When I was a kid we went to see a movie called “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines.” It was a comedy about all sorts of eccentric guys in wacky and improbable early 1900’s airplanes competing to see who, if anyone, could win a race across the English Channel. That’s the Race to Alaska in a nutshell except R2AK is longer, there’s a far greater diversity of crafts, the characters are more eccentric and a lot of them are women.
On June 23, at six a.m., sixty-four boats and one stand up paddleboarder cast off Port Townsend, Washington for Victoria, BC on the first leg of the Race to Alaska. Same three rules as last year: no motors, no supply caches along the route and no support vessels. There are the same check points: Victoria Harbor, Seymour Narrows, BC. and the First Nations community of Bella Bella, BC. Prizes are the same, too. First prize is $10,000 nailed to a tree in Ketchikan. Second prize is a set of steak knives.
Twenty-one boats will tap out at Victoria after the bon-voyage party. The remaining forty-four, including the paddle board guy, are signed up for the full race. You can, and really should, look up their crew bios here: https://r2ak.com/full-race-participants2016/. Racers will have a SPOT tracker so you can go online to follow along with whatever boat feeds your inner Sinbad.
As a slow person myself, the small craft guild are my people. Ten of the forty-four have a crew of one. I love those guys. One of them, Andrew Jacobs of Team Later Dudes (every boat gets to be a team even if the crew is solo) is sailing a Tanamu Polynesian canoe he built himself from three sheets of plywood. World famous ocean rower Colin Angus, National Geographic’s 2007 Adventurer of the Year, first self-propelled circumnavigator, is in the race. He’s floated the Amazon, Yukon and Yenise Rivers, made self propelled trips from Scotland to Syria and from Spain to the Middle East etc, etc. He was on board for R2AK last year but a week before the start his boat, custom built for the trip, fell off a trailer and smashed. Now Team Angus Rowboats is back and ready to put oars in the water. Roger Mann is also back. Roger Mann is what Colin Angus will be like when he is a grandfather if he toughens up a little. Fastest solo finisher in last years race, Roger aka. Team Discovery, has switched out his 17’ Hobie for a home-built 17’ trimaran. Tim Penhallow — Team Can’t Anchor Us — is back again in the 16’ Swampscott dory he and a friend pulled out of the blackberry bushes, fixed up and rowed/sailed to Alaska. In a natural progression of hull types sorting themselves out, Tim is in it for the small boat race between himself, Angus, Mann, Mathiew Bonnier—a French boat builder and the first European in the race, Michael Adams who will be pedaling (yup, pedaling) an Etchells 22 and the rest of the jolly small boats.
The spectacular 73’ star of the 2nd annual R2AK, sailed by Team Tritium Racing, sustained multiple broken parts after leaving LA for Port Townsend, a journey 200 miles longer than Port Townsend to Ketchikan. Running in heavy seas caused broken bowsprit and broken bow pulpit. The mechanism for raising foil broke as did part of the steering system. Long story short, the crew dropped from eight members to four and entered the race with a 32’ trimaran, the Taniwha, instead.
Most of the boats are sail boats between 22 and 36 feet. Multi-hulls are dominant. There are 14 boats shorter than the paddle board but they’re boats so they count as being bigger.
Boats with Alaska connections: They’re all connected naturally, especially the ones that made the race last year, but Team Ketchikan — three guys in a 27’ Santa Cruz, including Mike Firari, the Commodore of the Ketchikan Yacht Club — is special (see Throwdowns below). Team Uncruise—Dan Blanchard, CEO of Uncruise Tours in Southeast Alaska, is also special and a substantial sponsor of the race to Alaska. Team Onism—see women’s teams—is sponsored by Global Diving and Salvage. Around here we know Global as that amazing dive crew that raised the 100 foot tug boat Challenger from Gastineau Channel this spring and a few years ago removed the oil from the Princess Kathleen off Lena Point. Team Kraken Up has an Alaska ship captain aboard.
WOMEN’S TEAMS
This year the race includes two all-women teams. Team Onism is three women in a 22’ foiling trimaran. Foiling, as in hydro-foil. Fast, adrenaline rush sailing.
Team Kraken Up is the other all-women crew. NINE rugged women in a 26’ open long-dory with three sails, two masts and eight oars. Volunteers built their boat at the Port Hadlock Community Boat Project. It’s just the sort of project that a lot of us would like to make happen at Juneau’s Marine Tech Center.
THROWDOWNS
Last fall R2AK coordinator Jake Beattie challenged America’s Cup winner Larry Ellison, on film, to enter an America’s Cup boat like the Oracle. “We wanted to make sure that everyone felt invited to participate. Even the fancy pants.” In the throwdown: https://r2ak.com/will_larry_race/ Jake promises the billionaire yachtsman his own set of steak knives if he can just finish the race. “You’ve gone sailing before, this should be pretty easy.”
Another throwdown was when the R2AK staff, without asking Mike Firari, challenged the Commodores of the New York, Newport or any other yacht clubs to fight in a cage match against the Commodore of the Ketchikan Yacht Club. It was a pretty safe challenge. Mike is a ranked mixed martial arts fighter. Says R2AK: “Mike is just two Pabsts and a cage away from owning 99 percent of your 1 percent ass.”
The final throwdown is that unspoken one to everybody with a motorless boat who isn’t getting out on the water. It’s the season and the water is wondering where we are. We don’t have to be in a race or travel far. Water is all connected from here to Bella Bella to Seymour Narrows to water flowing under Karl Kruger’s paddleboard headed away from Port Townsend. Karl, by the way, chose the name that is the essence of motorless travel. He is Team Heart of Gold.
Dick’s story on last year’s inaugural race is here http://www.capitalcityweekly.com/stories/070815/out_1253457216.shtml.
• Dick Callahan is a Juneau writer. In April 2016, he won first place in the Alaska Press Club Awards for best outdoors and sports column in the state.
Looking north into Seymour Narrows, BC, a checkpoint for the R2AK race. Photo by Dick Callahan.
