For three weeks, Team Let’s Wing It and Team Rainy have existed for the civilized world as two boat-shaped clusters of pixels on a screen. Every morning emerging from another knot of islands, every evening dissolving back into some anonymous cove, and almost always within a pixel of each other. If you spent your days staring at the tracker (and judging by the lights flickering in the servers room, a huge number of you did it was easy to forget they had skin.
Yesterday, they became people again.
Martin and Yota banged their hulls into the Ketchikan dock after twenty days of continuous, low-grade suffering, becoming the first kayak finishers of the 2026 Race to Alaska. They are also the first racers to reach the Finish Line dock by kayak since 2023. In 2024, the Inside Passage allowed exactly zero human powered teams to finish, and although the coast wasn’t feeling much more charitable this year, its efforts to stop these two failed.
Early in the race there was a question: were they going to stick together the whole time?
Martin possesses the deeper racing résumé, and facts being what they are, most people expected him to be the faster paddler. Including Martin. Including Yota. Eventually, Martin decided to verify the hypothesis. On his longest day of the race—a 102-kilometer grind from Newcastle Island to Comox—he pulled ahead in a way that looked a lot like a farewell. But Yota wasn’t interested in watching his paddling partner shrink into a speck on the horizon. He dug in, hunted Martin down, and caught him at Brown’s Bay just north of Seymour Narrows. From that point till the end, their paces were locked in a mutual hostage situation.
Now that he’s arrived, Yota is planning to turn his kayak around and paddle the 80-something miles back to Prince Rupert. We believe kayaking home after finishing is an R2AK first.
The race has completed its biennial shape-shift into the only chase where nobody can actually see the thing doing the chasing. Four teams continue fleeing the Grim: Team Belly Full of Tea, Team Notes, Team Lillian Signed Up To Suffer, and Team Apple Bottom Boy.
The tracker will tell you exactly where they are at any given moment, their speed to the decimal point, where they shivered last night, and how many miles of cold water remain. What it won’t tell you is the exact location of the Grim Sweeper, as much as all of you beg for that to happen. Yesterday, the sweep boat cleared Bella Bella, ending Team Laughing Roomba’s official race. They are continuing toward Ketchikan anyway, because getting swept and finishing the journey aren’t mutually exclusive.
Race High Command hasn’t heard much from the remaining four lately: they are entirely occupied with the business of moving water with sticks. The only transmission we managed to pry out of Lillian was brief: “Maybe I’ll just chill here and watch Netflix for a couple days.” We think that’s a joke.
Somewhere in that scattered group, Eric Strickler continues to chase a finish that would make Eric only the second person ever to complete R2AK on a stand-up paddleboard, following Karl Kruger’s (Team Heart of Gold) run in 2017. The board beneath Eric’s feet has attempted this twice before, having been paddled north by Team SUP N Irish in both 2023 and 2024. The board has a lot of miles on it, but it has yet to see Ketchikan.
Three days remain before the broom falls. The race continues. So does the Grim Sweeper.
Header photo by Sam Parmett | Video by Garret Weintrob