Race to Alaska: the “Race” Part

“Are you in the race to Alaska?” Someone yells from the window of a house. It’s dusk, Campbell River. Graham and I are out pedaling as we make our slow way north, close to the shoreline.

“Yeah!” He shouts back.

“Good luck!”

We’ve had others: a boat we took for a whale watching boat until it began to cheer specifically, “Rho Your Boat!”, a lodge apparently doing a race tracker-based excursion to see us and others coming through.

At night in Johnstone strait, a hail on marine radio channel 16 from an ocean liner establishing that our courses would not cross, then signing off, “Good luck in the race!”

There is an official media boat that came and took our video interview and handed us homemade butter tarts.

It’s not like we wouldn’t do this voyage without the Race to Alaska; many sailboats make this cruise for the gorgeous scenery, the hot springs. But being in the race is different in much the way running in a marathon is different from running (or walking) 26 miles. There are other racers. There’s at least moral support set up. People other than you know and care about the finish line.

Also like a marathon, we’re not really in the class of likely winners. This is an adventure, a personal feat. At this point in the “race”, the prizes have literally already been handed out to the winners.

The rest of us strung out across the first several days into our own set of company. There’s the front pack. It could be argued that we’ve held down the very back of that front pack. But realistically, us, Goldfinch, and Louistic Supersonic are in a hard-fought battle for eleventh place.

Or, that’s how it looks on the map. That’s what makes the race tracker fun to watch: all the dots moving in the same direction lets you imagine quite a lot of cutthroat strategy.

In a weirdly Hunger Games twist, we gain greater mild celebrity merely by remaining in the race as other boats drop out: the rate of capsizes, dismastings, and log-damaged hulls has been high this year. Whenever the radio crackles on, we listen to hear if Coast Guard is rescuing another race boat; they almost always were, for the first few days. And we’re still here.

38 boats started, 24 I think remain.

The reality is, we look competitive only because we’re relentless. It’s sort of easier to do this rotating sleep cycle; we don’t have to seek out anchorages or decide whether or not we need sleep. We just go, wherever we get in each person’s four hour overlapping shift. The forward progress makes us feel good, but what else would we do? Hold still?

This sets us up in a fun leapfrog pattern with the two smaller boats. They’re faster, but they’re teams of two that stop for several hours at a time.

It’s nice to have company. When we had cell service and could check the race tracker, we would scan the horizon looking for specific friends; now that we don’t, we speculate whenever we see the white specks of sails on the horizon.

Goldfinch is a little boat, bright yellow hull that you would think you’d see across the water, but you don’t — just as likely you’d catch the sun glinting off of the friendly young guys’ constant broad smiles.

Louistic SuperSonic, whose boat’s deck and hull actually separated and had to be glued back together in the first leg of the race, consistently deploys mad strategies that have them scudding out in front of us at crazy angles, blue spinnaker somehow always flying.

And then there’s us, a tortoise of a boat, and we never stop moving, even when we do: when we’re making zero headway, you can bet we’re still at the tiller, that the moment conditions change favorable, we’ll be moving again, because we never stopped.

But still, this sounds competitive, and it’s not how it really feels. We take care of ourselves, each other, and our boat. There are times we could have picked riskier routes or faster sail configurations, but chose not to. We’ve only got so many days off until we’re expected back at work, which is really a stronger time pressure than competition. And most of the time, it’s no pressure at all.

Early morning passing the Bella Bella checkpoint, I know it looked like a good fight: Louistic SuperSonic right behind us, Goldfinch unmoving at the dock. I know because we had a blip of cell service and excited texts from home. But for us, it looked like me and Ert sitting side by side at the newly reconfigured pedal stations, singing Adele out over the smooth water in warm sunshine.

We’ve got Ketchikan in our sights now — dangerous hope, since it’s still a couple of days out. I know that for me it looks more like hot showers than a race finish line- eleventh place, eat your heart out. But if we do happen to come out ahead of Louistic and Goldfinch, I won’t be mad about it.

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