← WA360 Home ← 2025 WA360 Teams
Crew: Eric Townsend, Brandon Eshelman, and Joseph Hendrix
Hometown: Salt Lake City, UT
Vessel: 2019 Beneteau First 24 SE
Class: The Wind Division
Connect: Instagram
Get to know Team Jackalope
First thing first. Why race in WA360?
Because the asshats (sorry, intelligent and physically attractive individuals worthy of our praise and appreciation) at NMC decided to run R2AK every other year, leaving us with nothing better to do in 2025 than take a stroll around the millpond. And with that, thank you for your time and I enjoyed paying the $50 application fee. In all seriousness, we can’t wait to get back to R2AK after an embarrassing showing on the Proving Ground in 2023. WA360 is the perfect dip back into those waters; an opportunity to retest the boat, pedal drive, ourselves and the pedal drive in a mildly less committing manner. Hopefully we get more than 40 miles in 36 hours this time.
What’s your connection to these waters?
Eric started living in and sailing out of Anacortes in 2018 and has been dragging Brandon and Joey along for the ride ever since. That ride is usually a Catalina 42, and if you spot the hot pink spinnaker with the giant jackalope on it, that’s us. Lately, we’re knocking the dust, err algae, off the First 24 in anticipation of the race. Regardless of the vessel, sailing around the Salish is our first, second and fifth choice for fun and adventure. And occasionally, panic. Pretending to be sailors, we’ve plied just about every mile from Olympia to Desolation and have loved 96% of it.
Superpowers. Each crew member gets one. What are they and why?
Joey has Super Infectious Psych (SIP): He’s ALWAYS excited. Seriously, if you went with him to the drycleaners it would be the best experience of your week. It may or may not be the sole reason he’s on the team. Brandon has the opposite superpower: Showing Indifference Posture (SIP). Is he happy? Sad? Scared? Who knows. Should we be scared? Brandon looks fine, so I guess that container ship bearing down on us is no biggie. Thanks for the confidence, buddy! As for Eric, he was recently voted “Most Likely to be Batman,” so there’s that. Really, he has a trophy and everything. Way better than any “SIP” we can come up with.
Defend your vessel choice for WA360. What makes it so cool and worthy?
We’re sticking with our Beneteau First 24 SE from R2AK ’23…it wasn’t the boat that was the problem. The First is light, fast and easy to handle, the planning hull and lifting centerboard should (in theory) make for efficient pedaling in the calms, and the structural air bladders built into the hull are a good insurance policy against 2 am deadheads. Plus, it’s pretty and that’s what matters to Eric. The coolest thing on the boat is probably the power and electronics system that we designed and built from scratch – it’s grossly overengineered and for sure makes better decisions than we do.
What are your adventure qualifications for WA360? What makes you (y’all) cool and capable?
We may not be the greatest sailors (ok, we’re absolutely not the greatest), but we know what it means to manage high-stress, high-consequence situations, outdoors and for weeks on end. We know how to suffer. Joey runs trail ultras, so if you’re interested in the same effects as a 30-hour psilocybin trip but also want to feel like you’re dying, give him a call. Brandon spent most of his life hacking his way up frozen waterfalls and Zion big walls for days on end, just so tourists could take his picture (he’s very vain.) Eric was a Teton climbing guide, and paragliding instructor and is one of the few people enterprising/dumb enough to do a solo whitewater descent of the Grand Canyon. So all that should translate to a sailing race, right? Right?
What is going to break?
Please, please, please not the pedal drive. So yeah, the pedal drive. Guaranteed. After that, probably Joey. He scares easily.