Photo by Heather J.. Fisheries Supply Team Unicorns with Pretty Horns
EmmyLou’s witches’ brew
Update from the Race Boss
June 14 2021
At age 4, horses are just hitting their prime years, guinea pigs are entering the position of stately elder, but humans are still learning language, the right way to put on underwear, and how to draw faces that look less like exploding potatoes and more like depressurized soccer balls. EmmyLou of Fisheries Supply Team Unicorns with Pretty Horns, at age 4, sailed into a finish line coronation, which bestowed upon her not one, but two unicorn statues, while she padded about eating gummy bears and introducing strangers to her toy friends. This is clearly no normal child, and exclusive of the term “savant” bandied about in her presence, another question naturally arises:
“What are the asshats who came up with this thing doing, calling it a hard race?” We’ve been thinking about that, too, and here’s what the RC braintrust believes to be true. This year in WA360, there is a combined racer age of 6,618 years; a third of that total has already dropped out, and more every day. Our oldest racer is 77 while EmmyLou is our youngest, and if age was the award determiner, we could just look at everyone’s birthday to pick our champs. Years don’t always matter. What makes a winner in a race like this? We’d say a witches’ brew of ingredients: skill, judgment, commitment, dumbness, teamwork, blind luck, boats that don’t leak too much, and belief. And that last spice, this kiddo is full of—an assurance so deep, only engrained upon those young, not yet trodden by disappointment and cynicism. Belief in her family, her team, and if you have enough dragon stickers, patience, warm PJs, and a stylish hat with horns, the world will deliver your chosen desire. Let us all relearn a lesson. Winning comes first from believing you will win. Hardship is what challenges your belief.
Her witches’ brew didn’t have an abundance of some things on the list, but each crew member brings their own ingredients to the potpourri team, and when her dad and granddad spooned in some skill and judgement, she added a ladle full of belief.
Elsewhere on the water, it was just another Sunday in the Salish Sea. It all started at midnight, like many Sundays do, with the duo race officials, Marshal and Boss, glued to the tracker and a wee boat symbol of a team named Boogie Barge steadily pedaling 4 knots to the finish line, which is the walking speed of an excited 30-lb dog. Three very normal things then happened in quick succession: wind built out of the south, the calm sea quickly became a broiling wavefest, and it started to dump rain. With sodden fanfare, the third-place finishers of the Human Powered class crossed the finish line to establish our Sunday theme. Through the race course wind came and went, rain fell and passed, and currents added to team’s speed and confidence, then subtracted from the same speed and confidence.
6 teams made it across the finish line: Boogie Barge, Sargasso Saviors, Scull Dawgs, Dunlin, Fisheries Supply’s Unicorns with Pretty Horns, and Ravenous.
While Team Monkey Fist showed us pictures of their rower hands, so besodden we first thought they were uncooked pizza dough, other teams continued a relentless push into the final stretches of the race. Though our pair of kayakers from Gig Harbor, Teams Rogue Kayaker and Paddle On, Paddle On, bowed out after the lure of their proximity to home became too strong, our SUP teams, Scott Baste and Freedom, churned the waters for a 55-mile day. It was a day that offered regularity and showed strength. It was WA360.
How do you complete such a day? You bid the finished teams welcome and cheer on those still pushing; pull away from the tracker to watch the live streams; see the balance in the race of wins and losses. In this somewhere is a sailing version of a Grey’s Anatomy montage, replacing the Meredith and Derek yearning stares for a sailor, eyes cast forward and to the horizon, in search of Pt. Roberts. And then you cue the cello!