Team Time and Tide by Liv von Oelreich
Tireless teams and the unintentionally omitted
Update from the Race Boss
June 17, 2021
Day 9 of WA360! A day of no finishes—incomplete, undone—an absence of activity. It’s actually a lie of perspective, like a swan on the water, cool and calm up above with a frenzy of activity below. It’s a lazy eye that scans the blue-grey landscape of our tracker and only sees stationary boat symbols of bygone finishers scattered in the littoral of the race course. Even now, the Hammer brothers—and who doesn’t immediately love that name for a pair of rowers—of Team Time and Tide circuit our course’s northern reaches with the father-and-son Brogger duo in Team Health Forces Sail, leaving a bread crumb wake for the final teams and last solo racers: Andy Jacobs of Team Fun While Lost and Larry Baxter of Team Lost Cat.
(It was worth a moment’s pause to flip through the encyclopedic pages of our Pacific Northwest’s astrological, chakra alignment, spirit energy version of the Farmers’ Almanac, but we were unable to find substantive proof that using the word “lost” in your team name handicaps your race.)
So, this seemingly silent day we are giving to M.C. Escher with his frighteningly astute ability to find form and function in not just what is apparent, but in what is not.
It’s with his mad eye we see the importance of both negative and positive space in WA360, the elements that are omitted either intentionally or unintentionally. There is no time to mention every beautiful scene and epic moment, but sometimes, with our harried pace, we totally miss the boat, so to speak. And so let us circle back to Two Peas in a Tripod on their day 7 finish…
Team Two Peas in a Tripod is a solid father/son team out of Portland with aspirations for R2AK; they picked up a circa-2000 F24 trimaran a few years back with that race in mind. Before becoming the 24th team in human history to complete the WA360, the Satterwhite males spent two years reworking the boat, which included Chris, the son, designing and building their pedal drive by hand. A fest made more laudatory when you consider the number of production-model pedal drives that failed during WA360. Two Peas’ pedal drive didn’t fail, but Chris’ knees did.
In another example of a bad Stephan King plot twist, the team entered the Swinomish Slough in La Conner to encounter a shifting headwind of 6 to 10 knots and 2 knots of current against them, the seat of the pedal drive failing (okay, part of it failed), and the trimaran racing at 6 knots in the bad direction. Two Peas in a Tripod found themselves 20 feet from rocks, and Chris left with no option but to pedal as fast as he could with his hands. Brian, the father, describes himself as “level-headed, not prone to emotional swings,” but people don’t keep going after that kind of adrenal gut punch without some addiction to high levels of emotion. 
and 
What they learned is that the R2AK would suck with just two crew; that if Brian doesn’t get a Scotch and 8 hours of sleep a night, the world will actually stop turning; and that the little arrows that show currents on electronic charts are as effective as illustrating quantum mechanics for babies. It’s total B.S. and does not translate.
The tireless teams, our M.C. Escher masterpieces, are the ones still on the race course, and the teams like Two Peas in a Tripod who sometimes find themselves in the invisible ink, the negative space; but without them, WA360 would just be a jumbled bunch of lines, and a tracker not worth paying attention to.
Only stat worth noting today:
- 100 – Percent of times Lillian of Team Interstice gives us sh** every time she reads something we write.