Race to Alaska: Sea Legs
When I wake up, eyes still closed, I can feel the rocking motion of the boat: up and down, slow, lulling. It takes me a moment to remember that I’m in a bed on dry land. After nine and a half days without setting foot on shore, my body is convinced of a world in constant motion.
Our finish into Ketchikan was a dazed triumph: 1:30 in the morning, a few people from the race to cheer us from the dock regardless of the hour: photos ringing the finish bell, interviewed on the livestream, Alaskan Ambers brought for the team.
We followed the sounds of rowdy drunks to the only place still serving food, the Pioneer Cafe, and sat in a sort of staring, happy haze for two hours, Liam in and out of sleep at the table. When our food finally arrived — enormous greasy plates of biscuits and gravy and eggs and sausages and french fries — we devoured it.
Louistic, who tired of fighting the tidal current, anchored up and arrived the next morning, to be greeted on the docks by team members from Rite of Passage, Fashionably Late, High Seas Drifters, the race crew, and of course our whole team.
Other teams are still out there — and to be honest, the longer you take on this course, the more you deserve a medal.
We’re sad to not get to cheer in Goldfinch, who it seems had to make a quick stop for repairs, and who are taking the more conservative inside route. As I write, they’re still 56 nautical miles away, making a 1.5 knots in the light wind that can only be a grueling pedal across the Dixon Entrance.
Meanwhile, in Ketchikan, Ert organized a bar crawl for the finishers. Starting at the Cabaret open mic featuring solid stand-up, the most impassioned harmonica I’ve ever heard, and an R2AK blog post reading by yours truly, then devolving to a thorough tour of downtown’s dive bars, the still-delirious teams stayed out shooting pool and buying each other rounds until the bars kicked us out at closing.
I’m boarding my flight now, but in my mind I’m still out on the water. I’m thinking of the blazing heat of sudden downwind sunshine, the harrowing cold of wind chill on the midnight shift; the unending patience, kindness, and good humor that defined the dynamic of our team and manifested as laughter, home-cooked meals, and endless thermoses of herbal tea.
Before this trip, I’d never finished a sailboat race, and in fact in all but one case (a clueless keelboat ride) had only tried and failed to identify and cross the start lines.
I’m no old salt now, but I’m a quick study. Though I don’t have the muscle memory to guide the tiller in a tricky situation, I now know how and why to change a jib sail, when to reef the main, why to take a long tack or a short one on a broad upwind straightaway.
But of course the technical learning is eclipsed by the everything-else of it, the long continuous day we made with our four-hour-on, six-off schedules under a northern solstice, the mysteries of the sea.
A part of me is still there in the Strait of Georgia, caught in a perfectly separated current line where clear water meets cloudy, currents holding driftwood and pulling at our keel.
I’m still in the bank of fog in Fitz Hugh Channel, breathlessly searching the darkness for some shipping behemoth that sounded a foghorn twice and never appeared.
I’m in the endless dusk of the Dixon Entrance, the crashing swells of Johnstone Strait, the eerie calm of the morning after Seymour Narrows.
In a race that left other boats with smashed hulls, ripped-off masts, shredded sails, we were the lucky ones. It’s likely that fewer than half of the 38 boats that started will finish now.
But I hope that all entrants found an adventure, even if not the one they were looking for. Whether it’s breaching whales and wake-chasing porpoises, the kind camaraderie of strangers and other teams, or even just the flight of imagination required to show up on day one, each team and racer is a story, or a thousand stories.
Liam and his family are sailing the boat back south (this time with sleep and a motor). With exactly zero nights slept off-boat since our start in Port Townsend, his journey continues with the much-loved, much-repaired Betwixt. I wish them fair winds and smooth seas as they make their way back home.
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