Arriving vs checking in

Marcelle Fressineau has a blog and one of her handlers recently posted an update on how her race has gone so far.  In it she describes arriving at a checkpoint only to find that she does not have all of her mandatory gear:

Au point de contrôle à Central, Marcelle découvre qu’elle a perdu sa hache. Impossible de passer la ligne d’arrivée. Chaque musheur doit avoir en sa possession tout au long de la course un sac de couchage, une hache, un couteau, un cuiseur, des booties de rechange et le dossier vétérinaire des chiens. Nous lui apportons la hache qu’on a dans le camion, mais elle n’est pas réglementaire, elle est trop petite. Après quelques recherches, les handlers de Brian Wilmshurst (dossard no. 10) nous prêtent la leur. Ouf! Marcelle peut signer et passer le point de contrôle, mais récolte 30 minutes de pénalité. Sans cette hache, sa course s’arrêtait à Central.

Here's what the rules say:

If a driver loses a required article of gear between checkpoints, he/she cannot check in at the checkpoint until he/she has acquired and replaced the lost item. In the event of accidental and unavoidable loss along the trail, the driver will be allowed to replace the missing item(s) from a public source at the next checkpoint before checking in. The driver may also obtain items from a private source with the approval of the Race Marshal or Race Judge and a time penalty of thirty (30) minutes at Dawson or the last designated mandatory stop.

Arriving at a checkpoint doesn't necessarily mean that someone can check in.  While they don't say how much time elapsed between the time she arrived and the time she checked in, if it was, on average, more than 5 minutes it would likely have shown up on the tracker and if it was more than 10 it would have (barring the possibility that the tracker wasn't able to transmit data successfully).

Also, "well done" to Brian Wilmshurst handlers for their sportsmanship.