Team members: Lillian Kuehl
Hometown: Port Angeles, WA, USA
Race vessel: Chesapeake Light Craft Expedition Wherry
LOA: 18′ 3″
Human propulsion: Oars
Connect: website, facebook, youtube
TL;DR: If you want to be impressed, read this one. If you’re looking for funny, read another one.
Are you ready for a secret?
If we were to create a pie chart depicting the portion of these bios designed to be serious vs the portions setting up a punchline, it would look like an untouched pie, and likely one heading for a face.
Wakka Wakka.
Teasing out the essence of a team through folly and loving ridicule is where we live and breathe. Half of the random stuff that ends up in these things are us ricocheting around our own heads until we find something funny and somehow related to whatever team is in front of us. Being clear: funny to us, hopefully to some other folks, ideally/possibly the team. Each team is its own Rubix cube of potential funny that we twist and turn until all of those random dots line up and a chicken crosses a road.
…and then Team Interstice, the most punchline-proof team ever to roll 2AK.
Let’s start with her experience. In Northwest Maritime Center Adventure Races alone, she’s competed and completed two SEVENTY48s, one Race to Alaska, and 100% of the WA360s ever run—famously breaking from the rest of the pack, rowing down Hood Canal, then portaging for a couple of miles (that’s right, crossing a road. Why, you ask? No idea. See above note about lack of punchlines) before continuing on to Olympia. This year she’s doing the SEVENTY48 and then Racing to Alaska a day later. That’s no-nonsense, potentially ill advisable, but no nonsense. She comes from a family of marine trades professionals and just started her own marine trades business in spring of 2022.
You know what’s never funny?
Joking about women breaking barriers in non-traditional trades.
Her boat: super unfunny. She built it, in her living room, this spring, in like 5 days or some similarly amazingly short amount of time. A meticulously crafted Chesapeake Light Craft Expedition Wherry, 18 feet of boat, 5’10” of person, all of the miles to Ketchikan under muscle power alone with someone with the right skills, experience, and training to do it.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Absolutely nothing funny.
The inspiring cherry atop of this punchline-free pile of incredible:
“I’m trying to leap beyond my social nervousness and use my trip to bring public attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, so that more resources go to bringing them home and bringing their killers to justice.”
You know what you don’t make jokes about? Any of that.
Welcome to the R2AK, Team Interstice. Thanks for being here… and we’ll just leave it at that.