WA360: R2AK without hope
Update from the Race Boss
June 6 2021
Guest column by the writing staff of the R2AK. (On loan to WA360 after our juiced up unemployment benefits faded.)
If you didn’t know better, this was like any other first Saturday in June. Racers from SEVENTY48 rolled in and collapsed starting at 4:54am. Volunteers bustled about making sure teams didn’t die on the beach—checking vitals, then administering Top Ramen, coffee, showers, and more legit medical attention as needed. After short/dazed celebrations, boats made their way from beach to car tops while humans wondered aloud how they had just done all of those miles, in those conditions, which by all accounts ranged between gnarly and underwear-changing.
Overnight, beasty winds whipped up steep seas. Wind and tide fueled eddies trapped boats for what was and/or felt like hours, and pinned the more sensible to safe shores for hours more. There were medical emergencies (at least some unrelated to race conditions) that tested the collective abilities to evac racers to definitive care (all stable and ok, thanks for asking.) The first night of the SEVENTY48 was what we at R2AK High Command would call “Active” and others would call “Sleepless.”
Farther south from the Port Townsend finish line, the more than 40 teams who called it quits were shuffling homewards, walking that narrow path between relief and regret. “We made the right call, we’re safe, but…” Seas always look shorter after you get to shore, muscles less sore after a cup of coffee on terra firma. Solid decisions worm their way into doubts after a good night’s sleep. “What if?” These are answers you can’t Google, and even the best decisions tend to sting a little if they don’t include the finish line you’ve been aiming for. The better part of valor never has a leading role in life’s highlight reel, but it does extend the run time.
What was more extraordinary than all of that, more extraordinary than the 4-foot following seas that made it possible for Team Gorge Downwind Champs to surf his surfski into a first place finish with overall speeds in excess of 7 knots? After the 47 years of COVID-imposed isolation that have happened since March 2020, what was extraordinary was that ANY of this was happening at all.
COVID y’all. It’s been a thing.
Nowhere was this more evident than the Racer-Only Lamb Roast—an aggressively carnivorous R2AK tradition that has jumped species and has now infected the first year of WA360. For all five R2AKs (and now one WA360) there is a backyard party for racers that involves the open-fire roasting of 2-3 whole lambs; butterflied and crucified on metal racks that are definitively prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Why whole lambs? The exact reason is poorly defined, but like these races, the experience is not for the faint of heart.
Why before the race? In races when teams finish weeks apart there is no option for a big hoopla/kumbaya at the end; community can only happen at the beginning. No press, no production, (there’re barely napkins) just 100 plus racers descending full-hyena on flayed bodies that have been transformed from cutest to tastiest after 7 hours on the business end of a campfire. There’s also beer.
Yes it’s unnecessary, and yes it’s barbaric, but that’s the point. When you’re done clutching your pearls and shaming that part of your evolution that retained your incisors, ask yourself this:
Regardless of the carcass, when was the last time you were in proximity of 100 people and didn’t feel like you might die?
*Disclaimer: this event was done in compliance with the current COVID guidelines. We weren’t encouraging people to just raw dog the world.*
What’s extraordinary about right now is that “old normal” feels like “uncharted cutting edge.” Last night, in a widely known secret backyard location, racers were in proximity, equal parts excited and leery. Yes of the race, and yes of the skeletal remains they found themselves gnawing on, but mostly of being less than 6 feet and maskless outside.
The talk ranged from sailing, racing, the silent tastiness of lambs, the shit show of 2020, what they still had to do to their boats to hit the starting line. Humans talking to humans. It was familiar old times that feel ancient after the lifetime of the last 16 months. It’s been a lot, for all of us, and for everyone other than the lambs, this race has been a source of inspiration and frustration.
To a team, prepping for this race was a relief and wellspring of sanity to train, repair, and hope for something other than hugging their grandparents again—but frustrating. “We couldn’t find stainless steel!” Like everything from PPE to pork products, supply chain issues coupled with a nation that shifted its primary COVID-coping to “agro-puttering” after they got sick of eating all of their mediocre sourdough—those combined forces created a shortage of basic materials. Sure, plywood is the new Bitcoin, but at least you can still buy it. Stainless steel parts were scarce to unobtainable which made getting a sailboat ready for the rigors of the WA360 an exercise in futility and workarounds.
Hometown favorite and R2AK veteran Team Turnpoint was having sail issues. “Our mainsail just showed up. It doesn’t fit.” Something about the luff curve not running clean in the sail track, which is possibly better than the jib that has yet to arrive. Miracles and late nights on the sewing machine aside, they’ll use their training jib; the headsail off of a 15’ sailing skiff. Sub-optimal and far too small. Lance Armstrong never had to ride his daughter’s banana seat in the Tour de France, but when the starting gun fires you go to war with the army you have, pink tassels and all. Godspeed.
Like all of the teams taking the next 24 hours to madly check off all the hanging chads on their to-do list, Team Turnpoint has two races, and the first one ends when the second one starts.
“We sailed together for the first time a month ago.” Team Sail Like a Girl, R2AK’s 2018 champs, are back in action. They are rolling with a Crackerjack crew that’s a mix of returning and newfound rockstars, but due to COVID restrictions the all-woman crew hasn’t been able to return to their regimen of drills and warm up races that has been their Rosetta stone of success in past years. So far so good though: last month they waxed the fleet in the ‘Round Whidbey Race as their season opener. Line honors, and 3+ hours faster than the second place team. Hear them roar.
There are more than a few R2AK folks making the crossover to WA360. The obvious question: How is this race different from R2AK? Overarching consensus: less remote, less rowdy, but more complicated. Tides are a bigger factor, especially in the light air hobgoblin that is the South Sound. There’s fear of pedaling for days in this week’s light-air forecast, and an overall sense that for experienced racers the whole course is less of an unknown—which oddly is its own problem.
At least for the sailors, WA360 isn’t a moonshot. It’s not R2AK’s challenge of sending a hopped up buoy racer through the wilds, rattling through big winds of the remote unknown and hoping the Clif Bars and the jury-rigged mainstay hold out all the way to Ketchikan. WA360 is more like scooping up all the backyard regattas that people already do, stitching them together into a single decathlon, subtracting the nightly promise of a warm bed and a good night’s sleep, then adding oars and pedal drives. WA360, ta-da.
Other than the discomfort, this race isn’t a mystery. They’ve done all of this before—at least some of them for some of it. There are plenty of teams from the far flung corners of this great nation for whom the riddle is fresh, but at least for the PNW race set, they’ve sailed these waters, and ironically the foreknowledge of the challenge is in itself a problem. For the most local teams, they know what they are getting into. They know exactly how not easy this is going to be. One team put it best: “WA360 is like the R2AK… but without hope.” The devil you know.
And don’t even get us started talking about the human power teams like Wave Forager, Pacific Boys, and Scott Baste. That’s a rubix cube we won’t even buy ourselves, yet 13 teams are digging the pennies out of their ashtrays and lining up at the cash register.
By 9:30 the lamb and beer were consumed to completion, teams evaporated into the night. The wind subsided, SEVENTY48 unpaused from hunker-down mode, and teams resumed their steady progress towards the end. The earth turned, and the tracker junky diaspora hit refresh, again, hit it again, and got one sleep closer to the newest new race that has never been done. COVID be damned—here we go again for the first time.