The First Leg!

It was an uneventful sail.

That is, if you don’t count bright sunshine, dying winds, a fierce opposing current towards the end… and the usual odds and ends of mechanical issues and trim. One of the pedal drives needed adjustment. The “cruising” setup of the boat (a full kitchen and bathroom) added weight.

But Team Trimorons safely crossed the 40-mile open-water “proving ground”, which is what the R2AK organizers call the first leg of the race. Basically, they test the sailors’ mettle with a 40-mile open-water passage, carefully monitored by support boats.

There’s no guarantee this leg will be the roughest part of the journey–in fact, there’s almost an iron-clad guarantee that it won’t be—but safely navigating, and sailing, and pedaling across 40 miles of open water tends to separate the do-ers from the dreamers.

Team Trimorons started in the chill 5 AM dawn. (Please note the warm, waterproof DexShell caps.. soon I’ll be letting you know how to get a Trimoron logo-ed cap of your very own!)

By midday they’d stripped down to shorts and T shirts, and exchanged the warm hats for floppy sunhats (or none at all)….

About that pedaling…

I asked Jeff if he had to pedal much, and here was his (characteristically laconic) reply:

3-4 miles. Strong tide current against us into Victoria. The water was moving past us fast, but moving over the ground at less than 2 knots.

This was the first of the fierce Pacific Northwest currents. I’m sure it won’t be the last!

You may be thinking a 40-mile sail sounds strenuous. Heck, I think a 40-mile sail is pretty strenuous! But Maxi the cat was unimpressed. Maybe it’s because he saw what a very small portion of the race they’ve completed thus far:

That little blue line pointed to by the arrow? That’s how far they’ve come.
See that star WAY up in the upper right of the chart, under the word “Alaska”? Yeah. That one. That’s where they’re going.

40 miles down. 710 to go!