![]() The result? More miles to windward and crew who were scrambling to find charging stations once they hit Ketchikan to power up the cell phones they weren’t allowed to charge during the race. That’s like 10 people worth of water that you don’t have to feed or talk to that gets pumped to the high side each time you tack. Counteracting the inclination to tip all the way over is all of the weight in the hull that acts as a counter balance.Īdding weight and credence to “Team Counterbalance” are the weighted keel protruding from the bottom of the boat, a bunch of people sitting on the upwind/uphill side of the boat as ‘rail meat’, and (for some boats) water ballast that can be pumped from the low side to the high side to level the boat out each time you flop over and switch sides.įor Gray Wolf, it’s roughly 2,000 pounds of water that switches sides each time they tack across the wind. The wind blows on the sails, the sail/mast industrial complex acts as a lever that tips the boat over. “Usually we doublehand, the water ballast helps a ton.” That 2,000 pound pun not withstanding and dumbing things down: sailboats heel. The decade between bow love at first sight and Ketchikan glory has been filled with racing and adventure. Jeanne had been stalking it online for weeks, and after cajoling Ev into a viewing appointment “We came around the corner, I saw the shape of the bow, and I was like ‘Aww sh#t, get out the checkbook. If you were to ask 100 experts to name three words that describe the ideal R2AK race vessel, “heavy,” “wooden,” and “monohull” wouldn’t just be missing from the top ten, they likely wouldn’t make the list at all.Īpparently, our 100 experts ain’t sh#t, because TWBFW was all of those.Ī 1995 custom design/build, Gray Wolf is a cold molded, cold-blooded racer/cruiser designed and built with an unstayed rig-custom made, custom paid, and custom fitted for the circumnavigating ocean racer it was built for until a decade ago when Jeanne and Evgeniy Goussev fell in love (not with each other-that happened years before when they met sailing dinghies on Boston Harbor) and bought Graywolf at first sight. Bravo-effing-Zulu.īreaking down that bunch of effusive ambiguity: Yes, this week, but Team We Brake for Whales’ victory didn’t start in Victoria, it started an indefinable number of years ago and converged between Victoria and Ketchikan over the last 5 days, 18 hours, and 59 minutes. That at least today, the 40 feet of boat and 8 humans’ worth of success that hit the docks in Ketchikan is the result of compounding good decisions. ![]() What’s the straight line between Team We Brake for Whales ’s R2AK win and the 1986 Challenger shuttle explosion/2023 Miss Universe heavy metal wardrobe? Potentially only this: Team We Brake for Whales’ victory is a testament that the causal chain of custody holds true for not just failure, but the optimistic side of victory, too. Like our meemaw used to say: It takes a village to raise an idiot. ![]() They say that the root cause of accidents extends beyond the moment it occurs that when a ship sinks, a space shuttle explodes, or the USA’s entry into the Miss Universe pageant wears a 30-pound/space-themed costume in front of, apparently, the universe-there is for sure a bucket of blame that will be splashed on the captain, the flight engineers, and the nice looking lady wearing the planet on her head (respectively).īut right after hopes and prayers, there’s a hard look at what factors contributed to those people making those decisions. For those that finished within 36 hours, they were allowed to start the remaining 710 miles on June 8 to Ketchikan, AK. The 7th edition of the 750 mile Race to Alaska (R2AK) began June 5 with a 40-mile “proving stage” from Port Townsend, WA to Victoria, BC. ![]()
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