Port Hardy's 11th annual Canadian Cancer Society's Relay for Life Event was held on Saturday, May 28 from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. at the Port Hardy Secondary School, where participants who fundraised as teams leading up to the event spent the six hours walking in circles around the track well into the dark of the night.
Kids played on the soccer field, there was delicious local food donated for everyone to fill up on, tunes were pumping through the crisp evening air, and there were numerous tents belonging to different community groups aligned on one side of the track.
Around 6:30 p.m., there was a group stretching demo where everyone got limber, and then cancer survivors decked out in yellow shirts completed a Survivor Walk (one lap around the track holding the banner), which they started off by walking under paddles held up by the Dragon Boat team. After the Survivor Walk finished, the rest of the participants joined in. Each team had to have someone on the track for the entire six hours.
The event "went really well," said one of the Organizers, Sabrina Dent. "Year after year our numbers have consistently gone down (participants and donated dollars), but considering we only had 70 registered participants, we raised over $8,000 and counting."
Last year for example, Port Hardy's Canadian Cancer Society's Relay for Life Event raised a grand total of $19,188, $11,188 more than this year's tally so far. The top three teams alone at the previous year's event raised $6,762, nearly matching this year's projected grand total.
"It's always tough to find volunteers, and even though our numbers were down, it was still an amazing evening," added Dent.