Team members: Greg Pronko, Michele Sumpton
Hometown: San Francisco, CA, USA
Race vessel: Olson 25
LOA: 25′
Human propulsion: TBD
Connect: website, instagram, facebook
Greg has the energy of a guy who thinks sleep is a bureaucratic suggestion. Michele has offshore chops, a steady hand, and the increasingly important skill of managing whatever fresh nonsense Greg is engineering this week.
They met online, talking about sailing dreams, and that jumped pretty quickly into buying an Olson 25 and preparing to R2AK. Michele has been sailing since age three, raced everything from double-handed dinghies to Santa Cruz 50s, taught sailing for years, handled offshore gear failures mid-ocean, and kiteboarded across Brazil on 70-kilometer all-women downwinders. Greg spent his earlier years soloing mountains, building experimental boats out of recycled bottles, and surviving wilderness disasters that, to us, sound mildly fictional.
Together, they’ve turned Clean Sweep into a floating test platform for endurance, relationship dynamics, and late-stage “innovation”. Greg is deep into AI-assisted propulsion concepts and backup systems for the backup systems. Michele is focused on tides, weather, routing, and paper charts for when the electronics inevitably vaporize themselves somewhere north of Nowhere.
No Olson 25 has ever finished R2AK.
This year there are four. Three are double-handed. Which means an entire accidental class of underslept psychos are about to collectively discover whether caffeine, stubbornness, and semi-violent teamwork can overpower historical precedent.
The Race to Alaska Podcast
Episode 19: Team Sea Peas, Team Salish Seasters
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What’s the one piece of advice you’re absolutely going to ignore?
To use a pedal drive, and that there is no alternative. We will be engineering something different and it is either going to fail miserably or work, but we very well might be building a last-minute pedal drive in the wee hours of June 12th. Fingers crossed we can pull this off.
What’s the biggest unknown for you right now?
The course, the currents, the tides, the logs, generally everything about the race itself as we are 100% focused right now on getting registered and the boat ready. As for the planned route and overall plan, we might be winging it all at the last minute. As long as coffee, tea and chocolate is on board we will somehow make it work.
Confidence Level
92.8%
Duct Tape Fixes (Linear Feet)
82