Announcement

**Photoboy** · 06-15-2022, 03:29 PM

Stage 1, Day 1: The fast, the smart, and the broken
Header photo: Team Narwhal by Jim Meyers

First, most important: everyone is ok. Us, you, 100% of this year’s racers, and the brave men and women of the US Coast Guard and R2AK support vessels that affected four rescues in the Race’s first four hours. Everyone is ok.

Bruised egos, dashed dreams, but body and souls intact. Breathe in, exhale slowly. Everyone is ok.

Level set/spoiler complete, the first 24 hours of this Race to Alaska started 12 hours before the starting gun. Yes, people showed up in the hundreds to cheer the teams across the starting line to the rousing chorus of the Ukrainian National Anthem. It was calm, community-spirited, and topically resonant. It felt great to be rousing again after almost three years of paranoid shrinking.

But before that, while the party still raged and free R2AK tattoos were still being needled into forearms, Race HQ extended the time window for racers to get to Victoria by a full 24 hours. Don’t be dumb, get there by Wednesday night, we told them. Why? The triple threat of wind, tide, and the knee knocker that is the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

If R2AK is a hero’s journey, Stage One is the impartial arch villain. Voldemort, the eye of Sauron, one Darth or another; from the 40-ish rough water miles between the Port Townsend starting line and the welcome embrace of Victoria’s Inner-est harbor, on a good day the Strait of Juan de Fuca is a crossing that is unnerving at best for any vessel designated smaller than “ship.” 20 miles from shore is discomforting to most, but especially given the standard shitty weather and sea states that are part, parcel, and legend and normal to this particular stretch. Yesterday the Strait lived up to at least 100% of its reputation.

It.
Was.
Brutal.

Monday morning was special in the worst way. Winds, seas, and the momentum of three years of race eagerness, Monday’s version of the R2AK had it all: a strong tidal flow crashing into 30+ knots of wind raging in from the west created a sea state that surprised novice and veteran racers alike. The Coast Guard captain on scene said it best: “We’re out here all the time, and this was the worst we have ever seen.” Standing waves with heights roughly equal to the length of the smallest race boats, things were beyond sporty. Things were scary.

By design, Stage One is meant to be the “Proving Grounds:” a way to test the judgment, vessels, and skill of teams before they leave the warm embrace of civilization and life-saving resources, and send themselves into the remote coast of British Columbia. The Straits can be scary and big; the rest of the coast to Ketchikan is at least that, with the added layer that it is so removed and remote that even with radio and satellites, no one will hear you scream. Stage One is designed to make you ready for that aloneness, to battle harden your team to make sure you are ready. To misquote Frank Sinatra: “If you can’t do it here, you can’t do it anywhere, but especially not to Alaska.”

Un/fortunately for us and everyone, Monday’s Stage One did its job. In total, day one split the fleet into three: the fast and robust who made it across before the weather got the better of them, teams who hugged US beaches to stay out of the worst of it, and the teams who ventured too far for the conditions. The fast, the smart, and the broken.

The butcher’s bill of the day was four rescues: three capsizes, one snapped mast. There were more equipment failures that sent teams back to the beach and for some all the way back to Port Townsend, but four legit rescues: two conducted by the US Coast Guard, the other two by R2AK race support vessels, with at least one assist by a fast ferry. It takes a village, and huge thank yous to the captain and crew who took a time out on their way to Victoria to make sure everyone was safe.

Zooming in to the details we know:

Tatiana Dismasted

Team Narwhal’s 32’ trimaran snapped a mast in the shock load of heavy seas. It missed everyone on board, and they were towed to safety by one of the seven race support vessels on station in Stage One.

capsized weta

Team B-Team’s 14’ Weta trimaran capsized and was assisted to safety by the USCG, as were the two crew members on board Team Runaway Redux’s 14’ C-Lark who were lifted and returned to Port Angeles by a USCG helicopter.

Team Razzle Dazzle…what can we say. A four-time finisher of the R2AK and maritime professional for her day job, there’s an internet of worth “I told you so,” but the bare facts are impressive: in a testament to the conditions of the moment, the 20’-ish rowing trimaran didn’t technically capsize, but pitchpoled backwards in heavy seas.

For those keeping score, a pitchpole is when the ocean hates you enough to send your boat into a forward flung cartwheel, stern over bow. A down-wave nightmare when the weather and waves are so bad that the wave you are trying to outrun catches up and outpaces you and sends you and your boat cartwheeling forward. Scary.

Pitchpoles are usually reserved for breaking seas that overtake sailboats surfing down the face of monster waves; usually in ocean crossings and the once in a while Roger Mann who met the business end of Seymour Narrows during his midnight transit. (See R2AK 2015: Roger Mann- so cool sheep count him.) What we’ve never heard of until yesterday is Team Razzle Dazzle’s head-on, head over heels, backwards bow over stern experience caused by a wave so steep and in your face that boat and everything onboard was backwards cartwheeled, splat upside down by a 12’ standing wave that came head-on out of an inevitable nowhere. Katy is no stranger to the R2AK, a professional mariner who has made the Ketchikan finish line four times, but yesterday she was on the hypothermic business end of an upside-down boat. Game over, upside-down, and broken masted but safe thanks to Stage One’s support system. Tip of the hat to R2AK volunteers and the US Coast Guard.

For all of the calamity, for all of the “dial 9-1-and finger hover over 1” stress moments of the last 24 hours, R2AK’s class of ‘22 has had its moments of celebratory ok. As of writing, seven teams are safe and finished in Victoria. Team Pure and Wild got damned close to the Stage One record for the fastest passage that doesn’t matter. Golf clap and well done.

Despite the slant of two countries’ worth of network news and the Coast Guard’s Twitter feed, the news from R2AK’s day one wasn’t all bad. The lion’s share of teams made good choices. Some crossed the Juan de Fuca maelstrom, some stayed on our side of the wind and sea state madness. Some made it to Victoria. Some crossed the Juan de Fuca maelstrom, some stayed on our side of the wind and sea state madness. Some made it to Victoria, some created an impromptu campout 25 miles due south of Victoria’s promise of refuge and reset.

Dungeness Spit is a sandy and curled middle finger to the wind and waves that pokes itself out into the Strait with just enough oomph to gather enough driftwood and sand to boast a lighthouse at the end of it. If the teams who made it to Victoria should be heralded for their seamanship, the half dozen teams who fought and clawed their way against wind into the safety of Dungeness deserve a medal for bravery, a folk song for perseverance, and the rest of this paragraph for badass. Rowing into wind isn’t just annoying, it’s hard. Imagine rowing for 9 hours, now imagine that each stroke of your oars isn’t just meeting resistance in the water, but the sheer force of the wind is causing you to push against the resistance during the portion of your stroke that is in the air. Pull, hard. Push, hard. And to cap it off, you’re going up and down the slop of waves. Our hats are off to the hard fought miles for all smaller boats ready to cross as soon as the conditions permit.

At time of writing roughly half of the fleet is licking their wounds and waiting to make it to Stage One’s finish line; 20 or so have made the solid decision to wait until the weather mellows to make the jump to the Canadian promised land; with the wind and swells pegged at DEFCON Bonkers, most folks figured that the land of socialized medicine, hollandaise everything, and maple syrup can wait for a least another sunrise. Write-in frontrunner for Most Impressive Judgment Regardless of Age: Mustang Survival’s Team Rite of Passage leaned on their average 16.5 years of life experience and after starting the race at 5 am, returned to the same marina at 0510 to tie up, eat breakfast, and avoid the maelstrom that met the rest. Their parents and an internet of tracker fans gushed with relief and pride. Kids going to be alright.

With teenagers making the most responsible choices and the bonkers-plus sea state of day one, the forced backflips, and coast guard-and-race-support-vessel-assisted capsizes, it’s likely and justifiable that the long tail story of the next 24 hours will be one of increased prudence. Once bitten, twice whatever.

What may never get adequate, prime-time celebration are the rowers, sailors, and volunteers who did it right. The lead teams who made it to VIC in near record time, the intrepid and prudent teams holing up on the safe side of the border, the bodies and souls who through their very actions are embodying the saltwater prudence this race was created to celebrate. Winds were huge, seas were huge-er, and thanks to the combined efforts of the vessels supporting R2AK and the US Coast Guard, everyone gets their fair shot at another birthday. This coastline is what it is, but at least for Stage One, at least yesterday.

Weather is reported to be same-to-worse today, and better-to-nothing for Wednesday. Between the choice of 12’ seas and a five-hour bike ride, we’d take the latter, and we recommend the teams do too.

Stay safe out there, this sprint to the marathon is just getting started.

R2AK out.

https://r2ak.com/2022-race-feed/2022...nd-the-broken/

**Photoboy** · 06-20-2022, 08:10 AM

Progress Chart: https://r2ak2022.maprogress.com

Day 3: Big milestones, everyone finds their race, unknowing runs rampant

Field Report
photo: Teams Wraith 2AK and High Seas Drifters by Laura Bennett

Before we get to the daily dose of R2AK’s blathering fever dream, we need to set the record straight: if you don’t know, we probably don’t either.

To be clear: we are hustling. Up and down R2AK’s elongating geography, we’re hustling via boat, car, plane, and internet to connect with the ever shrinking field of competitors to find out just what the hell is going on. On a good day we can scratch the surface, but rest assured we’re not sitting on a pile of facts that we dole out like candy if you race fans behave. Don’t rule it out for the future, but at least for now we don’t wait until you buy enough stuff from Fisheries Supply until we drop a post. It would help if you did, but the stories are too good and/or we’re not that cruel or disciplined. Which is an R2AK length of saying that there is a lot we don’t know.

We’re still waiting for reports of just how gnarly it got on the west side of Vancouver Island. We don’t know why Team High Seas Drifters is heading so far west along Vancouver Island rather than jumping across towards Cape Caution with the rest. We don’t know how Team Stern Wheelin’s fresh R2AK tattoo is healing up, or how any part of “Racing” to Alaska includes Team Sockeye Voyages getting on the water at the crack of 2:30 pm. Unknowing runs rampant here.

What we do know is that Day 3 was big in at least the following ways:

After a Profanity of Driftwood retired any chance of an inside-team win fueled by anything other than a leaderboard catastrophe, and the “flock of log” debate was definitively settled by the global citizens of R2AK’s Tracker Nation, Team Pure & Wild made history by being the first R2AK team to round Cape Scott at roughly 19:30 and balanced their definitive right turn out of Victoria with a veer to the right towards the checkpoint in Bella Bella. Weather models are flawed at best, but at this point it’s looking like a speedy downwinder to the pin, and then downwind again into Ketchikan glory. Barring logs or any other catastrophe, while we fear the jinx potential of saying this out loud, with the nearest team horizons away and no one anywhere near their boat speed, it looks like it’s their race to lose. Logs are everywhere, hubris and jinxes are real, so for the health and safety of everyone onboard, everyone reading this should knock a non-floating piece of wood right now. Now.

We’re still waiting for reports of just how gnarly it got on the west side of Vancouver Island. We don’t know why Team High Seas Drifters is heading so far west along Vancouver Island rather than jumping across towards Cape Caution with the rest. We don’t know how Team Stern Wheelin’s fresh R2AK tattoo is healing up, or how any part of “Racing” to Alaska includes Team Sockeye Voyages getting on the water at the crack of 2:30 pm. Unknowing runs rampant here.

What we do know is that Day 3 was big in at least the following ways:

After a Profanity of Driftwood retired any chance of an inside-team win fueled by anything other than a leaderboard catastrophe, and the “flock of log” debate was definitively settled by the global citizens of R2AK’s Tracker Nation, Team Pure & Wild made history by being the first R2AK team to round Cape Scott at roughly 19:30 and balanced their definitive right turn out of Victoria with a veer to the right towards the checkpoint in Bella Bella. Weather models are flawed at best, but at this point it’s looking like a speedy downwinder to the pin, and then downwind again into Ketchikan glory. Barring logs or any other catastrophe, while we fear the jinx potential of saying this out loud, with the nearest team horizons away and no one anywhere near their boat speed, it looks like it’s their race to lose. Logs are everywhere, hubris and jinxes are real, so for the health and safety of everyone onboard, everyone reading this should knock a non-floating piece of wood right now. Now.

Don’t believe us? Watch Lynnette Oostmeyer’s field report today.

https://youtu.be/BuaJmvHqFjo

While the tidal cycle raged in Wagnarian proportions, Teams Lost But Don’t Care, High Seas Drifters, Fashionably Late, Vegemite Vigilantes, and Wraith 2AK were locked in heated and close tacking battles that turned simply transiting R2AK’s most challenging boss energy into an aria. After 120 miles these 5 teams were trading tacks and swapping leads through Seymour Narrows and Discovery Passage more times than seemed possible. It was a day seemingly scored to the plot of a mid-inning boat race jumbotron’ed at a Mariners game. Pick a boat, and play out the drama as it goes from way ahead, to way behind, to ahead, to behind, to whatever version of checkered flag elation or “I was so close” you share with your seat mates before a pitcher returns to the mound. Translating all of that for all of you who’ve never attended a game of professional sportsball: these teams were on top of each other, dodging whirlpools, working the wind lines, and vying for advantage in this narrowed gate that is as much of a challenge as it is the turnstile to wilderness. It was exciting.

It’s day three, and as much as the leaders are clipping through the mileposts, the rest of the fleet is settling into whatever race R2AK provides. After receiving a spontaneous mid-race cookie drop from a fan, Team Ruf Duck’s 31’ trimaran is mixing it up with the teen crew on Mustang Survival’s Team Rite of Passage and the 20-foot contenders on Teams Loustic SuperSonic and Goldfinch. The rowers of Teams Don’t Tell Mom and Let’s Row Maybe? continue to duke it out one stroke at a time, and have oddly converged with the paddlewheeled fury of Team Stern Wheelin’s riverboat/mid-70s sailing tech mash-up. Olympic medal rowers vs pedal-powered Steamboat Willy? It’s a good thing we don’t attempt to time correct for boat speed, because how?

Day 3 was big, and the bigness of Day 4 is looking like Team Pure & Wild lining themselves up for a log- dodging, tailwind sleigh ride all the way home. Stay frosty, racers, and stay tuned, race fans. The racing is just getting started.

BREAKING NEWS: This just in: Team Shear Water Madness has snapped one of their masts just past Seymour Narrows and is retiring from the race. Everyone’s ok, and the details remain unknown for now, but the sum total of forces proved too much for at least 50% of the unstayed masts of their custom cat ketch/schooner. Game over. Time to find shelter, repair, and a warm bed. Live to race another day.

BREAKING NEWS 2… and now Team Stern Wheelin has left the race. We clearly don’t know anything. More as we know it.

**Photoboy** · 06-21-2022, 03:39 PM

Day 5: Pure and Wild for the win, secret weapons, breakfast lasagna
Field Report | 24-Hr Fact Sheet
photo: Team Pure and Wild by Thomas Hawthorne

It’s been years since Ketchikan welcomed R2AK’s finishers to its shores, but by the early hour of Team Pure and Wild’s crossing of Dixon Entrance, you could tell that things were happening in welcomed and familiar ways. As their tracker blip went from “When will they get here?” to “We better hurry!” fans clad in R2AK swag migrated from disparate corners of the community to a slow-forming flash mob that converged on the docks of the Alaska Fish House to wait for R2AK’s first finishers.

In truth, the preparations started weeks before. Volunteers made a new stand and polished the bell, the local newspaper had been peppering the headlines with updates, fishing guides volunteered to take the various cameras from R2AK and local TV to catch the team’s final approach, cash and firewood were placed on standby. It had been years, people were ready.

This was true in the five previous R2AKs, but this year’s vibe had a pent up, “Yay, and thank god” energy. There has always been a cheering mass on the dock, and the stalwart fans from Ketchikan were joined by others who had been similarly inspired. Staff of nearby restaurants ignored customers for a few minutes to cheer in the winners. A couple made the trip down from Anchorage, another up from Texas, and at least a few from Port Townsend to be part of the celebration. Class acts to the end, Team Pocket Rockanauts might have exited the race early but made it to Ketchikan to be part of the action, and a passenger on a nearby cruise ship joined the crowd just to see what was happening. She arrived uninformed, but Joy from Salt Lake left as the race’s newest fan and tracker enthusiast. Took pictures with the team and everything. The mood was the good kind of contagious, and if you believe the woowoo that good energy can manifest in the natural world, for at least four hours it didn’t rain. Yes, in Ketchikan.

After a run under sunny skies, Team Pure and Wild was welcomed with cheers and applause—4 days, 4 hours, and 32 minutes after they left Victoria. As they say in these parts: Welcome to done.

They rang the bell and drank the beers, kissed their loved ones, and offered thanks. There were cameras and microphones (so many cameras and microphones), questions and stories, and crowd-wide curiosity about what had happened in the last 750 miles. In the KTN and across the global Tracker Nation, fans chimed in to share in the joy and were eager to learn how they did it.

Finish lines are the natural habitat of platitudes, and the team’s warm collected remarks on a rare rainless day seemed to reinforce a dreamy state of topline perfection. Regardless of when racers finish (or not), Race to Alaska is often defined by a profanity-laden freight train of hardship and grit, of overcoming the sum total of logs, calms, and gales between start and finish. If one were to simply look at Team Pure and Wild’s abstract and believe the first offered version of their elation-fueled stories, it could feel suspiciously picket fenced and perfect. Olympic and otherwise accomplished sailors, on a fast, custom, and proven vessel that finished not just first but more than a timezone ahead of the nearest competitor, all culminating in a downwind, down current, sleigh ride in the sun that ended in $10,000 and their sweeties waiting on the dock. It all seemed too perfect.

On the surface, to habitual rock throwers and the “It’s not fair for the little guys” set, it looked like this episode of the R2AK was less of a Man-vs-Monster, late-night horror show of human struggle against impossible odds, but an after school special where things were ok, then ended up even better.

Where was the suffering, the agony, the exhaustion? Where was the rain-soaked 2 am finish where haggard, limp drysuits stagger off their boat in a pile of walking exhaustion and struggle to muster that last crumb of sleepless adrenaline just to ring the bell before crawling into a wet bed one last time because they were too tired to move? Some people watch NASCAR for the chance of a crash, and as thousands of fans as far away as Australia reveled in TPW’s accomplishment, to those who judge worth by proximity to failure, this all seemed suspiciously easy.

To the delight of race fans, our underwriters, and the US Coast Guard alike, Team Pure and Wild’s race wasn’t a journey to their ragged edge, but a honed demonstration of what’s possible for the incredibly capable.

It wasn’t all teacakes and daisies. Were there hairy moments? Totally, but they were met and dealt with. From pounding into big seas for the length of Vancouver Island, a sketchy full send shimmy out the bowsprit to retrieve a wayward tackline, the log strike in Hecate, to shredding their spinnaker as they took it down on the final night—there were plenty of occasions to rise to. One night it was so rough and uncomfortable that at least one of them got seasick despite his many ocean miles. “I ate a Dramamine then immediately puked.” The difference between these and the same-themed stories from teams who make it to Ketchikan by the skin of their teeth is that these moments of challenge weren’t survived, they were executed.

Were they tired? Sure. Their crew had been sleeping three hours out of every nine since the race began. Three hours to sleep, three at the helm, and remaining three to make food, help out on deck, and other household chores.

By our estimation, as much as their experience manifested in their ability to sail fast and safely (and they 100% did), Team Pure and Wild had two secret weapons: real food and ballast.

It seems subtle, but the ability to have relative comfort has an underrated importance in a race as long as this. You can grit your teeth for a couple days of sleeping in a wet drysuit, but finding relative comfort helps you recharge, keeps up morale, and as we know from watching Team Fashionably Late: happy crews sail faster.

Rather than the standard, boat weight conscious, racer menu of Jetboiled bags of meal-flavored rehydrated calories, Team P&W decided to spend the weight they saved by only packing one shared sleeping bag, with pre-making enough real food to last them the trip. Yes, it was a four item menu that fell somewhere between “fourth grade birthday” and “frat house,” but the pizza, lasagna, chili, and chicken fingers that they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner had the calories, sustaining comfort, and practical application to keep them going. “After the third time in the oven, the top layer of the lasagna got pretty burnt, so we’d just peel it off and have at it.”

We can only speculate, but given TPW’s new-found glory our guess is that “Lasagna: it’s not just for breakfast anymore” and “Lasagna: the food with a disposable top” are front runners for the Lasagna Council’s next ad campaign.

Also, did you catch that? The boat has an oven. They could have made cookies.

Secret weapon #2: ballast. Enabled by R2AK’s Wild West rules, the team’s ability to move weight from low side to high side played a huge role in their performance. The Riptide 44 Dark Star, already had built-in water ballast; port and starboard tanks that allow you to fill the windward tank with water to counterbalance the force of the wind and keep the boat flatter and faster. Short course race boats use meat ballast: humans who clamber side to side between tacks, using their girth to do the same thing as the tanks. TPW’s water ballast system works like this: just before you tack, you use gravity to drain the water from the high side to the low side, then tack over. Low side with all the water on it becomes the newly weighted high side, and Bob’s your uncle. But what about right before you tack when the water is downhill and exactly where you don’t want the weight? “It’s a little sketchy,” but the water ballast system allowed them to drive big boat performance with a shorthanded crew.

Adding to the effect, they also restacked their gear. Each time they tacked, one person would drive, one person would winch, and one person would restack and retie hundreds of pounds of sails and gear stowed both on deck and down below. They rotated the task depending on who had energy and who needed to get warm. “It was a lot of work, you got pretty sweaty.” Especially restacking their sails, which were stowed on deck; moving them to the high side meant you had to start in the elements on the wet and pounding low side. How much did all of that weight shifting matter? Their guess is they gained at least a knot, maybe two—a speed increase of 10–20%. “One of the reasons I love this race is that it allows us to sail the boat to its potential rather than to a set of rules.”

The talk around the dinner table ping-ponged from laughter-filled recollections to the technical debrief of what sails they used and when, to a deep reverence for the experience they just shared and the coastline they just experienced. The sound of whales blowing less than half a mile off in the dead calm near Bella Bella, the pitch black transit around Cape Scott whose only light was the glowing phosphorescence of their bow wake and the outline of a fish swimming alongside for a length of time somewhere between amazing and disturbing. “I stared at it for five minutes before I had the nerve to ask Alyosha if he could see it too. I thought I was going crazy.”

More than their experience and the race itself, talk soon turned to wondering about their fellow racers still on the course. All of the damage from logs, how much they learned about paddlewheels from Team Stern Wheelin’, and where was Zen Dog? While they were proud of pioneering the outside route, their excitement was genuine as they learned that their “sistership,” Team Dark Star (the same-named boat of a vastly different design), was pioneering another by deviating from the standard inside route through Seymour to an even inside-er one. In a matter of hours, the winners had gone from competitors to race fans glued to the tracker.

Champions of spirit and of deed, Team Pure and Wild is sailing to raise awareness and funds for SeaShare, a non-profit that works with the fishing industry to get seafood’s high-quality protein into food banks and other food assistance programs. Pretty cool.

Our hats are off to the champions of Team Pure and Wild, and with the winner in, the race is just getting started; 26 teams are still fighting to Ketchikan. Race on!

24-Hr Fact Sheet
36 – Minutes Team Pure and Wild missed getting the R2AK World Record for fastest monohull (2019 Team Angry Beaver – Skiff Sailing Foundation – 4d 3h 56m)
1 – Number of people who have taken first place in multiple R2AKs (Matt Pistay 2019, 2022)
10,000 – Calories Team Don’t Tell Mom planned to eat daily (2 people)
18.83 – Least mileage of any team so far in a 24-hour period (Team Dark Star)
183.3 – Highest mileage of any team so far in a 24-hour period (Team Pure and Wild)
25% – Of full race teams have dropped out
6 – Years Liz Harpold has swooped into Ketchikan and fixed all the finish time errors R2AK High Command has botched
13:3 – Ratio of times Team Let’s Row Maybe? have talked about their blisters to how many blisters they have
20% – Of teams currently racing have passed through the mid-way checkpoint of Bella Bella (4.5 days into the race)
20% – Of teams currently racing have not exited the Strait of Georgia yet (4.5 days into the race)

Announcement

R2AK 2022: A Rambunctious Start

R2AK 2022: A Rambunctious Start

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