Team Slowpoke

Team members: John Fisher, Tara Watkins, Kayla Markwardt, Eric Sorensen, Andy Jacobs, Sam Adair
Hometown: Seattle, WA, USA
Race vessel: Olson 25
LOA: 25′
Human propulsion: Pedal (Prop)
Connect: instagram

Six adults on a 25-foot boat is either a logistical masterstroke or a personality test designed to ensure failure. Team Slowpoke is prepared for it to be both. This crew is built on the “long, slow collision” of selective memory loss and unfinished business, composed of people who have spent years as R2AK volunteers, tracker hounds, and last-place finishers. They aren’t just a team; they are an Outward Bound faculty meeting that migrated onto an Olson 25 named Grey Dawn.

The headcount crept upward until six felt not just reasonable, but necessary—redundancy for pedaling, someone to cook, someone to sleep, and someone to get sick. It’s an approach that suggests significant experience and just enough imagination to be dangerous. They’ve spent years in the fine art of doing too many things at once in too little space, often while mildly hypothermic and negotiating with teenagers. That is a skill set useful almost nowhere else on Earth but here.

They likely won’t all meet as a full crew until just before the start, a fact that doesn’t seem to bother them. They’ve done some bad math and somehow figured out that ten knots of current is the aerodynamic equivalent of a 300-knot hurricane, yet they’re still going. Armed with 45 pounds of dehydrated mango and a collective refusal to know when to quit, Team Slowpoke is heading north to see how bad an idea can get before it becomes educational.

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First things first, why Race to Alaska?

Because it is the worst good idea we know.

Race to Alaska strips away the things that usually save you: engines, excuses, and the comforting illusion that someone else is in charge. What’s left is wind, muscle, tides, and a very personal relationship with your own bad decisions. That’s not a deterrent for us…..it’s the point.

What’s your team’s origin story?

Team Slowpoke did not form quickly, cleanly, or with anything resembling good judgment.

This team is the long, slow collision of unfinished business, selective memory loss, and people who should have known better finding each other anyway. It began years ago, with Eric standing safely on the sidelines as a spectator, Tracker fiend, Spam cook, video grabber and GoPro gofer, telling himself one day…… Andy was already out there in 2017, learning the hard way how fast the race can revoke permission to continue, when a surprise squall rerouted him into the San Juans and filed his dreams under “Try Again Later.” Tara actually finished the thing in 2022 with Sockeye Voyages, then promptly spent so much time on small, motorless boats that the memory of pain and fear slowly dissolved into something dangerously close to nostalgia.

Meanwhile, John had been quietly plotting. After hearing about the race pre-pandemic and then getting his teeth blown back in during the WA360, he retreated to Maine to learn how to sail without an engine at HIOBS. This was meant to be self-improvement. Instead, it resulted in meeting Kayla and Sam who had no connection to the race, no lived trauma from prior editions, and therefore no built-in resistance to joining a team attempting to row, pedal, and sail itself to Alaska.

Eventually, these trajectories crossed. Stories were told. Failures were shared. Finishes were celebrated. Warnings were ignored. What emerged was Team Slowpoke: a loose alliance of former volunteers, humbled returnees, proven finishers, and two wildly optimistic newcomers, bound together by the belief that coming in last “as long as you finish” still counts as a kind of victory.

We are the proud final finishers of the 2021 WA360 (FunWhileLost) and the 2022 Race to Alaska (Sockeye Voyages), carrying forward a proud and confusing legacy of dyslexic first-place finishes. Our origin story is not about winning.
It’s about coming back.

Luck/Skill Ratio
63:20

Friendship Survival Rate
42%