The lighthouse at Point Wilson is just the sort of lighthouse a lighthouse should be.
White walls. Red roof. Standing out at the end of a finger of sand beyond a handful of wind-tortured trees suggesting all manner of unpleasantness. On nasty days it’s gray and cold and wet. The wind howls. Sea foam and macerated bits of microplastic leap upward toward the windows. People in the light room (or whatever you call the place with the bright thing) have front-row seats to a long history of R2AK vessels plodding, crawling, and praying their way past the tidal rips just offshore. The place looks like it was built specifically so sailors could point at it and say, “Yeah. That’s where everything went to hell.”
The rips around Point Wilson have inspired terror in the minds of racers—some for weeks, some for months, some for years.
The funny thing about anticipation is that it never sits still. Given enough time it grows. You start by wondering whether you can make it to Ketchikan. A few months later you’re studying current tables. A few months after that you’re mentally surfing eight-foot rollers through the Potato Patch while simultaneously fighting off hypothermia, sleep deprivation, equipment failure, and whatever other horrors your imagination can manufacture during a February evening spent googling.
The race grows and grows until it becomes something that exists almost entirely in the mind.
Tomorrow’s forecast is doing a remarkable job of convincing people that the Proving Ground has gone soft. Sunny. Light wind.
What the teams may discover, however, is that nasty breaking seas is only one of the PG’s arsenal. With a full-on June Heat Advisory in effect, and twice the sunny rays cooking each racer from two angles as they bounce off the mirrored waters, competitors may discover that their hydration plan until this point has been “water exists,” that their nutrition plan is “I’ll probably eat something,” and that spending the last six months optimizing a foil shape does not actually help when you’re cramping up, mid-crossing, with nowhere to run.
More than one competitor casually bragged about having spent more time designing a propulsion system than actually using it.
There are teams arriving at the starting line with aerospace-grade opinions about mechanical efficiency and remarkably little seat time. After six months of debating the optimal shape of a propeller, tomorrow may present an opportunity to discover that the Strait of Juan de Fuca remains inconveniently wide regardless of how elegant that CAD file turned out.
Early tomorrow morning the horns will sound and the fleet will point north. The race that has existed for months in charts, podcasts, weather models, spreadsheets, sea stories, tracker replays, and imagination will give way to the real thing.
Didja miss us, Ketchikan? Here we come.
Header Photo by Taylor Bayly Video by Garret Weintrob