Team members: Peter Allen
Hometown: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Race vessel: ONE SUP Unlimited
LOA: 17’6″
Human propulsion: Paddle
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You might think that the bravest person in the R2AK is the guy who enters on a stand-up paddleboard. You’d be wrong. The bravest person is our insurance guy.
In the anything-goes world of the R2AK, teams make compromises all the time; trading off speed for survivability, sacrificing human or wind power to optimize the other. Team SUP N Irish shatters that outdated way of thinking by sacrificing everything to optimize difficulty.
Boat to Alaska? Hard. Engineless? Harder. SUP? Bonkers.
If you are like our insurance guy, right after disbelief and adding a few zeros to our premium, next came questions:
How do you bring enough water? How do you sleep dry? How did one come to hate their feet enough to keep them wet and cold for 750 miles? Why would you choose something that sounds so miserable? Think of standing for a 750-mile bus trip, but in a pot of 50-degree water—sounds horrible, and you’re not even making the thing move. All of that, and barring a very specific kind of apocalypse that leaves paddleboards unaffected, there is zero chance of winning—but if he finishes, he will be only the second person to do so on a SUP.
Why?
Team SUP N Irish inspires the kind of awe unencumbered by envy, and isn’t arriving to the starting line uninformed. Peter Allen is a veteran of the 715KM Yukon River Quest (twice—because once wasn’t enough suffering) and SEVENTY48, R2AK’s trusty sidekick race. His feet know cold.
We planned a sit down with Team SUP N Irish over a bowl of maple-glazed Cheetos to talk about sailboats, rowboats, and other options he might not have heard about . . . but he’s still paddling his way over to us.
Welcome to the R2AK, Team SUP N Irish. We’ll have warm socks for you at the finish line.