R2AK: The Masterminds
While I was in Port Townsend earlier this year I interviewed Jake Beattie and Daniel Evans at the Northwest Maritime Center:
https://nwmaritime.org/
https://r2ak.com/2017-clip-of-the-day/
Daniel has the official title of Race Boss for the R2AK, the infamous Race to Alaska, organized by the Northwest Maritime Center. Jake is the Executive Director of the Center. We met in Jake’s office. Shortly after I entered the room I realized that I really should have interviewed them separately, so I could catch any inconsistencies in their stories. When I said so Jake agreed with me and suggested that he and Daniel were, perhaps, like witnesses to a crime. Actually I was thinking that I should have interviewed them separately because they reminded me of potential criminals in a crime.
They kept looking at me sideways as if they might be in trouble. But then they would laugh out loud at something the other had just said. They amuse each other to no end and it is apparent that this behavior has been present for a long time. A long long time.
They feed off each other and their humor is infectious. They tried hard to be polite and stay on topic, but then they would be off again. Laughing. Then I would laugh at them laughing. It was great fun. I stopped asking questions and just watched them fidgeting in their chairs. There is a coffee house directly below the Center called Velocity. That might explain some of what I saw. I’m surprised they didn’t punch each other.
It was Jake’s office, so I guess there is a rule in his office: No smacking each other, but Daniel sits in the squeaky chair. Maybe they take turns sitting in the squeaky chair. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Just to get a response from their social worker. Or parole officer. Hard to say without seeing their report cards from middle school. It was an interview with congenial juvenile delinquents.
Below is the interview. The names have not been changed to protect anyone.
[Why Ketchikan?]
Jake: I know my answer.
Daniel: Go for it.
Jake: We came up with the concept of the race for the inside passage. I think we came up with the name Race to Alaska and then we figured out that it just
made sense because it was 750 miles. [It] just felt about right.
[Were there alternatives [to Ketchikan]?]
Jake: Probably.
Daniel: It was to the north, right? Ketchikan was really what we know, actually. Our strongest tie in Ketchikan has been with the Ketchikan business bureau?
They bring in roughly a million people in cruise ships, but their focus, that’s pretty much guaranteed now, their focus is the other form of traveler. The
independent travelers. So we had a proven attraction for them.
Jake: From the beginning they really liked that this was something that was something that was not a cruise ship. Because I think everyone there has this sort of love/hate relationship with the cruise ships, and [don’t] really connect with the normal cruise ship passengers. Alaskans aren’t cruise ship passengers in general. They do go on cruises, though.
Daniel: They actually announce the schedule for the cruise ships every day on the radio so people can avoid those times in downtown. The Ketchikan Visitor’s Bureau is one of our biggest supporters. The other one is the [Ketchikan] Yacht Club. The yacht club is just a little floating building in the harbor where the finish line is. They literally will just have random barbeques if there are enough racers around that are tired and hungry. So they have a barbequer and there’s a living room, the kitchen. They throw these huge parties for the racers. They even raced two years ago. They had Team Ketchikan! It was really great. They are huge supporters, especially behind the scenes. If we need a trailer or something or go somewhere or whatever it might be, they’re really helpful.
[They have a very short sailing season, I take it?]
Jake: No, they have a higher tolerance than everybody else.
Daniel: They’re one of the only teams that, when they finished in Ketchikan (aboard Santa Cruz 27 KERMIT) [they] stepped off in shorts and felt perfectly normal.
Jake: It rains 13 feet a year in Ketchikan, so [snorts and laughs] they’re a hardy bunch.
[Daniel is laughing]
[Skip Allan … said he was sitting around with you at the 2014 Wooden Boat Festival in a beer tent when you first had the idea for the R2AK.]
Jake: It did happen at the beer tent. It was a group of sail and oar folks. [Daniel and I] were both Outward Bound instructors doing open boat stuff. The type of boating I’ve migrated to [Jake owns a Sharpie) is kind of an extension of that [Outward Bound ethos]. Simple. Open boat. Beach/cruise beach/camp [with] zero to few systems. Being with the water. There’s a group of people like that who, if you’ve seen our opening video, that’s kinda what we thought the race was going to be in the beginning.
[I think everybody thought it was going to be like that.]
Jake: Because none of us are very smart, right? There was a group of people around this table and it was a bunch of people saying: “What can we do to make more people interested in this type of simple boating?” And most of the ideas, I thought they were really bad. [laughs]
It was, like, “Let’s take up trash, do a competition, see how much trash we can pick up” or “Let’s go around Marrowstone Island”, which is this island around here [gestures]”
Daniel: Another Pacific Challenge type?
Jake: Yeah, Pacific Challenge, or “Let’s do an everglades challenge but do it here!” [But] nothing felt culturally like a fit. The Everglades Challenge is its own thing on the east coast. Probably similar to us, but it didn’t feel like it was crystalizing the energy that was in the air for me.
At that point I had been here for three years, in this role here. One of the lessons I keep learning here is that sometimes it’s just easier to do bigger things than to do smaller things. Oddly. So at some point, in this beer tent I blurted out: “Why don’t we just put up $10,000 and see who gets to Alaska first!” And every one looked at me like I was stupid. But I couldn’t let go of it. It seemed like a good idea. So then I talked to a few other people and grabbed Daniel and got him on board.
Daniel: The year before the first race.
[to Daniel] Did you come here before the race or did you just get contacted?]
Jake: He was already working here. Not in the building, but in town. I have a very short list of people who I really want[ed] to bring on board. It is One. Daniel. Long. We talk about it a lot. It’s our way of doing experiential education but without being in the boats.
[Somebody asked: “Will that beer garden authenticity wane as boats get more expensive, the competitors more high profile and the riddle of the route less mysterious?” I’m sure you’ve read that.]
[Jake and Daniel look at each other and start laughing]
Jake: We might not have [read that].
Daniel: Last year had the most singlehanders of any of the years. I think people, they are cracking the riddle a little bit but that’s allowing them to push themselves in ways they hadn’t before. So there’s the guy who sailed twice in trimarans, so multihulls the first two years. Then the third year he decided to do it in a sliding seat with one other person and row all the way up. I think people are finding ways to continue to challenge themselves the way they were challenged the first year.
[I remember the first year, the video: It was wonderful. Who did that video?]
Jake: A friend of ours. Who does all our videos, actually.
[I think that really captured people’s imaginations. The Singlehanded Sailing Society has always been people doing it themselves, they’re not sponsored, they prepare their own boats, they have to figure out how to fix things half way across to Hawaii. They’re singlehanded. They have to figure out how to deal with sleep deprivation. They don’t have to deal with logs and trees and the current.]
Jake: And bears.
Daniel: And land.
[But they do have to deal with squalls. So [the race is] still nice that way. We don’t pay much attention to high profile people who come in. They’re part of the race but we don’t pay much attention to them. In your first video you had all those little wooden boats.]
Jake: That was because there was an event here and we needed to film something.
[So they weren’t really participating.]
Jake and Daniel: NO!
Daniel: That was well before the race started.
Jake: We made a website and a video and then figured out everything else in the next nine months. [laughs]
[So all those little guys in their little boats … ]
Jake: None of them … well, one of them was in the race. One of them ended up being in the race. Colin Angus. He happened to be here that day and he was trying to be in the race the first year but it didn’t end up working out. The second year he was in the race.
[I don’t think people know that.]
Jake: We’re fine with that. [everybody laughs]
Daniel: I tell people that. People look at the second year race [and say] “That video was so different from the first!” I [say] “well, cuz that’s race footage.” It’s a promo video. Before the race.
Jake: We had no idea what it was going to look like.
Daniel: Yeah!! [laughs]
Jake: Usually we say, “I don’t know” all the time.
Daniel: Yeah.
Jake: We just make fun of people.
[Russell Brown wrote: “My hope is that the guy who builds his own boat will always have a chance of winning because the human power element will likely keep the boat small and relatively cheap.” Have you found that to be the case?]
Daniel: Not at all. [laughs diabolically]The people with the record, the boat off the production line [cost] $250,000. Yeah.
Jake: Yeah
Daniel: Yeah.
Jake: This is something I keep laughing about. We started this thing with a promo video of rowboats but we said “no rules and no handicaps” so it turns out that fast boats … are faster. [laughs]
Daniel: The thing I really love about it, right? You get Team Kelp. All women duo in a 22’ Santana. Two years ago they did stage one, had a great time, right? They ate gummy bears, took pictures of gummy bears, hung out with all the other racers. They saw the boats that went up, the ones that won. They’d been following the race. They sailed the next year. They’re going all the way to Ketchikan and they stood right next to all those fast boats.
They weren’t deterred because they didn’t come here to get first.Or second. And that is what we’ve seen. There’s this big division in boats that are there because this is an amazing and cool thing to do and they want to get away from their life for awhile and really challenge themselves. And others that just want to put pedal to the metal and see how fast they can do it and if they can hang with the contenders.
Jake: I was just hanging out with the people who won last year, the three brothers on a hot shit trimaran. The three brothers were Olympians and national champions. They are as good as it gets, sailing-wise. Pretty close, anyway. They did the race because it was a departure. Cuz they also think this big money sailing scene is not all that sailing should be, and were looking for something else. I feel like we offer the departure for them as well. That goes back a couple of questions.
One of the things we do in our race that I think limits that is that we make fun of everybody. We make fun of the people that win a LOT. So I think a lot of the big ego, big money people … we’ve had a couple of folks who’ve showed up and we [say to them]: “It’s kind of ridiculous what you’re trying to do. You know that, right? You got beat by this kayak cuz you didn’t actually finish.” Bwahahahaha!
At the same time we try to make fun of people like they’re our siblings, right? We make fun of you ‘cuz we love you. And if your big and expensive campaign works, great! We’re probably going to talk about the guy in the kayak more ‘cuz it’s actually more impressive.
Daniel: You know that the standup paddleboard guy finished? We had a team trying to apply with a boat - they didn’t know if it would even fit in the harbor for the finish line. It was that big.
Jake: They kept asking us questions. We said: “We don’t know. You figure it out.”
Daniel: Because the race is about you figuring it out! Send someone up to measure it if you want! They had a twelve foot draft. I said, “Call the harbormaster!” They ended up getting a smaller boat because the bigger one broke. Then they kind of quit the first day of the Victoria start.
[In the Spring of 2015 I was on the North Shore of Tahoe at a standup paddleboard café in Carnelian Bay. I realized that this race had captured people’s imaginations when I asked the owners of the shop, “Have you heard about the R2AK?” And they said, “YEAH!” They knew all about the race and its paddleboard participants. In Tahoe. That surprised me.]
Jake: Apparently we were huge in Estonia that first year, too. We were in some Estonian Adventure magazine. We’ve been in German magazines, too, but apparently in Estonia it was all anyone could talk about.
Daniel: What was the headline in Germany?
Jake: “No one drowned! No one eaten!” [big laughs]
Jackie: To keep it accessible, is that why you broke it up? So people can just go to Victoria instead of feeling like if they only went to Victoria they [had] failed?
Jake: Victoria was for a couple of reasons. Especially that first year we knew there was going to be a bunch of really bad ideas showing up cuz, especially the first year the riddle was fresh and we didn’t allow enough time for people to really get ready. I think of it kinda the same way as all those early flight experiment videos? There were just these things hopping up and down! We knew we needed to bake in a place for people to fail, but also we wanted a place for people to participate if they didn’t want to go the whole way. So they could be part of the scene.
Daniel: You had thirty six hours to get across and if you didn’t make it through thirty six hour you were done. You were done. By and large the people who were just doing stage one? Were doing it because it was still a pretty darn big challenge in the platform they were in.
Jake: If you paddle from here to Victoria on a standup paddleboard, if there wasn’t a dude going all the way to Alaska you’d feel pretty cool. Right? It’s still a big thing!
Daniel: The biggest race I can find for a standup paddleboard anywhere online is 32 miles. They’re kind of classic. There’s one around Catalina that is 32 miles. It’s in the circuit. The one in Hawaii, what they call a down winder? It’s 32 miles downwind.
Jake: And this is usually upwind to Victoria. The currents go in both directions, though.
Daniel: We had a windsurfer the first year. And then he did it the second year.
Jake: Now he’s doing it in a Tornado [catamaran].
Daniel: Yeah, the full race.
Jake: I love talking about this more than anything in the world!
Daniel: Me, too. [they both laugh] Just to think! A windsurfer!
Jake: He was winning for awhile, too! For the first year? We actually lost him on the screen. There was a big panic. “Where’d he go? Where’d he go? Where’d he go? Where’d he go?” Cuz we didn’t think he was in front.
Daniel: So far in front! So far in front we had no idea! We had to send our fast boat, finally saw him on the horizon! He was in front of everyone! It was blowing twenty five at least!
Jake: At least.
[Tell me something about yourselves.]
Jake: Gemini.
[What did you say?]
Jake: We’re super difficult to interview. [laughs]
[There are lots of moving parts.]
Daniel: Yeah
[What prepared you to do this?]
Daniel and Jake laugh uproariously. They can’t stop.
Jake: Uh. Well, finding Daniel, one. Really, when we started…
[Before that. Was it Mrs Smith in second grade? ]
Daniel: Honestly, I attribute a lot of who I am and how I thnk and how I engage with adventure, to Outward Bound.
Jake: Likewise.
Daniel: Outward Bound is a way of being that is unparalleled.
Jake: Especially training, the way they train instructors to think about education, risk, experience outdoors. There’s a lot of Outward Bound DNA baked into this. It’s not an Outward Bound course by any stretch of the imagination. It is definitely a departure from, we’re not circling up and all that stuff? But the same sort of ethos is in there. And I think without that we wouldn’t be here.
[So the two of you were in Outward Bound?]
Daniel: In the 90s.
Jake: Early 2000s. [In] Anacortes.
Daniel: I was in Anacortes and then I was a mountain guide and then back east on Thompson Island in Boston (Harbor). I’m from Boston
Jake: Bellingham.
[You met at Outward Bound?]
Jake: Anacortes. And then we were actually roommates for a year or two here. In an Outward Bound Halfway house. We started to do other things.
[Do you see this race lasting twenty years or are you just enjoying it as it comes?]
Jake: That’s a hard question.
Daniel: I see R2AK as a stress test. I think it’s really still in its infancy. I think that it’s a really hard question to answer right now.
Jake: Is it still relevant in twenty years? Probably. It’s keying into a particular part of the sailing community and open public that feels relevant right now. I don’t think we want to be around something that doesn’t serve a purpose anymore. If it stops serving a purpose, maybe not.
[The idea of the 70/48 pre-race: Where’d you think of that?]
Daniel: It was this guy named Dean who was one of the racers, he was one of the standup paddle-boarders that did stage one. He is very much into paddle-boarding and [being] on the water. [Dean is] from Tacoma. We started talking and he had this idea about a race but it took some massaging till it got to a place that made sense to us, [a race] that was both engineless and sport, just like Race to Alaska, but no sails at all. Because frankly, 48 hours/70 miles in a sailboat? Dead easy, right? If the wind is right, it’s nothin’. It didn’t feel like the type of race for a sailboat.
[So it’s a preparation for the non sailors?]
Jake: When we got to it, we [wondered] how do we condense it into something that could be done over a weekend? We didn’t really get excited about it until we got it down to the engineless. Then getting it down to simplicity? And then, when we decided to start it at five at night? That was when it [started to feel like us!]. Because the whole thing [has] gotta be just hard enough and it’s gotta be a little bit annoying. [laughs]
Daniel: We talked to this woman who [said], “Oh, I’ll probably try to knock it out in a day if we start in the morning. I’ll just row and row and row.”
We [decided], “Alright. We’ll start it at night.”[laughs]
Jake: How do you balance those … regular skills with the full scope seamanship skills?
[Part of the SSS mission is to prepare people to do offshore racing. How to do that safely and how to do it yourself. And a large part of your ethos here [seems to be the same: to educate. What part of this race, the Race to Alaska, is [meant] to educate?]
Jake: The Race to Alaska is the applesauce that you mix the medicine of education into. By creating this question and offering zero resources to help, it’s intentionally [educational]. For the racers and … for the fans.There’s school groups that have created curriculum around it. [During] the first year I read about somebody in Long Island doing some curriculum around Race to Alaska.
Daniel: People tried to predict where people would get when they looked at the tides, how far people would get every day. There were all sorts of predictions met.
Jake: There were school groups … what kind of boat? Why would you choose one boat or another? Which indigenous craft from whatever culture would make the most sense for this route given traditional technology?
Daniel: There was a student here locally that built a boat for the race.
Jake: A senior project. And raced it after his senior project.
Daniel: It’s that engagement. It’s about engaging with the water, engaging with the maritime. Everything is kinda free. The tracker is free, our Facebook is free, and we really focus on the story telling. I think we’ve gotten really good at the story telling of the evolving experiences of the racers. I [think] it engages with the non racers [as] well. Part of 70/48, the other race that we started, was accessibility.People can be on their facebook teams as much as they want. We have great connectivity printing stories that we want to tell. It’s even more accessible for the viewers as well.
Jake: Maybe there’s another tie-in back to that Outward Bound mentality, I don’t think we’re teaching sailing for sailing sake. That’s not really our goal. Our goal is using the sea as a vehicle for creating better people. We think the sea is a really great vehicle for that.
Daniel: You get tons of stuff. Especially up in the middle of nowhere.
[My understanding is that participants in this race share information. People aren’t proprietary about information. Nobody’s territorial. No one is proprietory about information. Do you find that to be the case?]
Daniel: Completely. And not just [about] information, boats get together and stay safe. They finally get up to the end of Vancouver Island and they’re like, “Oh my God! We have to get across Cape Caution?” A couple of them will buddy up. When radios go bad people will [say], “I have a spare!”, and they just give it to other people. They buddy up in some of the bad places. Maybe they make it up to Shearwater.
Jake: All the while still racing. Down to the last wire there’s still people who are very very competitive but definitely egalitarian.
Daniel: That high school team is a great example. They were pedal down the entire time, but they weren’t very fast. They were mixing it up and hanging out with the other people, but they were still racing.
Jake: One of the things we see is that people kind of find their own race. So you get, based on talent and conditions and boat types, you get these really weird matchups where trimarans are going against monohulls. They just race on.
There’s definitely a community that exists.There’s this growing community of participants that are all, even if they’re not in the race, they are still supportive. A lot of our sponsors are past racers. We can be competitive and compassionate. Racers can be that in one moment. They can be experienced and foolhardy. We can be reverent and irreverent and that can all happen in one thing. We can be for the sailing nerds of the world and for the people who just like adventure and/or compelling stories. We can help people get into both adventure and a deeper path that isn’t going to put a dent in society but it’s a little bit. We can help evolve people so they can do impressive things without being self impressed. The ego can take a little bit of a back seat…. Plus Alaska is cool. [laughs]
Daniel: One other thing that I really like is, have you ever been somewhere where you watch something monumental like the calving of a glacier into a waterway that causes a twenty foot wave to be rolling towards you. There are those moments that are both catalyzing and galvanizing and they make your heart race. I feel like being a witness to the race.
Jake: Yeeeeeaaaaaah.
Daniel; Being witness to the race gives me something. All these people that are here for all these reasons that [Jake] was talking about, they’re actually succeeding at them. Or you’re seeing the challenge happen. You’re watching seamanship at its finest.
Jake: Sometimes less fine.
Daniel: And then, there at the end? The ones who make it? You get to hear what they say. There has to be a debrief to this experience. The Soggy Beavers has come in …
Jake: A team in the first year. Canoeists.
Daniel: The team was following behind them, I can’t remember the team, it was a team of three and I think it was in a trimaran. We always bring some beer down, it’s usually a six pack of beer to offer a beer at the finish line. After about ten or twelve minutes, I ended up talking to someone else and I turned around again and someone had brought a lot more beer
Jake: This was at ten in the morning.
Daniel: The racers were sitting together in this huddle and they were telling their story. There were no non racers there. Some, myself included, started to encroach upon them just to listen. They were de-briefing to the people, only the people who could understand what they had gone through. That first year was pretty …
Jake: Gnarly.
Daniel: Gnarly. Because no one [knew] the recipe then. And the weather was just horrendous. So they were doing this debriefing and it was amazing to be a witness to that. It was one of my favorite moments.
Jake: I really like the open architecture. People make this race what they want it to be. And I also love the open architecture ‘cuz it forces people to make it what they want it to be because there’s too many: Here’s your path! Here’s your path! and I thnk not having a lot of structure - having as little structure - is important for people to just embrace it themselves. That seems to be working, too.
Daniel: I also have more fun at work when I’m working with Jake. It’s amazing.
Jake: Likewise.
[In an email regarding the R2AK Peter Heiberg, (Singlehanded Transpacific Yacht Race participant in 2012, 2014) asked, “ Can you imagine us (the Singlehanded Sailing Society) letting somebody do the Transpac without doing a qualifier? At first I thought this was nuts. But nothing’s happened! So now I think it’s brilliant!”
Has anything bad happened?]
Jake: There’s a lot of close calls. Not a lot. Every year we’ve had at least one close call. The bad stuff.
Daniel: There hasn’t been a lot of negativity since the race has run. Before the race … people that I would call friends, who have known me for a long time, come up, very angry at me. [They said] that I was supporting a dangerous endeavor where people were going to die. Sailing people.
Jake: So far, knock wood.
[Our Transpac sailors can’t get insurance when they go offshore to do the race. What do you do? From an administrative point, do you have any insurance for this at all?
Jake: The first year one of the things I had to go to the board with was this race plan. When they realized I was serious, they asked me “How are you going to get insurance?”
I worked with our insurance broker. I gave them a seventeen page document: Here’s what the race is. It’s dangerous. We’re not giving support. Basically that’s what it said for seventeen pages. They came back and our first insurance policy was $500.
[What did it cover? What aspects of the race?]
Jake: Our liability. Because we explicitly say, “This is dangerous” all the time. We said: “We’re not helping at all”.
Daniel: We even say, “You probably shouldn’t do it.”
Jake: there’s no liability. Really, there’s very limited liability. We organize it but we say it’s really dangerous and we’re not helping and there’s nothing to help you. Don’t get into trouble. You are your own insurance policy.
That’s the other thing I love about this race. We keep saying, “No! We’re not going to help you!” “Help yourself!” People ask questions, we [say] “I don’t know! Go figure it out!”
Daniel: We have a media boat filming.
Jake: But they don’t help anybody. It’s not in the spirit of the race.
Daniel: The spirit of the race is: “Figure it out!”
[What kind of [media] boat?]
Daniel: A big power boat.
Jake: Sometimes it’s a small power boat.
Daniel: Sometimes it’s an inflatable.
[What will it be this year?]
Daniel: Don’t know.
Jake: We have no idea. [laughs]
[Don’t a lot of [media] people want to cover [the R2AK]]?
Daniel: I hope so. [laughs]
Jake: Sometimes. [laughs] I think in the beginning they did because it was really new and now it’s about the stories that show up. There’s going to be at least one documentary film crew this year [2018].
[Who’s doing that?]
Daniel: The Team is Team Torrent. It’s a standup paddleboard and he’s a vet [veteran]. They’re working with PTSD, light therapy, standup paddleboard therapy and making this documentary of Josh Collins
[Thank you, fellas.]
DONE
