Last night, Team Northbound Nutters won the 2026 Race to Alaska.
Perhaps the least surprising thing to ever happen in R2AK: The big yellow trimaran was the boat to beat from the start, but that shouldn’t take anything away from the way they sailed. Captain Nige Oswald, Michael Holt, Gavin Brackett, and Rob Woelfel finished in 5 days, 8 hours, and 4 minutes, putting together a race that was as smart as it was fast.
What stood out wasn’t just the speed. Nutters made two full stops along the way, one in Campbell River and another in Port Hardy. Later, they spent time drifting roughly 40 miles offshore while making repairs before getting underway again. In a race that often rewards relentless forward motion, they showed that sometimes it pays to stop, regroup, and wait for the right moment. Then, when the time came, they unleashed the trimaran equivalent of a cheetah being fired from a t-shirt cannon.
Congratulations, Nutters. We’ll work on finding you some competition. Possibly in a complimentary color.
Meanwhile, the ghost of the Proving Ground appears to have realized it didn’t do its job when it had the chance and decided to make up for lost time.
Yesterday delivered a remarkable amount of boat disintegration between breakfast and dinner:
The headline incident was Team Wet Leg’s dismasting. Wet Leg had spent most of the race looking like the clear favorite for the sharpest prize in R2AK—the steak knives. Somewhere roughly 30 miles offshore of Aristazabal Island, however, their mast decided it no longer wished to participate in the vertical plane.
Details remain limited. The official summary, based on radio traffic and satellite messages, appears to be:
“We broke some stuff.”
“Do you need assistance?”
“No.”
Followed shortly thereafter by:
“We have created a highly questionable replacement rig and are proceeding heroically.”
As of Tuesday morning, they appear to be making good on that promise while working their way back toward Bella Bella. Their tracker suggests the final miles may have involved assistance from a towline, and we just received a magnificent photo proving it: showing them attached to a Coast Guard vessel so large it looked like it was walking a very small, broken dog.
Team Back on Port has officially reached the bargaining stage of grief and as they dropped out, announced they’re willing to sell their boat for five dollars and a bottle of “good” whiskey. This represents significant inflation over Team O Race’s Proving Ground exit price of two dollars and a bottle of wine. The marine economy remains strong.
Team Boomerang: While battling up Johnstone Strait, an alarming creaking began emanating from the starboard chainplates—those critically important bits that keep the mast attached to the boat instead of adjacent to it. Preferring their rig upright, they turned around and headed back.
See? Boomerang.
Because they come back.
Team Desert Drifters suffered a blown mainsail and retired into Browns Bay, where they pursued the traditional maritime recovery protocol of obtaining a hamburger.
Meanwhile, Team Death Warrant, aboard a catamaran that continues to prompt the question, “what exactly is that?” determined that what exactly it is is a boat that does not especially enjoy sailing upwind. With 50-degree tacking angles, they looked ahead at approximately two billion remaining miles of race course and concluded there were better ways to spend the summer than methodically introducing their heads to the same wall.
And then there was French Connection.
French Connection caught fire.
Not all of it. Just a little bit of it.
The electrical system attempted a brief audition for a disaster movie, and their main halyard also failed because misfortune travels in packs. They will not be continuing. Captain Nicholas already has intentions to return in 2028, potentially joining forces with Ghislain from 2024’s Team Narrows Minded. Possible team names currently under consideration include French Minded, Narrows Connection, or something in actual French that we will use Google Translate to understand.
As for the race within the race, the steak knife battle remains very much alive.
Teams Celerity and Pa Si Vite continue trading blows up the coast, with Pa Si Vite sitting just behind and refusing to go away. The gap is small enough to keep everyone interested and large enough to keep everyone nervous.
Northbound Nutters may have finished the race, but the Race to Alaska is nowhere near finished. There are still more than fifty teams out there threading channels, breaking things, fixing things, and making decisions all across the spectrum of “good/bad.”
Header photo by Ryder Booth | Video by Taylor Bayly