Story:
Mike Procter

Photos:
Supjunkie,
Kelli Surritte,
@perfectnegatives
and @paddleleague,

Trevor Tunnington and the team I stumbled across that Charles Dickens quote in a magazine on the flight from London to Vancouver; and it stuck in my head. Mostly because it sounded ominously like what we had in store for us. We were four days from the start of the 2019 Yukon River Quest – the world’s longest annual paddling race; 715km down the Yukon River in less than three and a half days.

The 2019 Yukon River Quest by SUP

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,”

A week later, as I limped towards the finish line in Dawson City, I reflected on those words… It had definitely been both the best and the worst of times. And with no shortage of foolishness. Wisdom, admittedly a little less so. We weren’t exactly the conventional contestants in a race so extreme that only 15 paddleboarders had previously managed to complete it. Historically the domain of canoes and kayaks the Yukon River Quest (YRQ) had only opened its doors to SUPs in 2016; which is when the event first grabbed my interest. Whilst I was far from a pro SUP racer, I knew I enjoyed the sport; and more importantly I’m a total sucker for any ludicrous challenge.

Also, I was confident I had something else in my locker; a mental resilience and determination instilled in me through six years’ service in the British Army. Given my network of like-minded old Army friends, it wasn’t long before I found a couple more recruits, Ben Ashwell and Stu Croxford, both also former infantrymen. In Stu’s case, an explosive encounter with a Taliban road-side bomb in 2012 had ultimately led to the amputation of his right leg. But like so many injured veterans, Stu’s spirit and determination has seen him conquer some of the world’s most daunting physical challenges; from a full Ironman to the Cape Epic. The Yukon, however, would represent a whole new level of endurance challenge.

We had little frame of reference for such an astronomical distance on a SUP. We knew we had to fly halfway round the world with our boards, and we knew we had to carry a long list of mandatory safety kit. On paper, the Red Voyager sounded like a suitable board for the challenge. After explaining our challenge to the very helpful folk at Red Paddle Co, they very kindly loaned us some boards and threw in some extras like paddles, deck bags, t-shirts and caps.

From there we began a near-two-year build-up of paddling UK and European rivers, lakes and oceans. But it wasn’t until the three of us arrived in Whitehorse, Canada, when the sense of adventure truly set in. Whitehorse played host to a series of pre-race events, kit checks, racer briefings and support crew briefings. The support crews are an invaluable entity for this race. Ours included my wonderfully supportive wife, Sophie, our two young children and Sophie’s parents, Mitch and Belinda, for good measure.

At the meet and greet event we were keen to get to know the few other characters in our category; i.e. the mad men and women who – unlike the canoe and kayak majority – planned to paddle for up to 70 hours… standing up. We wanted to hear their stories, their background, their preparations and solicit what advice we could from those far more experienced than ourselves. One man in particular, Bart de Zwart, who was the preordained favourite having won the YRQ SUP category in all three years since it was introduced.

Bart’s advice was simply, “Don’t get off the river.” It sounded a little dramatic. We didn’t believe we would be in that much of a rush. After all, we weren’t planning to win the race. We knew all too well our lack of racing experience and the fact that were paddling on inflatable touring boards amidst a field of 14-foot carbon race boards. Our goal was simply to finish; an achievement in its own right.

And they’re off

The race began at midday on the Wednesday, with a frenetic energy totally disproportionate to the race that lay ahead, as 300-or-so racers (from solos to eight-person voyager canoes) scurried the 400m from the start line to their waiting boats, spurred on by the cheering crowds. Once we hit the water, the chaos quickly settled into an orderly stream of vessels snaking along the river. The SUPs were easy to spot, standing tall over their seated contemporaries. They were all out in front already; and we guessed that was the last we would see of them. Over the first few hours the orderly line began to spread out and quite expectedly we took our place near the back of the pack as we approached the dreaded lake.

If you’d asked us before the race, “what is your greatest fear?”, the answer was without doubt “the lake”. Lake Laberge is 50km long! To put that into perspective, that’s 1.5 times the width of the English Channel. There is a saying amongst race veterans, “if you can make the lake, you can make the race”. Not only is it 50km bereft of current, but this vast expanse of water is also exceptionally vulnerable to the weather, as we would very quickly discover.

Less than half an hour in, a storm came rolling down the lake and within seconds engulfed us, turning relative tranquillity into horizontal rain and four-foot waves. Our hearts sank as we battled to keep the noses of the boards from being battered by the oncoming waves. We had little choice but to fight our way off to the side.

Knowing there was a tight race cut-off at the other end of the lake, we decided that any movement was better than no movement. So we had the idea of removing the fins from the boards and wading through the shallows; dragging our kit-laden boards behind us. Thankfully, we hadn’t even made it 1km when the storm began to break and we were able to take the fight back out on the water.

As the remainder of the lake dragged on the time pressure grew. The safety boat lurking behind us served as a depressing reminder that we weren’t just near the back, we were the back; and the cut-off was closing in on us.

Finally, as Wednesday blurred into Thursday, after 13 hours of paddling we finally met with the welcome revival of the river current which eased us off the end of the lake to the Lower Laberge check point, where we relished the opportunity to briefly step ashore. The temperature drops quite considerably at night, so we took the opportunity to quickly eat and layer-up, and then pushed off into the night.

breath-taking scenery

The next few hours were some of the most pleasurable hours of the race. The so-called thirty-mile stretch still seemed relatively small; perhaps 30-50m wide. Through the tight meanders we enjoyed the feeling of racing along with the current, zipping past the breath-taking scenery. The cold air had developed thick patches of mist on the surface, which were strangely enjoyable to paddle through. With our persistence in overdrive, we also started catching up and overtaking a few other boats; mostly two-person canoes and the odd solo. Whilst most other vessels were typically faster paddling than us, we were fast learning the beneficial river currents, which we could see better from our standing position. And thanks to some successful overtaking efforts, we finally got that pesky safety boat off our back for a while.

However, we were beginning to face another issue; Stu’s prosthetic leg was giving him problems. The relentless duration without being able to rest the socket was beginning to risk lasting damage. By early afternoon, after more than 24 hours of paddling, Stu made up his mind he wasn’t going to hold Ben and I back from completing the race ourselves.

So, dismissing all military clichés about never leaving a man behind, Ben and I were reluctantly forced to leave Stu behind. After tending to his leg, Stu was able to paddle on to the next monitoring point at Little Salmon and was able to get a lift from there to Carmacks where he joined forces with our support crew.

Ben and I knew we still had roughly nine hours to push hard to Carmacks. Carmacks being the first enforced stop – of seven hours – and the only place where the support crews could meet us. It was also the last real race cut-off, so we told ourselves if we could make it to Carmacks, we would make it to Dawson.

Spurring me on was the thought of everyone who had supported and sponsored us in the lead up to the race. We had decided a year earlier to use this adventure not just for our own gratification, but also for a worthy cause; Great Ormond Street Hospital, raising over £10,000 raised for the charity.

Then several hours before Carmacks, an unexpected vision appeared in the distance; another SUP. It didn’t take us too long to catch up and reveal it to be Paddle League/SUP Racer journalist, Chris Parker. Chris told us he had just tried to have a 10-minute power nap to combat the spiralling sleep-deprivation. The fresh company proved a welcome revitalisation for all three of us, and as a reenergised threesome we ploughed on; finally reaching the rest stop and our waiting support crews at 21.00 on the Thursday evening, 33 hours into the race. Soberingly, we weren’t even halfway at this point. But who cares; we could eat proper food, we could sleep for a few hours, and then the rest of the race would be downhill, right? (No!)

Carmacks to Dawson

After about five hours’ sleep, we set off from Carmacks in the early hours of Friday morning. Our spirits were relatively high considering the growing list of physical ailments, and the 400 odd kilometres still to go. The Five Finger Rapids came and went without a hitch. But just as our confidence was peaking, Mother Nature reappeared to break our hearts again. No storms, no rain, just the one thing SUPs are more vulnerable to than anything; WIND! For hours on end. Worse still, it didn’t seem to matter which direction we were travelling on the meandering river, the wind simply blew up the river and into our faces. We were reduced to big heavy paddle plants, desperately trying to grab hold of the river current and keep pace with it whilst the wind tried relentlessly to blow our inflatables back upstream. When the winds finally eased some eight hours later, low and behold the time pressure was back, as was our old friend the safety boat, chasing our tail.

Despite all our hard-fought efforts to catch up and overtake a number of canoes and kayaks, many of them had ended up withdrawing. Others – by virtue of sitting low under the headwinds – had managed to catch us up again.

We finally reached the second enforced stop at Coffee Creek 22 hours after leaving Carmacks. It was only a three-hour stop, where our intention was to simply refill water and energy drinks and get a bit of shut-eye. Frustratingly, for two straight hours, a 1,000 militant mosquitos tried relentlessly to eat our eyeballs through our eyelids; so the sleep never quite transpired. Oddly it didn’t really matter, because we felt close now; and by close I mean a mere 180km. It’s funny how our perceptions of distance were totally skewed by the context of how long this race is. I remembered on approach to Carmacks thinking to myself, “50km to go… we’re basically there”. Your average SUP distance race is about a quarter of that. Yet here in the course of this unfathomably long quest (great word for it), 50km is just around the corner!

That optimism did a good job of pushing us through the final leg. The pains seemed to fade away, or we just stopped thinking about them. The winds came back in force, but somehow we just didn’t care. We didn’t swear loudly at them like the previous afternoon.

We just got on with it

The sleep deprivation, however, was in full force. It became very difficult to look at the banks of the river without hallucinating. For me, the thousands of pine trees lining the banks morphed into armies of cartoon characters. Rock faces were even worse. We tried whatever we could think of to keep ourselves awake. Mostly I sang. But for the life of me I could only remember the words to one song; Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler, which I’ll probably never be able to listen to the same way again. At one point I heard a clatter behind me followed by a string of expletives. I looked around to see Ben climbing out of the river onto his board. When I asked him what happened, he replied glumly, “I think I fell asleep, the next thing I knew I was in the water”.

Keeping the body fuelled was also imperative for staying awake and keeping going. But it was becoming harder and harder to motivate ourselves to eat or drink. I was sick of the taste of cereal and nut bars. My energy drinks, which had been a lifesaver, had eventually grown sickly; and my mouth felt dry and blistered.

The last couple of hundred kilometres to Dawson are also by far the most testing as far as navigation goes. Thanks to the many tributaries, the river had grown enormously by this point, up to a kilometre wide; you could no longer just nip from side to side to catch a better current. More so, it becomes extremely braided, forcing you to choose meticulously which channels to take. The river map lashed on top of my kit became a fixation; a source of great concentration and frustration, but also provided a countdown of sorts. Each page of the map might take an hour to paddle, and each turn of a page became a tiny victory in its own right.

By the time we turned the final map page to reveal our finish line, the emotion began to set in. We revisited our sadness at having lost Stu along the way, but we were happy to have met and had the pleasure of paddling with Chris. After more than 70 hours of paddling, with less than five hours sleep, through sweltering days and freezing nights, brutal headwinds, the lake, the storm, the hallucinations and the pain – the feeling as we finally approached Dawson City was indescribable. As we passed the finish line to the sound of boat horns and cheering crowds, including our fantastic support crew, our sense of accomplishment reigned supreme.

One welcome surprise, and a real testament to the spirit of the SUP community, was that all of the other SUP finishers were also there cheering us in. Bart de Zwart, as expected, had defended his title. Albeit nearly five hours behind his personal best, confirming the challenging conditions we had faced. Peter Allen, another YRQ veteran, a couple of hours behind. Followed by Canadian superwoman, Shauna Magowan and then Brad Friesen. Despite finishing hours before us, and surely longing for sleep themselves, they were all there waiting to high-five us into Dawson. What an unbelievable tribe they are. Or should I say, we are, because I think I’m here to stay.

As with any such physical and mental challenge (and I can’t think that there are many in the world quite like this), the endorphins quickly allow you to forget the pain and misery along the way; and the hundreds of times I said to myself, “never again!”.

Instead, I soon began to think, “what if?” What if we applied all those things we had learnt along the way; reading the currents, picking the channels, arranging our kit, better nutrition, avoiding getting off the water? What if we had better luck with the conditions? Most importantly, I wonder what it would all be like on a race board? Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out…

Thanks

We owe a huge thank you to everyone who played a part in this incredible experience. To those who gave generously to Great Ormond Street Hospital. To those who kindly supported us with kit and equipment; Red Paddle Co, Millican, HydroFlask and LifeStraw. To the race organisers and spirited army of volunteers.

And of course, to our fantastic support crew; we could not have done it without you.