Team members: Joachim Roesler, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña
Hometown: Millerton, NY, USA
Race vessel: Stretched Angus RowCruiser
LOA: 24’6″
Human propulsion: Sliding rowing seat
Connect: website, facebook, twitter
TL;DR: References to the Holocaust, barbarian invasions, swingers, accountants, road rage, and the existence of Germany.
Getting to the core of Team Fix Oder Nix is to get comfortable with the dissonance of stereotypes being deeply false and deeply true at the same time. These are charged times, so for a single beat in our wall-to-wall, lack of censor or good judgment, bump-stocked, mouth-flapping, fully-auto, letting the thoughts fly and hit where they will, kind of existence—we’re going to choose our words carefully here: there is something deeply dissonant with the madcap practicality of Team Fix Oder Nix. From our seats, it lies within their deep-rooted Germanity.
Don’t get us wrong: other than the Holocaust, one of the most tragic events in human history, we’ve got nothing against Germans. Call it our own cultural bias, but they come with a reputation: orderly, rule-abiding, efficient, calculated. There are others, but let’s focus: “German engineering” evokes images of people in lab coats and clipboards making sure that BMW has the precision to ensure US owners feel safe riding your ass as they try to make the left lane their own personal Autobahn. Precision doesn’t happen in the same emotion of wild abandon—the same traits that make great accountants feel antithetical to those that might embrace the swinger lifestyle. To be clear, we have no idea or judgment on how much Team Fix Oder Nix utilizes the pineapple emoji for their social agenda, but their very being evokes that level of contradiction.
Team Fix Oder Nix rolls up to R2AK 2022 with the experience and aptitude to beat the band. Half of their team built an Angus RowCruiser and custom trailer in 2016, so he could race in 2017. He had a ton of experience in east coast races (Everglades Challenges, etc.) but in a hat tip to the fatherland, he created a program based on experience and the challenge ahead. He even had sense enough to drop out in Campbell River before his rolling prototype took him into the wilder part of the course where rescue is even less of an option. He’d used it for a total of three days prior to it hitting the starting line. There were issues; he was smart. German smart. He dropped out.
In R2AK 2018, he finished—which is an accomplishment for a solo team on an 18-foot boat. To us, the most impressive part was when he figured out the return trip. Trailer in Port Townsend, how did he get his boat onto the ferry that would be his return ticket to the real world? “Two wheelbarrows and a hack saw” hardly does justice to the one-use-wonder, jerry-rigged trailer created with a credit card and the local hardware store, then hand wheeled to the ferry landing to take his boat the last mile/last 750 miles back to his car, but it’s a start.
All of this planning, all of this practicality—if you get past R2AK’s lack of rules, get past the folly, risk, and negative ROI from this entire endeavor, it strikes us as a Germanic and unspoken certainty that Joachim would return with a well-thought-out plan to do this whole thing again, but better. His solution is oddly American: more. More people, more waterline, more sails.
Rather than buy a solution off the rack, Team Fix Oder Nix donned their white coats then ciphered and built a whole new program. Their solution? A longer version of their last: a stretched Angus cruiser with an extra mast for another sail and another “coffin cabin” to sleep people bow and stern.
Who is the new crew? Nationality unknown, but effectively German by contradiction. Zoë matches Joachim’s precise contradiction with aplomb: “Our idea of a day well spent is hiking up a mountain with 30-lb paraglider backpacks then flinging ourselves off.” Apparently, Zoë has the Cape Cod record for paraglide flights in a single day (32). Beyond having a history of well-founded bad decisions, Zoë has also immersed herself, months at a time, in the austere extremes of the Senegalese bush, Nevada desert, and Brooklyn. Adventure cred to spare, while some mariners have nothing to prove in the R2AK’s watery throwdown, she might (or might not given the hardcore of this picture).
Welcome to the R2AK, Team Fix Oder Nix. New boat, new crew, and a whole Germanic tradition to uphold. All we hope is that we do better than the Romans.