Yukon 1000 Canoe and Kayak Race

Race Technology by: Qualifying Races: Yukon River Quest Florida Water Tribe

Do you really want to do this? Whitehorse to the Alaska Pipeline/Dalton Highway 1000 Miles / 1600 Km 7 to 12 days of 18 hours solid paddling July 20th, 2009 The Yukon River 1000: A new canoe and kayak race, a new style of canoe and kayak race. The Yukon River 1000 is a new LONG endurance paddling event that is provisionally scheduled to be held starting Monday 20th July 2009. This race will be the longest canoe and kayak race on the calendar, knocking other long races into a distant second place. The Race will start from Whitehorse and continue down river all the way to the Alaska Pipeline Bridge on the Dalton Highway, 1000 miles, 1600 Kilometres downstream. Dawson is not even halfway! This is a separate race from the Yukon River Quest, not a replacement for it. It is being run by a diferent organization. This race is made feasible by new technology. In the past, putting on a race of any length has required a small army of volunteers to man checkpoints. But this race will be using the new Spot devices ( findmespot.com). These devices are little boxes a bit larger than a garmin ETrex GPS, have no display and only 4 buttons. Inside, they have a GPS receiver and a Sat phone messenger. You push a button, and it sends a little message from almost anywhere in the world telling those you want to know where you are and if you are OK. In addition, these devices come with a panic button and $100000 of rescue insurance. This is a completely new way of running a race that has not been possible before. This race is long. We anticipate the leaders taking 7 or 8 days to complete the course. We want to prevent racers from being "overenthusiastic" and paddling all night so we will require each boat checkin every evening before 11:15, and again in the morning FROM THE SAME PLACE at least six hours later. This enforces a night time stop for each boat. The race will be open to tandem canoes and kayaks, voyageur canoes, and pairs of solo canoes and kayaks. Solo boats must travel together and must camp together each night. The river is too big and the race too lonely to allow solo competitors. In the last week or so we have had articles about the race in the Yukon News and the Fairbanks News-Miner. That latter article was picked up by AP and appeared more or less verbatum in the Anchorage, Juneau, and Kodiak papers and perhaps others that I am unaware of. I have also been on the radio here in Whitehorse on both CBC and CHON-FM. I hope it sounded good. We have run a number of tests of the results software which has performed reasonably well. There had to be some minor tweeks to how the system decided where racers are with respect to the waypoints, but that is about it. We ran one test on a couple of boats between Minto and Dawson. Now we are gearing up for a "live test", displaying results for those boats in the YRQ that are carrying Spot devices. There will be over half a dozen of them. I am convinced that this is the way to show interim results. I hope to get the entry software up in the next couple of weeks. Actually the software exists, and connects to the test version of PayPal. I just need to get all the ducks in a row and then pull the trigger to get it "live". It you are interested in this race, I suggest you read the rules, and waiver. Then if you are still interested, contact me at info@yukon1000.com