As if being president of the Yukon River Quest wasn't hectic enough.

Add to that a wedding.

Then you have some idea of how Stephen Mooney, president of the Yukon River Marathon Paddling Association (YRMPA), spent most of last week.

Tomorrow he'll wed fiancée Susan Rubinoff. Planning the wedding prevented him from being along the river during the River Quest and in Dawson City at the finish line.

"I didn't just because of this wedding, and the fact that family are coming in, so I promised my fiancée that I wouldn't leave town. And I'm building a house right now.

So it's been pretty busy.

"But if this would have been a normal year, I would have been out on the lake, at Carmacks and at Dawson, absolutely, and that's what the president usually does.”

Mooney set the date for the wedding before he was named YRMPA president, he noted.

"And it's a promise that I made to her last year, that we set the date, so I had to stick with it,” he said with a laugh.

Instead, he and organizers followed the River Quest from its communications centre at Sport Yukon fielding phone calls from the race marshal and coordinators.

Three out of four volunteers rotated eight-hour shifts, manning phones and updating the River Quest website with times reported from the checkpoints, doing what they could to communicate the race's progress to the public.

Mooney won the solo kayak class of the River Quest in 2004 and the tandem kayak class with paddler Greg McHale in 2005, setting records for both at the time.

Following the progress from an office was a different kind of thrill for Mooney.

"I know the river well enough, and the times, that I can see guys coming in at checkpoints and I can calculate, given the times, when they should be at the next checkpoint.

"It's interesting. The fun part is, of course, receiving the times as they come in and updating the website so you can see the people moving along the river and everyone's looking at it. People have that screen up all the time and they're just refreshing it, waiting for us to update that information so they can see where their teams are.”

He cited the mixed voyageur team Sausages and Mussels' pursuit of the open voyageur team the Texans as being especially close.

"The interesting parting the of the race, I really thought that Sausage and Mussels, the Yukon voyageur, would give the Texas team a race for their money. At one point, they were 17 minutes behind,” Mooney said of the two teams barreling toward the 30-Mile checkpoint. "I thought, ‘That's great – they might be able to reel them in.' But the Texans then pulled away and eventually got two hours on them.”

The Texans finished first overall with a time of 42 hours, 17 minutes. Sausages and Mussels finished second overall in 44:37.

While no records were broken, Mooney said the entire pack was faster than ever.

Solo kayaker Hiromune Imai finished in 71:40.

Eighteen teams scratched, but none before Lake Laberge, the first real test of the River Quest, Mooney said.

He was also impressed with the 11 voyageur teams entered in the event, noting mixed teams

Skookumchuck and Team Skagnificent.

The voyageur is a team dynamic versus a solo kayaker or canoer, where it's the mental side of the race, especially when you find yourself alone in the middle of the Yukon River for several hours.

"It's a long race when you're traveling by yourself, because you got to motivate yourself for the 50 plus hours to get to Dawson,” Mooney said. "There's long stretches where you don't see anyone, and you may be just five or 10 minutes behind a boat and never see them for an entire race because they're always around that corner. That's the psychological strain on some paddlers.”

Mooney also corrected a mistake made during the awards banquet, in which solo kayaker Chris Spoor was given the Most Improved award after scratching in Carmacks last year and this year winning the solo kayak class.

While Spoor is talented and deserved praise, Mooney noted, mixed tandem canoe team of Iain Seal and Ingabritt Scholven won Most Improved after knocking eight hours off their last year's time.