R2AK: An Exciting Day All Around

The Northwest Maritime Center’s Race to Alaska (or “R2AK” for the cool kids) has gone from crazy upstart idea (“First place is $10,000. Second place is a set of steak knives”) in 2015 to classic Port Townsend event in 2016. But for me, almost all the excitement of race day happened off the course.

I happened to be in town for the start of the inaugural race last year. I had actually planned to follow the race from further north that first year, hoping to sail ahead and catch the contestants midway, when the field had shaken out and the most grueling aspects of the race were setting in, but that fell through. The start was fun to watch, though—in many ways, it reminded me of that other classic Port Townsend event, the Kinetic Skulpture Race. Although I am currently marooned in town waiting for my rigging to be assembled, I had planned to stay for the race start this year anyway.

I went ashore for the Pre-Race Ruckus the night before, chatted with teams and spectators, marveled at the ingenious and foolhardy entries. Checking the forecast, I imagined that it would be an exciting start. While 2015 had launched into a screaming westerly that scattered and battered the fleet after they got out into the teeth of the Strait, this year a brisk southerly and rain showers were on deck, promising a fast downwind start… and some excitement at the line, since the Port Townsend waterfront kicks up a bit with a south wind playing on it.

I got a jump on the scheduled 6 a.m. start time when the wind shift happened at 3 a.m. It was sudden, and caught my rode against the keel, putting me broad on to the wind. I was up unsnarling that and decided to just stay up… I’d ducked in the night before and knew that Velocity Coffee would be opening up at 4 a.m. for the race.

I dinghied in to the dock and spent a long time trying to figure out a way to tie up that wouldn’t result in my dink getting bashed to pieces. I never came up with a solution to that—the wave action was rocking the whole dock around, so I did my best and shrugged and hoofed over to the Maritime Center. If I had bothered to look up from messing with my dinghy, I might never have made it there.

The race start was even wilder than I had imagined. I had breakfast with some friends at their rigging shop and watched the fleet cross the strait on the race tracker website. A small helicopter had buzzed the start line, knocking down a couple of boats—my friend Christian, among other people, had called the police about it, and an officer dropped by to get more information. He’d seen it, too, it turned out, but I had taken a video of some of the low passes and showed it to him. He asked me to email it to him for evidence, as he planned to file reckless endangerment charges against the pilot. The Coast Guard and FAA had already been notified, he said.

With the wind starting to build again, I trekked back to salvage what was left of my dinghy and go hunker down on my boat before the rain started.

As I got down to the dock, though, I saw what I should have seen earlier that morning: a 32-foot sailboat that had been anchored inshore of me hadn’t weathered the wind shift well, and had dragged anchor and washed up onto the beach just below Better Living Through Coffee. I put my bag in my dink and went over to commiserate with the unfortunate owner.

An acquaintance of mine from a marina where we both used to live was already down there when I arrived. Arnie, too, had a new boat and had decamped to Port Townsend to work on it, and I’d seen him around a few times. He was busy expanding on the finer points of anchoring technique and configuration to a stoic older fellow in a watch cap and damp boots, who I took to be the owner. “Sanderlin” was the name across the back of the boat. I didn’t know what it meant but it didn’t seem like a good time to ask so I just introduced myself to the owner, who didn’t look like he was absorbing many of Arnie’s anchoring lessons, anyway.

Paul was his name, and he was headed for Port Angeles, held up in Port Townsend for a bit by a broken halyard… and, now, a stuck boat.

There was nothing much to do, the tide still falling, but Arnie and I compared notes and agreed that with a higher high that evening and a forecast wind shift back to the northwest, there would be no trouble getting Sanderlin off again around 6 p.m.

“I’ll be back in around then if you need a hand,” I told Paul, and headed back out to my boat to write up the R2AK start for Three Sheets.

That done, I put on some warm clothes and foul weather gear and rowed back in to the beach. The tide was still way out but Paul was sitting there on the beach, a couple of very damp bags beside him and an inflatable dinghy hauled up above the sailboat. He’d been very lucky, I saw, to have ended up on sand and gravel. Rocks studded the beach and seawalls made of boulders supported buildings to either side.

“I’m going to go get a coffee while we wait,” I told him. “You want something?”

He hesitated, mumbled, “Well, I’m not really going to have any money until next week…” which told me much about the condition of his boat and his ability to equip and repair it.

“No, no,” I said quickly. “I’m buying.”

We had coffee and hunkered down inside as the rain started to fall. Paul was a semi-retired electrician. He’d been living in Port Angeles for a little while but he’d learned to sail in Florida, when he was younger… his parents had both been licensed masters, had sailed the Caribbean and as far away as Venezuela. He’d only had the Endeavor 32 for a month or so and was still trying to get it out to Port Angeles.

As the tide came up and the coffee shop started closing up, we walked back out to the beach. The fellow who owned the building the shop was in and who lives on the upper floor, was out there. He said he recognized me; he had been keeping an eye on me, anchored out in front of his place, mastless, for a while now, wondering if there was something wrong. I assured him that it was part of the plan and I was just waiting for parts.

Another dinghy hit the beach, bearing a tall, bearded fellow who introduced himself as Gene. He had the Alajuela 38, Brio, that was moored out just a bit past Zia and thought that he, too, would come in and lend a hand.

Paul, whatever his youthful sailing experience, seemed inclined to wing it when it came to getting Sanderlin afloat again. I had been to this rodeo before and had broached the idea of getting a kedge out to haul off with, but Paul thought he’d just let the tide come in, hop on board, and try to motor off. I had my misgivings, but it was his boat; Arnie, at least (where the hell was Arnie now, anyway? I wondered) had got a line from the bow out to a seawall at the mouth of the little bay, so a little pulling could be done from there.

Now, Gene, too, brought up the kedge idea. Paul didn’t seem to want to make a decision about it, so we made it easy. I had hauled in a hundred feet of spare line and some snatch blocks, and Gene had a couple of large spools of line, and we sort of eased Paul into the idea that it would be useful and easy to run his knock-off Danforth out past the eelgrass line and use it to haul himself off with.

It was fairly pouring by now, drizzle running down inside the neck of my fouly jacket, but setting the kedge was fast and easy. I waded out and got the block on and Gene rowed the anchor out and dropped it, and we returned to the beach and stood and were rained on, waiting for the tide.

There was nothing at all dramatic about getting the boat afloat again… it just happened, Paul cranking on a winch and me working at the bow line as the water slowly rose around it. Someone had had the foresight to dig out around the rudder and the waves in the bay had abated, so no damage was done, and Paul fired the engine up and swung around to the city dock, where we’d all agreed he ought to spend the night.

Gene and I recovered our gear and he invited me out to Brio for dinner, which sounded good after a long afternoon of getting soaked. I rowed back out to Zia to get into some dry clothes and found that my phone had been blowing up while I was ashore; the media had apparently got wind of the video and wanted permission to air it, and were pestering the Port Townsend police department about it since they didn’t have my contact information. The police had been trying to get hold of me. In the meantime, the most natural place for most people to get at the video, Three Sheets, had gone down (a unrelated, but unfortunately-timed, problem, it turned out later).

I fired off a few email replies, it being well after business hours, and rowed over to Brio. Gene, his wife Crystal, and their two children, Byron (3) and Rowan (1) sold their house in Denver last year, bought Brio, and moved on board to give the sailing lifestyle a shot. It’s the sort of story about living aboard that you love to hear, and I was absorbed by it over soup and cornbread cooked on an impressive looking old diesel stove in their classic galley.

The Brio story, boat-wise, turned out to be very similar to the Zia story, in terms of previous owners and equipment and circumstances, despite them being quite different boats, so although they are relatively new to the liveaboard lifestyle we had quite a bit in common. The kids were already asleep when I arrived and we spoke softly in the red-lit cabin as they tossed in their berths.

The rain let up only a little by the time I returned to Zia, and it kept throttling up and down all night. My chainplate holes, sealed with duct tape, had not withstood the onslaught, and water had spilled down into the interior there, and from the one leaky port light I know about. That dampness combined with the soaked boots, clothes, and gear that I dragged in made it a damp evening indeed.

The rain petered out by late the next morning and I rowed in to check on Paul and go to the store. He had gotten a good night’s sleep, he said, and was fixing to go get anchored out again. Since he hadn’t had enough rode to get the kedge out the night before, I asked him how much he did have.

“Oh, I got eighty feet,” he said. “I figure I’ll come out and anchor near you. I only put out like seventy before. You’re in about, what, thirty feet of water there?”

“Yes, I’m in thirty feet, but eighty feet of rode isn’t going to be enough to hold you that deep. You are going to want a minimum of ninety, and that’s a bare minimum. Any kind of serious blow and you’ll want even more.”

“Well, but I’m going to put out like ten or twenty feet more than I had before.”

“Yeah, it’s not how much more you put out, it’s whether or not the whole length you put out is enough.”

We went around and around in this vein for a while, and I suggested to him—both for reasons of selfishness and practicality—that he head over to the other side of Boat Haven, where he could get the hook down in about twenty feet over sand and mud. Having seen his anchoring setup up close, I didn’t want it anywhere near me—he didn’t have the scope to hold in thirty feet, and to get in shallower close to town, he’d be in grass and weed, and wouldn’t hold anyway (which is likely what happened the first time around).

He was still unresolved when I headed to the store, but he was getting ready to shove off when I got back. I again tried to dissuade him from returning to our corner of the anchorage, but he seemed determine to give it a shot. I shrugged, steeled myself preemptively against offering any “I told you so’s” when he ended up on the beach again, and returned to Zia.

Pretty soon, Paul motored past and, true to his word, tried to drop anchor near me. Too near me… almost directly on top of my anchor.

“Paul! Paul!” I yelled. “You’re on my anchor! You got to pull up, move further off!”

The wind was picking up now out of the northwest, and since he was almost on top of my anchor he was, necessarily, windward of me. As he started drifting back, still dragging his ersatz Danforth around, I had visions of him hooking my rode and sending both of us reeling out of the anchorage, intertwined. He was debating with me about swinging circles but quickly drifted close enough that even he could see it was going to be a problem, and reluctantly began hauling his anchor up again (by hand).

I armed myself with a boat hook and kicked some fenders over, hoping I could fend him off and let him scrape down one side on his way to becoming someone else’s problem. But it all relied on him getting the anchor up, which he didn’t seem to be in to much of a hurry to do. I started yelling—I could see his anchor, right there below the surface, getting closer and closer to my outstretched rode.

“Paul! Pull up! Pull the damn anchor up, man, you got to get it up now. Right now, Paul!”

He was practically on my bow by then and he didn’t quite get it in time—a fluke snagged my rode, but it was close enough I could reach down with the boat hook and flick it off at the last second before it went taut. Unfortunately, while I was doing that, I wasn’t able to fend him off, and he smashed right into my pulpit, breaking my bow lights off.

“Sorry,” he said weakly. I didn’t reply.

He swung around again and this time went much further inshore, but still upwind of me. I was seething by then—this is the thanks I get?—but there wasn’t much I could do about it. At the same time, I knew he was exhausted and frustrated, and if he was rejecting all the advice he had been given, it was a pattern I also recognize in myself from time to time… a hopelessness and fatalism fueled by the knowledge that I may be doing something stupid, but at least it is a stupid thing I am capable of doing on my own.

Still, I figured on another sleepless night. The tide was still coming in and wind building, so I expected to see him skidding toward me again when the geometry failed, as it inevitably would.

But after a couple hours of careful attention, I lost track of time doing other things. Suddenly, in a flash, it occurred to me that I hadn’t looked out at Paul lately.

I popped up and peered out a port light toward where he had anchored. No Paul. Had he moved? I wondered, hoping against hope. Then a cold feeling swept over me. Maybe I couldn’t see him because he WAS RIGHT ON MY NOSE! Feeling the panic rise, I happened to glance out the other side of the boat. And there he was, not far away, but not right on me—almost directly between Zia and Brio.

Well, we both dodged a bullet there! I thought, reaching for me shoes… for he was obviously dragging, and just as obviously completely oblivious to the fact.

Crystal was already out on deck yelling and sounding an air horn and Gene was climbing into his dinghy. I yelled a couple times as Sanderlin swept past, then threw on a lifejacket and got in my own dinghy to start rowing after him.

Gene got there first and banged on the hull.

“Paul! Paul! You’re dragging, man!”

Paul’s head appeared in the companionway. He looked around. I couldn’t read his expression exactly, but he shrugged.

“I’m just going to let it go,” he said.

“Paul, man,” I said. “You can’t just let it go. You’re going to get out deeper and deeper and it’s going to drag faster and faster!”

We finally managed to convince him to haul up the anchor and give the spot near Boat Haven a try. He wearily started hauling up the anchor again and Gene and I returned to our own boats. I sat in the cockpit and watched as Sanderlin got smaller and smaller, Paul pulling and pulling on the rode. When he finally got it all on deck he was probably a mile off and accelerating. But when I saw him finally start moving upwind again, I took off my lifejacket and went below.

Still… I didn’t actually rest easy until I saw him get past the ferry terminal and out of sight.