleared out. By 7 p.m., most of the Yukon River Quest paddlers were again on their way downstream to Dawson City after their seven-hour mandatory rest.

Local standup paddleboarder Stuart Knaack was sitting by a fire, a heat pack resting on his back for a mysterious injury that he has yet to diagnose.

“I got to a point in the race where I didn’t want to go on anymore,” the 36-year-old Whitehorse man said. “With the injury that happened, it just drastically dropped my time. Mindset and everything else was just working against me.”

He was talking with a volunteer, musing in his mind about scratching.

“Before I could even say the word, I saw Glen (Pearson), one of the other paddleboarders, he just came around the corner,” said Knaack. “My brain just switched off from being able to scratch to just like, okay, you’re going to Dawson.”

Knaack left Carmacks Checkpoint at 2:22 a.m. The only paddleboarders to leave after him were Whitehorse’s Michelle Eshpeter and Glen Pearson over an hour later.

Eshpeter and Pearson soon caught up with Knaack and he and Pearson would finish the race in Dawson seconds apart.

Eshpeter, 33, had some volunteers worried early in the race. She was the last boat out on Lake Laberge and got pushed around by winds that blew in later in the evening.

But Eshpeter, with an infectious smile tackled every part the Yukon River Quest with aplomb. Her race was going exactly to plan.

“The plan was awesome and I stuck to it, even though it made it really awkward at the start,” she said. Eshpeter had an hourly nutrition plan she was following. It’s generally uncommon for paddlers to start their nutrition within the first hour of the race.

But with every checkpoint, she charmed volunteers with her never faltering positive attitude and slowly climbed the ranks.

Of the 11 standup paddleboarders who started in Whitehorse, nine finished the race in Dawson.

United Kingdom athlete Joanne Hamilton-Vale was forced to withdraw at the Little Salmon Checkpoint.

“ It was honestly the hardest decision I have ever made and the most difficult words to say were ‘I officially quit from the race,’” Hamilton-Vale said in a Facebook post from Carmacks Thursday evening. “(Twelve) hours later and I am still crying at my failure as I feel I have let a lot of people including myself down.”

Hamilton-Vale believes she contracted a parasite from drinking river water. She was unable to keep food or water down for a while.

The other standup paddleboarder to withdraw was Tony Bain.

“Some people say I always play it safe. I do, that's why I'm here to tell you what an amazing day I have had, what an amazing experience I have had,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “I ended my journey at Little Salmon, as I wasn't going to meet the cut-off point.”

Around 4:30 a.m. Saturday morning, the first hint of a SUP rounded the corner at Moosehide Slide. Hawaiian Bart de Zwart was on the horizon of winning the experimental SUP class. His official winning time was 54:41.14, just over 20 minutes ahead of Norm Hann and Jason Bennett and 26th overall.

After all the hype around the standup paddleboarders, there weren’t many to welcome them into Dawson with the rising sun. But the small family of athletes supported each other in their feat.

“We all knew we wanted to finish and we all knew if something came up, we could rely on each other,” said Knaack.

Standing on shore after his historic wind, sea legs still a little wobbly, de e spoke of his journey.

“If you are racing each other for 55 hours, you beat yourself up. So we sprinted away and we just saw who was faster,” he said. “Then the last 10 hours I said okay, I felt really good and I noticed the other two didn’t feel so good, so I just put the hammer down and well, the hammer was 13 hours long.”

Many had wondered how the standup paddle boarders would last over 55 hours of standing on the river.

“The legs, most people think it’s difficult, but I think what’s more difficult is sitting down. It’s just perspective I think,” he said. “The canoeists say, ‘oh a lot of respect,’ and I say, ‘oh a lot of respect for you, because I couldn’t do it the way you do it.’”

At the awards ceremony Sunday, a standing ovation greeted the SUP finishers on stage.

If indeed they do get to race as an official class next year, there are certain to be more that make the trip from Whitehorse to Dawson.

“It was a wonderful experience and I don’t think this adventure could be topped out for how great it was,” said Eshpeter.

As great as it was for her, she said at the finish, fresh off a sprint to the end “I think I’ll look for a different adventure for my next one.”