Team Boogie Barge

Team members: Blake Hansen, Craig Bartlett, Kian Flynn, Taylor Ffitch
Hometown: Tacoma, WA, USA
Race vessel: Pedal Powered Catamaran
LOA: 29′
Human propulsion: Pedal (Prop)
Connect: instagram

Boogie Barge keeps showing up mid-evolution.

Blake Hansen and crew have spent the better part of a decade rebuilding the same dumb idea across SEVENTY48, WA360, and R2AK: a human-powered boat that just…goes. The details change—new hulls, new pedal drives, new theories about sleep—but the elusive snowy-white-north-goal remains.

Sometimes it arrives with fresh epoxy still curing. This time it’s showing up with another stab at “sleeping coffins,” which is, by all accounts, an upgrade from their previous system: crouch-sleeping. Paint remains elusive.

They’ve proven enough to keep going. Last year, they took the top prize in WA360’s THE MUSCLE GROUP division, and earned the giant bronze belt and exactly zero dollars. In R2AK 2024, they made it a third of the course before breakdowns, illness, and sleep deprivation stacked up. They left early, convinced they had more in them and not enough time to show it. The Proving Ground started them off with a good lesson: structural integrity matters, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca suggests multiple passes on those welds.

Ride again, Boogie.

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First things first, why Race to Alaska?
We keep coming back for more. The goal is to not give up any more. We have been trying to solve this puzzle for most of a decade.

What’s the one piece of advice you’re absolutely going to ignore?
We need to ignore the many cruising hideaways in the broughtons where you can hang out on a dock and eat spot prawns. That was a slippery slope last time.

Confidence Level
75%

Night-Before Sleep (hh:mm)
-02:00