On Saturday, Crew Yahoo started off early with the third race of the festival at 8:54 am! We warmed up far away from the marshalling area, and as a result we didn’t hear the Marshall calling our team name, several times! “Good of you to join us!” said the Marshall as we ran by to join the other teams. We almost didn’t make it to the race! With the panic of that beginning to get our adrenaline going, Crew Yahoo finished well ahead of the competition, with the second fastest time of the morning (2:09:62), behind NAVY!

We raced again in the early afternoon, and finished first again in our heat with a consistent time of 2:10:69 – to set us up second overall and a spot in the Platinum Division Semi Finals for Sunday! We celebrated with a few drinks in the beer gardens, followed by a delicious dinner and more drinks at Il Terrazzo…. and then followed by even more drinks at the Bard & Bart pub.

Sunday morning allowed for a bit of a sleep in, as Crew Yahoo was not slated to race until 11:14. The competition was more intense as the Platinum Semi finals contained the most competitive teams in the festival! We pulled out a third-place finish in our heat with a time of 2:07:02, which did not guarantee our place in the finals. Out of the two Platinum Semi Finals, the first and second place teams advanced, and the fastest third place team advanced. Fortunately, we ended up beating the 3rd place team from the second semi, and were thankfully advanced into the Platinum A-Division Finals! This is a feat completed by Crew Yahoo only once before in Kelowna 2008!

The final race: We were in lane 5, up against the following formidable teams:

· Lane 3 - Navy Dragon Anchors,

· Lane 4 - Portland Fire Dragons,

· Lane 1 - RGL United; and

· Lane 2 - Xtreme Reach.

We knew the race was going to be tight, and we were all ready to go! We flew off the start, and with our start sequence we gained at least two seats against the rest of the teams! Our timing looked and felt impeccable, we were attacking the water in unison, and compressing like we’ve never done before! Tracy and Kelvin called three powers, and the team really dug deep to keep up the momentum! After the well-timed calls, we were starting to feel some pain…but Kelvin and Tracy encouraged us:

“You’ve got this!!!”, so we kept it up! Within 50 feet of the finish line, the Navy and the Fire Dragons stepped it up with their finishes, and they pulled ahead right at the end! We kept our rhythm and ended up with a respectable third-place finish, less than 1 second between first and third!! The resulting medal-winning times were:

Gold: Navy Dragon Anchors – 2:05:29;

Silver: Portland Fire Dragons – 2:05:82; and

Bronze: CDBC Crew Yahoo – 2:06:25! Bronze medal for us!

A huge thank you to Kelvin and Jeremy for great coaching, and to Karen and Tracy for their well placed power calls (even when there was a seemingly 200-m long finish on our first race!) and their encouragement! Also to our support crew Sheldon, Mark, Robin and Meghan who was always on hand to help out the team and cheering us on every race.

Congratulations to the Victoria Team for bringing home one of the toughest medals our club has ever earned!! Let’s keep this up for Kelowna!!

Video of the Platinum A Division Final http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFPNZW5JhqI (Courtesy of Robin)

Pictures of the weekend are also available in the Gallery