Photo by Heather J.. Team Barely Heumann.
Tireless teams and the unintentionally omitted
Update from the Race Boss
June 16 2021
Of the six teams in the field on Monday, two crossed the finish line, leaving four teams on the course—three sailboats and one pair of rowers. Team Time and Tide, are a pair of brothers from Petersburg, Alaska, rowing in a double-ended dory aptly named Pleasure and Peril. Jens claimed an innate ability to enter a “happy berserker” like trance, which we are guessing serves them both well as they push through the longest open water stretches of the race course.
Team Barely Heumann landed on our shores today, with Team Interstice 30 minutes on his heels.
Jim Heumann, of the obvious team, is one of those adventurer/racer types that gauges success by his inner clock; race clocks are just an annoying tick that have no bearing on his goals or victories. Jim is WA360’s Willy Wonka, what you see is not what you get. What did we see? A dude in a rotomolded, ballasted pleasure paddler whose website promotes traveling with two dogs…and we swear he was passing out candy bars. What happens to be underneath the hood of Team Barely Heumann is a collection of experiences including 5000+ miles of paddling, countless buoy races on T-birds, sails to Haida Gwaii, New Zealand and the Inside Passage, ski ascents all over North America, and 1,100 miles on this plastic fantastic he named Little Dipper. He chose to forgo all the experience, speed, and sailing joy to paddle a two-legged egg the circumference of the southern half of the Salish Sea.
As expected, Jim was welcomed by a crowd that was bolstered by the arrival of Lillian Kuehl of Team Interstice. Our maritime Nellie Bly was the only team to take the never-thought-of Hood Canal route. What she lost in race time she gained in the chance to wild forage across the neck of the Kitsap Peninsula. Lillian comes from the local Miller family legacy, and having sailed with some of her clan in Race to Alaska in 2019, this year she decided to complete both SEVENTY48 and WA360. Lillian once willingly snorted wasabi and finds the experience remarkably similar to rowing in WA360. Glad to have done it. Worth the experience. Never need to do it again.
It takes all types, Lillian, and it may be worth asking yourself, what’s to blame here? The magnet that draws you in or the fact that you’re magnetized?
In the wake of her finish (get that little turn of phrase?), it seems timely to throw out these stats:
- 21 – Percent of WA360 racers who are women
- 9 – Percent of WA360 captains who are women
- 30 – Percent of crew in the top 10 finishes who are women
- 25 – Percent of captains in the top 10 finishes who are women
- 44.12 – Average age of racer
- 259,200 – Strokes by Team Pacific Boys to row the entire course (In just under 4 days)
Any guesses for how many revolutions of the pedal drive for Jim? Or strokes for Lillian?