Photo by Jeremy Johnson. Team Time and Tide.
Alaska does WA360
Update from the Race Boss
June 18, 2021
We have finishers, non-finishers, and those still moving forward in this race. Thursday found some of each. Team Lost Cat decided the big wind predicted over the next few days was less fun than hitting up Jalapeños for a parrillada and mojito, signed his resignation and headed to B-ham. Teams Fun While Lost and Heath Forces Sail kept traveling—one finding anchorage in Blaine (we’re guessing for the water parks) and the other off Pelican Beach on Cypress. Our final team on the list, Time and Tide, rowed into Port Townsend at 7:35 PM and 36th place of WA360.
Now, we need to add a disclaimer here… If you’re reading this, you have eyes. That’s a pretty safe assumption. Likewise, if we’re writing about anything to do with Alaska, it is highly subjective, with a bias angled enough to slide a four-wheeler up Mt. Fairweather, and contains deep and obvious prejudice in either an anti or pro way depending on the sentence. Combine this truth with the Mounties’ shockingly effective defense against our R2AK staffs’ attempt to pierce their border for the last two years, and you will have a daily update writing staff both nostalgic and feisty. Into this hair-trigger situation comes Alaska’s rowing representation from Petersburg, Team Time and Tide. They were born and raised in a coastal SE Alaska town of a few thousand souls—here it’s worth reminding readers, the population of Seattle is greater than the population of all of Alaska, which itself is larger than Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, and Utah combined.
That is to say, Alaska is freaking huge and no one is there. Where a kid in the lower 48 might get a sandbox and a patch of grass for their playdates, Alaskan children are released into a vast expanse of mountains and water where both Tonka trucks and Barbie dolls come equipped with holsters for cayenne bear mace and .22s. (Hint: the bears use the spice for eating if you can’t use the gun.)
Brothers Jacob and Jens Hammer are made from a well-used pattern. Weaned from Alaska they became commercial fishermen and joined the military to practice throwing themselves out of perfectly good planes (paratrooper). Before driving a jet ski from Iceland to SE Asia, they drove Dodge Neons across the tundra in winter. And before completing WA360, they never rowed more than 10 miles in one sitting.
But rowing 360 miles takes a hell of a lot more than just rowing 360 miles, and these brothers have that: helicopter pilot, sea cucumber diver, solo rowboat camping at age 11, mountain climbing, triplets.
Sure, they got to discover what it felt like to bake under real heat and navigate one of the busiest commercial traffic lanes in the U.S of A, and they did really discover the difference between rowing 10 miles and 360 miles, which is 350 more miles that your ass is shining a hard cedar board. For them, the last two miles were the worst. A strong flood was sucking them south while a gusty westerly was pushing them away from Port Townsend, creating a slow, sloppy slog dodging ships 52 times longer and over 300,000 times heavier than their Viking dory. Jacob characterized it as “not in trouble,” but “paying attention.”
Was it easy? Was it hard? You’ll never get a straight answer from them because another attribute Alaskans have is an involuntary reaction to telling the truth about anything that happens. The phrase, “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story” is nailed to every Alaskan birch bark crib. In fact, the term “good story” usually means a wild ass, out of control, heart-stopping, where’s my mamma, please make it stop, chilling bad idea and needs to be toned down a bit for popular consumption.
We’ll just end their tale with a warm beer at the finish line. Teams Barely Heumann, Paddle On Paddle On, and Rogue Kayaker were there to greet them, along with our own Race Boss and Media Boss. Time and Tide were already talking about next time, but when Jacob finally turned away from the crowd you could just barely hear him say, “I just have to f*@#ing learn to sail.”