Team Old Farts arrived in Ketchikan on Friday in the Ketchikan way: under a heavy, unrelenting gray faucet, thoroughly soaked, with a small crowd of family and friends watching them skid into Thomas Basin. They had big smiles, an un-broken boat, and dragging near the rudder, a commercial crab pot buoy they’d picked up somewhere in the previous seven hundred miles. Whether the trap was still attached remains a mystery, but there is a distinct possibility they accidentally poached their way across an international border.
Congratulations to Team Old Farts. Come back when you’re actually old.
In even wetter and considerably more exhausting news, the kayaks are nigh.
Only eight kayaks have ever finished this thing, and only six did it without a partner to share the misery. In 2023, paddling duo Teams Bella Bella and Beyond and Sporting Chance crossed the finish line together, resulting in a tie and proving that even after seven hundred miles of water-road-tripping together, humans are apparently still capable of friendship.
The math of paddling to Ketchikan is unpleasant: 529 hours from the starting gun to the Grim Sweeper finding The End, and roughly 700 miles of race course. That sounds like a leisurely 1.3 mph – until you subtract sleep, food-time, beach landings, hauling gear, cooking mush, waiting out weather, and spreading wet gear around so that later it can lie to you about being dry. The real math: 35–40 miles a day, 11–16 hours in the boat, for three weeks.
Which is what Team Let’s Wing It and Team Rainy have been doing, day after day, for eighteen days, putting in the miles with the consistency required to get to Alaska when the engine is you.
Both have been moving north exactly the way this thing needs to be done by paddle: consistently, determinedly, and, whenever spotted on course, looking pretty damn chill.
Further back, Team Laughing Roomba (Rod and Haleigh) are occupying the space some people call last place, though a better description is that they are the ones still out there playing the game while the referee is actively driving toward them in a motorized chase boat.
Laughing Roomba was the final team to clear Cape Caution. They knew the Grim Sweeper was behind them, close enough that if the wind shifted, they could probably smell its administrative exhaust. Plenty of teams in that position look at the map and choose the sensible exit: cross over to Port Hardy, buy a coffee that wasn’t filtered through a spare sock, and rejoin a society that still remembers their names. Rod and Haleigh looked at that door and closed it, turning north into the empty, complicated wilderness with a deadline breathing down their necks.
HIGH COMMAND hopes to chat with them as they pass through the narrow band of 5G around Bella Bella and find out exactly what the hell their lives have been like. Somewhere behind them is a motorboat whose entire purpose is to tell them they’re done. Roomba appears to disagree.
Header Photo by: Lynnette Oostmeyer | Gallery Photos by: Elleyna Thompson