Active Members are those who are associated with one of the sporting sections (Rowing, Rugby, Yachting or Field Hockey) of the club.

The club offers rowing to a variety of groups, Juniors, Open, Masters, Adaptive, Novice, Recreational and Corporate.

Read started on an arduous training program that covered hundreds of miles over the choppy driftwood-strewn waters of Coal Harbour.

His intensive program, often leading as far as the Second Narrows Bridge in all kinds of weather, morning and evening, soon began to produce results.

To their horror and surprise an unknown force had appeared on the West Coast and soon began to threaten and then demolish what hitherto had been an American preserve.

By the opening of the Commonwealth Games, Vancouver's rowing community was quietly confident that the Canadian eight would surprise the world.

The 1954 Commonwealth Games teams arrived in mid-July, but attention was focused on track and field, where, it was rumoured, an Englishman named Roger Bannister was going to try to run the mile in four minutes or less.

The "Miracle Mile" took place between Roger Bannister and John Landy at Empire Stadium, but the biggest upset of the games occurred when the Canadian eight, generally considered a crew of green kids, finished the 2000-metre course two and a half lengths ahead of Thames Rowing Club, the English crew.

After the final race, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh met with the chairman of the VRC rowing committee, Nelles Stacey, and asked what the club owed its victory to.

Read was not impressed, but the rest of the VRC committee took it as a royal command, and training and preparation followed until the crew left for England and the Grand Challenge Cup.

There, sport had become a political tool in the Cold War, designed to show, through the excellence of its athletes, that the Communist way was superior to the way of the West.

In 1955 the invasion by these seemingly "professionals" state-subsidised oarsmen happened again and left the guardians of amateur sport, the Henley stewards, shaking their heads in dismay.

Still, some hope existed; after all, this unknown crew, which had just won the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games, was entered and though the Soviets were heavily favoured, miracles did occasionally happen.

In the first heat on Lake Ballarat, 50 miles north of Melbourne, the four beat Germany by six lengths, with Australia and Denmark behind.

The victory signaled a decisive shift of Canadian rowing excellence from its former traditional base of Toronto, Ontario to the Pacific Coast.

There, the race in the final for the eight became a battle between Canada and (at that time) West Germany, with a crew from the German rowing academy at Ratzeburg.

The Jokers Field Hockey Club was founded in 1964 by Victor Warren, John Young, DK Fraser and Joost Wolsak.

They checked out some of the local teams, but none of them really interested these gentlemen, who still wanted to play good, competitive hockey, but with an active social side to it.

The newly formed Jokers team entered into the British Columbia Lower Mainland Grass Hockey League in Division 1, circumventing the rule that new teams had to start in the second division by attending the league's AGM en masse and passing a motion for the exception (winning by a single vote).

The women's team was made up mostly of wives and spectators, was formed by Annemieke de Leeuw and Judy Peat, (née van Dishoek).

In 1974, Victor Warren and then Jokers president Stuart Wilson worked with the VRC Rugby team to form a field hockey section of the Vancouver Rowing Club.