WA360 2025: Failure, and Success

Well, I’m back!

If you’ve been following along with my WA360 race this year, you’re probably wondering “WHAT HAPPENED??!”

Short Answer: Not enough boat!

---

Oh, you want longer? I’ve got that too! But in bullet point form, because I’m tired!

-Ruby is a light as hell, small as shit boat! So, she did AMAZING on the downwind runs, keeping up with boats 5-10 feet longer, and ones that should have by all rights passed her easily. She’d surf down even small waves with just the littlest bit of encouragement and I got her planing, FULLY LOADED, twice during the race.

-She rowed well in calm water but again because of that light weight, had real trouble rowing in chop, or much more commonly, powerboat wakes. My spine was going every which direction!

-Side note….. there were a LOT of powerboat wakes to contend with! Like…. a lot. Turns out, America has a lot of people? And they like to go fast and don’t care about small rowboats? Who knew.

-Upwind sailing was either amazing or just a bit of a mess, performance wise. I had an incredible upwind run under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, fully hiked out (Laser style, almost!) but two days later in Puget Sound, I started running into the chop and wakes I talked about earlier. Ruby needs so much focus on weight and balance to keep upright that she’d start taking a liter or two of water from waves at a time over the side, I’d try to reach down and bail her out, and she’d immediately try to capsize to leeward, scooping much larger quantities of water over the low side rail. I could pinch upwind to get a few moments to bail, but it would result in not making any progress at all, or just nose diving into waves as I was stalled.

-Downwind, despite the performance being SO GOOD, was also more than a little terrifying. Because of the sprit rig, There’s a VERY narrow window where your sheeting angles are correct for the kind of big (for her) wind I was in. Too tight on the sheet, and she’d round up; too slack and the sprit spar and how it affects the sail would immediately start her “death rolling” (look it up, it’s a small dinghy or big IOR yacht thing!). I could keep her in that window downwind! But, when those wakes or confused, choppy seas would get me out of it…. I had a few instances where I was an inch (less, really!) from a pretty disasterous capsize.

-So, that all added up to not feeling any reasonable chance of taking my (borrowed, and due to be up for sale after the race by the Maritime Centre who owns it, don’t forget!) boat across the two major Strait of Georgia crossings or the last Strait of Juan De Fuca crossing without a significant (80%?) chance of losing it all. Yeah, not worth it! I was going to continue for the hell of it (Up to Bellingham, maybe?) but two days of some very not fun conditions (Pre fourth of July powerboat HELL on the water), an angry lady kicking me off a waterfront beach that she didn’t own, A screaming powerboater at 9:30 PM, and a football sized hornet’s nest led to me taking an exit where there was still “rescue” to be had, in the shape of my amazing partner Rachel who braved the ubiquitous “No Trespassing” signs on Whidbey Island with me to hand carry the boat to a waiting trailer.

-There were some amazing moments on the trip, and also some real challenges. I didn’t realize how different from R2AK the vibes would be due to no public shorefront here in the USA (Canada, and R2AK by extension, you’ve got public access to EVERY beach up to the highest high tide point) Here, you’re stuck with state parks (loud and overcrowded generally!) in almost every case.

-Some moments I loved:

• The start day overall! The massive fleet all together, talking to Travis and Melissa the Kayaker duo in their kayaks who are still out there killing it as of July 4th, the amazing downwind run to near Bainbridge, and then, late that night, rowing next to the ocean rowing boat (Tough Shells)
• Getting into the South Sound, glassy calm water for rowing and finding the only “wildish” campsite of the trip. Night rowing around the Olympia Shoal mark!
• Trading tacks and talking with the Hobie Tandem Island teams and the Inflatable catamaran the next day, before an amazing upwind, fully hiked out, tackfest under the Tacoma narrows bridge, with the current helping my angles.

-Things I didn’t like:

• The amount of traffic that would roar by at ludicrous speeds. 100 feet seems like a lot of distance, but in Ruby it’s absolutely not. I had at one point 3 boats pass me within 15 seconds, all within 125 feet and on either side of me. I can’t describe the cross chop that that threw up. It’s especially demoralizing when you’re trying to row through it! There were in certain parts of the race a nonstop kaleidoscope of wakes coming at Ruby, constantly.
• Gig Harbour. Gig Harbour, and the summer denizons thereof, can go eat a bag of dicks. I had to visit there twice this race, (it’s the only stopping point within range of Tacoma Narrows on the north side to wait for tide) and had my own experiences with the dregs of humanity that roar in and out of there, but I think the sum total is best summed up by a media team member’s experience: “There was a guy in a mansion on the hill above the harbor with a speaker and a sound system blasting music all day, and he was on his mic shouting “HEYYYYYY LOOK AT ALL THOSE BOATS DOWN THERE” at 9pm at night.”

-Some real funny shit

• So when you’re tacking upwind or sailing downwind, and you need to pee, what do you do? If you’re on a keelboat, just drop the tiller and chill while you do it, or there’s other standing options, but on Ruby, not having active control of the tiller at all times leads to a capsize almost always…. so, what you do is you jam that tiller right between your butt cheeks and while you take care of your business, you can keep on sailing! (It’s a two handed affair to get the dry suit unzipped and aim into the bailer. Oh, the things that bailer bucket has seen….
• I took two, 6 foot long 1 foot diameter yellow inflatable beach rollers that served both as flotation and as beach rollers for getting the boat above the high tide line at nights! But, I didn’t take a pump: too bulky and too heavy. so, every time I rolled the boat up or down a beach I’d have to deflate them a fair bit to get them out from where they were jammed into the boat, and then stand there on the beach huffing and puffing into the end of this massive yellow cylinder. Know what’s even better? When I went to get them back into the boat I’d have to deflate them, get them into place, then huff and puff, contorted over the bottom of the boat, until they were back to full size. I can’t imagine what the locals who say me must have thought.
• Jake Beattie, the CEO of the Northwest Maritime Centre and R2AK founder, dropping Prudence the emotional support chicken to me on a 75 foot line from a bridge.