Tonight I enjoyed giving a talk to the San Juan Sailing club about the Race to Alaska. It was great to meet John Manning of Team Why Not (registered for the full 2016 race), to see Nick Wainwright and get a truck-top tour of his recently completed Angus Expedition rowboat (build for the full 2016 race), and to finally get a chance to commiserate with Nigel Oswald (of Team Turn Point Designs in the 2015 race).
As part of my preparation for giving the talk I updated the Google spreadsheet of full race registered teams that I began prior to the 2015 race. It was interesting to see a few differences emerging between the 2015 and 2016 races: fewer purpose-builds and (mysteriously) way fewer catamarans; 3x the 2015 # of women; high boat diversity — SUP to 32 foot cat; about the same average team size, but hardly any 2-person teams. Check out the new tables near the end of the talk!
I also included a bit more detail about the qualifier and our experience of the full race. There’s still wind and boat data to analyze, video to edit, and trip log to share (more soon in an imminent day-by-day blog post), but for now the talk presents some new looks at the fleet’s tracks and some of my favorite photos.