Team members: Paul Pennoyer, Evan Pennoyer
Hometown: Essex, MA, USA
Race vessel: Balboa 20 Monohull
LOA: 20′
Human propulsion: Rowing
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TL;DR: Midlife crisis, organ rejection, bad math, body hair, and bowsprit envy.
We’ve been told that Race to Alaska has a bucket list sort of appeal, a thing you do to commemorate graduating college, pending nuptials, or descend a few rungs deeper into your midlife crisis—it’s not the pool boy, and it’s not a sports car, but it has a proven ability to fill the need for a “See, I’ve still got it” self-affirming, flailing declaration to the world as the gray creeps into your various hair areas.
From the goal to taste Ketchikan glory before graduating high school, to R2AKing to embrace and thrive into stage four’s final moments—we’ve seen it all, and in an off-brand moment of actual sincerity, we can say we are honored to be a part of all of them.
Team G-MA’s bucket list raison d’AK seems to stem from the bookend career moments that the father/son team finds themselves in. Evan (The younger) clocks in at 23 years and 6 foot 4 inches tall. He’s at the exact point of his career where he’s grown-upped and out of the outdoor industry—traded hiking boots and spray skirt, trail crew and kayak guide existence for a Brooks Brothers passport to a financial sector job. Solid move for a career with enough earning potential that you probably won’t eat cat food in your twilight years, but R2AKing at this moment in your professional progression has two potential outcomes:
- Organ rejection: Nature is great, cubicles suck, you’re back on trail maintenance within 6 months, running the R2AK by 2042.
- White knuckles: We’ll see you in 2042 for your Midlife Crisis.
Paul (The elder) arrives at R2AK’s starting line gazing back from the other side of a lifetime of toil. In his own words taken straight from his application:
“I just retired after 31 years of teaching—15 in New York City and 21 in Massachusetts.” For the youth of New England, we just hope he didn’t teach math.
15 + 21= 31 metric/Canadian years mathing up a rising generation and prepping for the entirety of British Columbia’s coast. Paul’s a licensed captain who has delivered boats up and down the east coast, kayaked for fun, and sired a son with sense enough to adventure and sell out early.
What do you do when you have all of your working life ahead of/behind you? Team G-MA’s equation: buy a boat sight unseen on the other side of the continent, take it to Alaska.
Add it up, carry the one, convert to Canadian, what could go wrong?
If we were to take a winger on a boat we’ve never seen, we’d stack our chips on pedigree too. Team G-MA bullseyed on a Lyle Hess-designed Balboa 20. Hess is an OG in the world of fiberglass production hulls, the Balboa 20 is the practical middle child of a designer turned legend by his fiberglass adaptations of the sailing workboats from jolly old England town. Hess is best known for a career of boat designs so sexy that they put the wood back in wooden boats… that are actually fiberglass. We all have our kinks, but look at his Bristol Channel Cutter and tell us that you wouldn’t swipe right on the bowsprit dimensions alone.
This ain’t that, and with a swing keel, rowable lightness, and a kickup rudder—Team G-MA’s Balboa 20 is among Hess’s more practical, less Freudian designs that was also reported as the one he personally used. Bowsprit be damned.
With a solid boat, and capabilities from both sides of the career horizon, welcome to the R2AK, Team G-MA. We’ve got no idea if your team name is your common initial and home state’s abbreviations, or you are paying homage to a thug of a Grandma.
In case it’s #2, the peanut brittle tribute is on its way.