The festival site is starts at the Seaplane car parking and ends at Ship's Point. The entire Inner Harbour is open to spectators. The site is limited to 90 crews as Canadian Forces tents, lent by the Navy, and set up by the Navy Dragon Anchors, has squeezed out nearly all the flat warm-up spots. Two entry points for the Paddlers Village, guarded by viguelent volunteers. The village itself has a pre-marshalling area, a by donation message tables and free water coolers.
Marshalling is done by the very bald Marshall Greg and his ever increasing lavish comments towards paddlers. By the way, radios work to keep everything running smoothly. From pre-marshalling, teams are escorted tightly by flag wavers near the beer garden (cheers from there), between the spectator stands and the International food and entertainment village into the Marshalling area. In the Marshalling area, borrowing of equipment is done. They are then brought down to two docks (lanes 1-2-3 and lanes 4-5).
Two sets of 5 Millennium boats are used. Due to water traffic, boats are to cut across the race lanes and proceed along the south edge of the race course to the start. There is a small cove if you have to wait a while, due to ferry or seaplane traffic. In one heat, due to ferry & seaplane traffic, and a re-race, one team waiting up to wait up to 30 minutes. Water officials bring you into the pre-start area, which happens to be a narrows 100m across, shared by 5 lanes and normal boat traffic, then the land-based start official does the start using an airhorn.
One chase boat for directions as there will NEVER be any lane markers. Surprisingly, it is rare for wave riding to occur, due to the chase boat. Several harbour patrol, Victoria police and RCMP boats are there to direct traffic for larger vessels, but are rather unsuccessful with smaller vessels who create wake for the races. There are docks surrounding the race course so it would be next to impossible to stop traffic. After the finish line, you have about maybe 40m of run-off before you hit one of those multi-million dollar yacht docked at the end, screaming to be hit by an over exhuberant team forgetting to hold the boat. Forget about turning, as you will probably hit the boat next to you as they come screaming into the run-off area.
As noted earlier, wakes are a huge problem in unmarked lanes. Also, inexperienced sterners have issues with wakes and the 90* turning tidal current which can add time. Wind was light on Sunday morning, but it was mostly a cross wind.
Times were slower this year because of Calgary. Normally, most teams would do Calgary earlier in the month as a regionals, then some would go to Victoria. This year, some teams seemed to hold back for Calgargy this week.
Port-o-potties and their equivalent port-o-urinals are scattered throughout the site (outside the Paddlers Village and International Village). Only real complaint was the beer garden this year. After the races, the organizers enforced the maximum capacity rule. This prevented a lot of team from getting their medals, and the happy mayhem that normally followed didn't this year.
