Scott and I have been doing HTFU training with the help of our buddy Kevin as I posted about a few days ago. While we were trying to survive the cold waters of Puget Sound, it happened that Emily Riedel of The Discovery Channel’s Bering Sea Gold fame wandered down the beach to see what was up with the swimmers. She then proceeded to join us in the water as the countdown timer hit 6 minutes to go. She was pretty casual about it all, laughing and clearly enjoying herself.
Today I had coffee with her to talk to her about cold water, the spirit of Alaska and going for the gold. In her words:
It only hurts until you go numb, I saw you out in the water and thought “kindred spirits” and getting the gold is never easy, it can be a disaster!
When I suggested she join the race, her eyes lit up and she said “I’m fascinated by this race and will consider it in the future.”
Jake Beattie and the Northwest Maritime Center, you better start planning R2AK 2016!
Scott and I spent the weekend testing stuff for the R2AK and boy do we have stories. There be some video editing though before we are ready to show you the main activity of Saturday. Meanwhile we spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning camped on the boat “Finding Alaska”
Which Is the better compass to steer by when trying to get to Alaska?
Cooking Breakfast.
Reading A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE by Tony Horwitz.
You can’t go on one of these types of adventures without a bunch of gear. We are making some, we are modify some and of course some works so well we can use it as we buy it – off the shelf. Right now we are in full test mode trying out this fabric versus that fabric. Sleeping in wet gear and getting some rest. Concocting meals, figuring out ways to cook, how to start a fire when you you’ve gone hypothermic – yes we are inducing it and then trying to recover but under controlled conditions. We’ll be posting more on this topic later with both raw data and our takes on what works best. We have spent years being adventurers so we have our biases. We like these guys not just for their great gear and willingness to work with us on setting issues right but also for their excellent film series.
The Race to Alaska challenges us to reconsider how to propel a boat with human power. I hope the race evolves to be a novel, inspiring test bed for all sorts of solutions, but it’s clear that already it has got creative juices flowing as many participants and observers think outside of their comfort zones. While some of the experienced rowers are wondering whether if/how they should add sails, some us experienced sailors are wondering if rowing is the best human-powered technology.
I hope the race motivates a long discussion and much re-consideration of both new and old technologies. Not only has the technological revolution brought us innovations like the Hobie Mirage drive and pedal power, but the Internet has slowly revealed time-tested propulsion methods that aren’t seen too often in the Pacific Northwest, like yulohs. And of course, one shouldn’t forget that canoe and kayak paddles have moved humans up and down the BC coast efficiently for millennia…
Speaking of yulohs, here’s an example of that happens when you ask a smart person (my dad, Val Veirs in this case) to consider the problem. After a 1/2-hour discussion with Thomas about pedal drives in the backyard, he sketched this fin-based solution —
A pencil/pen sketch of a novel way of propelling our catamaran in the R2AK. A fin on a long pole pivots off the front beam and is forced back and forth by human legs pushing on a control bar.
This mimics how most fish, including really big ones like sharks, swim (and they have a lot of experience). It is also reminiscent of the yuloh — a long oar that is directed aft, pivots off the transom, and has a vertical blade — which has been used to move a wide variety of boats in Asia for a long time. Prior to entering the race, yulohs and the Italian forcole were on the top of my list to test out on my Tiki 21.
We’ll think about whether such a solution makes sense from the many perspectives we’re considering. (How much does it weigh? How efficient is it? Does it use different muscle groups than other methods? Can it be stowed away when sailing?) In the interim, you watch these two awesome video demonstrations of how well a fin or yuloh can work.
Are you inspired? What human powered propulsion would or will you use this June? Let the conversation continue!
What’s going on?! Is it last week’s record rainfalls, the crazy northwesterly that blew through on their tail, the minor earthquake recorded off Vancouver Island last month, or is the Salish Sea finally just fed up?
What I see ahead reminds me of the Smirnoff ad that Roz Savage www.rozsavage.com posted a link to on her blog a few years ago: a deckhand throws his empty beer can over the ship’s rail and Neptune revolts, lifting all the trash and sunken ships and planes of the ages off the bottom and throwing it all back up to where it came from.
The waters ahead are littered with logs, a tree with its roots intact, what looks like the remains of someone’s picnic picked up by a wave mid event and reset at sea and a clump of kelp with a large block of polystyrene foam trapped in the middle. Two gulls are perched on it eying each other as the foam bobs along with the current. All this in a ragged line playing off to the northeast.
The wind, on our port quarter, pushes us rapidly towards this barrier. How do I get through? Half an hour ago we had to stop to free a plastic shopping bag from our rudder. Our speed dropped precipitously from 21 kph to seven as the bag hooked the rudder’s heel and then opened like a sea anchor set by the Pardey’s. I yell to Scott who is dozing off shift “trash line!” He jumps up and is up the mast in seconds gazing out like an Arctic ice spotter looking for a way through. “It’s bad” he yells, “really bad!”
I don’t want to get stuck, I think, recalling a recent night sail with my friend Andy that put us and my boat Tsunamichaser, in a massive raft of trash and debris from which it took over an hour to extract ourselves as we drifted towards the breakers on the eastside of Lopez Island. Or the two days my girlfriend and I spent extracting our Westsail 28 from the sea vegetable and leftover detritus soup that trapped us in the hurricane hole off Winter Harbour up Vancouver Island’s west coast years ago.
The added weight of Scott aloft sends a slug of seawater over the deck and into my face. Wow that water is warm, I think. I look at our seawater temperature read out; 18.3c. We have been continuously logging sea temperatures since leaving Port Townsend three days ago. A degree higher than the temperatures that Traci C and Tracy L recorded on their passage to Ketchikan in 2012 but not as warm as our fellow sailors Mike and Catherine documented last summer off Lund.
Tiller over hard, we go through decks level, the sail momentarily shakes as the pressure eases and then the snotter comes tight on our Pacific rig as we take off on a new course. There!, I see the gap Scott has seen. Between an up surging boil full of life and nutrients and the adjacent spinning tangle of debris – a clean line. I drop in like a surfer in the right spot on the perfect wave who with two quick strokes takes off down the waves face. Like the same surfer entering “the green room” my hand momentarily trails in the water – cold shock! A quick look at the temperature readout confirms the change, it’s 6c.
“Thermocline!” I yell. “It was all because of a massive thermocline!”
I’m reminded of how hard science can be. What we observe right now might not be what we think it is. We get to circle the sun a limited number of times in our life, yet the cycles of life are long and ever changing. Is it safe to draw any conclusion? Even after a lifetime of observation? Where I sail right now there was once a thick sheet of ice. What would I think if I woke tomorrow to that! The land has changed. We humans have always had an effect on the landscape but are we bigger than the Pico de Fogo volcano that is reshaping Cape Verde today? What about a streaking meteorite colliding with our planet. One day it’s like it has always has been the next very different. If we knew it was coming what could we do? A thousand years ago we would have looked skywards in awe of the light that wasn’t supposed to be there. But it’s the slow incipient change that we have wrought over the last few (insert ten, hundred or thousand – your choice) years that might matter now. Many small unmeasurable changes hurling us towards a tipping point.
For the moment, Scott and I sail on. The wind blows from the northwest. The others are out there somewhere. After all there’s a race on and we are bearing down on our competition as the winds change to our advantage.
On a fateful “Tiki Tuesday” — September 23, 2015 — we decided to take the plunge and enter the Race to Alaska. What a great chance to challenge ourselves in some of the most beautiful seascapes known to sailors! Add the intrigue of finding a design that would be optimal for human and/or wind power in the complex marine environment of the British Columbian coast, and we were hooked. Plus, the process of getting ready to race would definitely get us both more physically fit! Maybe we would get really hardened by the training and end up reversing the feats of The Sea Runners — those hearty Scandinavian canoeists who made it from Baranof Island to Astoria back in the mid-19th-century?!
For the first week we thought a lot about whether it should or could be done in a Hobie 16′ or 18′. We were pretty inspired by Matt Sornson’s video about Minor Threat — their 2013 bid to win the Everglades Challenge by sailing and paddling a Hobie 16′ — especially the part where Sailor Jerry boosts morale (3:02).
We tried sailing a Hobie 16′ out at Sail Sandpoint and quickly had a lot of questions:
Where are we going to put 10~days worth of stuff (gear, food, water)?!
Could we really take turns sleeping in some sort of “salmon roll” on deck, or would we need to stop to sleep?
How wet do you want to be, and for how long?
What are the risks of capsizing [multiple times?] on the outer coast of British Columbia (vs in the Gulf of Mexico)?
So we dried off and thought about what fundamental goals we had for our R2AK boat. We settled in on 2 key ideas:
Play to our strengths in building and sailing Wharrams. Thomas wrote at the time: “We are experienced Wharram sailers and should not discount the years of experience we have building and sailing them. We know how well they move and how well they keep their crew. With a little Nielsen project management we will have a well built JWD H17 built in months. Plus I don’t see them as slugs. I think the performance will impress.” And a final motivation sealed the deal: James is in his 90’s and deserves a little more glory before he sails off into the sunset. How cool would it be to win it in a Wharram?!
Just keep swimming. We both agreed with some of the R2AK introductory panel members who asserted that the winning boat will be the one that keeps moving — both in calm and windy weather. [See 0:50 in the video below… “The boat must look after the crew so they do not have to go ashore. If you can keep one person resting and the other working efficiently, the boat won’t be the fastest, but it will get there first.”] The penultimate speaker reiterated this by saying (at 5:54) he would want to “keep the crew on the boat and keep the boat going all the time.”
This led us down to the UW/WAC yard to visit the Tiki 21′ (Scott’s first Wharram) where we considered whether we could reduce its weight and windage sufficiently by replacing the rigid cockpit platform with a net like Rory did on Cooking Fat, and maybe by cutting its cabins off flush with the decks. Even with such changes, though, we realized it would a big boat for 2 and would still weigh a few hundred kilos unloaded. Could a different Wharram offer just enough shelter for a two-person crew and be much less massive, enabling meaningful movement by a single person?
Then we saw this photo of a Wharram Hitia 14 which weighs in (unloaded) at only 86 kilos.
Hitia 14 zipping right along.
It has awesome sailing speed and displacement, but looks just about as wet and unaccommodating as the Hobie 16′.
At last, we learned that the Hitia 17′ is plenty fast (15 knots, or 28 km/hr, steady on a reach in SF Bay) and has little holds or lazarettes in each hull. Most people use these holds for storage and sit on top of their hatch covers while sailing, but others were innovators and got down inside the holds themselves:
French kids are revolutionary!
This helped us realize that the bulkheads forward and abaft of these holds were just about as far apart as we are tall. Perhaps with some modification of the central bulkhead (#4), the Hitia 17 could accommodate a sleeping human?
Today I had coffee with her to talk to her about cold water, the spirit of Alaska and going for the gold. In her words:
