Team members: Liam Burke, Robert McMullen, Graham Cornwell, Kelsey Breseman, Rick Breseman
Hometown: Normandy Park, WA, USA
Race vessel: C&C 25 Mark 1
LOA: 25′ 2″
Human propulsion: Two pedal stations
TL;DR: Legal weed, life support Cheetos, roaring adventure lives, Rwandan backpacking, beep boop beep, predictive soggy puppy piles.
If we were smarter and better funded, we’d make these things multimedia.
No idea how it would work, but stick with us: it should involve sound. While the word monkeys who write these things tapped away in the corner, we’d send the DJ/sound people digging in the crates; looking for the perfect groove to serve as the sonic haiku for each team; distilling the essence of each team into a single sound that transcended language; whose vibrations created resonant consciousness and the team’s sonic avatar could sync chakras with your higher soul in a glorious yin/yang/yoni consummation of energetic unification that transcends divine.
What can we say? Weed’s legal now.
Descending back into the physical plane and the back half of these Cheetos, the kernel of whatever all of that was still stands: if teams had sounds as their bios, the sound essence of Team Rho Your Boat would be a mashup of the collective battle cry of the Braveheart army charge with the “beep boop beep” of 1960’s sci-fi computers.
Unpacking the part of that that’s worth unpacking, let’s start with the Braveheart, shield clanging “They can take our lives, but they cannot take OUR FREEDOM!” that is Team Rho Your Boat. Some teams are technicians, highly calibrated with piston timing and valve clearance so precise that they can go from 0 to Adventure in 2.9 seconds. Team Rho Your Boat has the other kind of energy; the amps to 11, push the gas pedal through the floor, strap a jet pack to your other jet pack, “more is more” credo that doesn’t collect all the merit badges but roars through the scout meeting with double strapped jet packs blazing.
R2AK attracts the experienced and talented with frequency. We’ve had national champions, Olympic medalists, we even had the first guy to circumnavigate the earth under human power. At this point, our bullshit meter is as honed as our wonderment is calloused. We don’t impress easily. Reading the roar of Team Rho Your Boat’s collective accomplishments turned us from hard boiled skeptics into screaming fans of the latest boy band.
The normal stuff quickly descended deep into the wells of “Are you effing serious?”: collegiate sailing, kayaking and sailing in Washington waters, WA360, Tough Mudder, thousands of ocean miles, adventure travel through Rwanda, globally ranked orienteering competitors, annual off-grid survival trips in the Alaskan wilderness, backpacking the breadth of Iceland and the length of Chile, and the topper: solo run from Astoria to Chichigof Island in a 16-foot open boat, then repeated the same trip, 40 years later, in an 18 footer.
That’s like 1200 miles, some of it open ocean, in a tiny open boat, at least 40 years before we thought 750 was tough enough to commemorate with steak knives and a souvenir t-shirt. Then they did it again 40 years after it was a bad idea the first time.
60s sci-fi beep boop beep? On top of all that adventure roar, at least three of them are mechanical engineers. That means their systems are dialed. Their pedal drives are custom designed and fabricated, the first that we know to be mounted off the sides of the boat, a side-wheeler designed to be deployed and stowed rapidly. They even had the audacity/foresight/prudence to test them extensively before race day. (Honestly, seems like cheating compared to standard issue R2AK yahoo.) All of that prep and organized, our guess is they have one of those tool kits that is all tidy; unmarred, name brand tools all labeled and snugged into the right part of the clear plastic organizer.
Beep. Boop. Beep.
Team Rho Your Boat’s adventure wagon is a C&C 25, a modest racer cruiser with less waterline than the combined height of the five souls aboard, and we can say that with confidence without actually knowing how tall they are. Five grown adults, all their gear and food for 750 miles to Alaska on a 25-foot racer/cruiser of mid-seventies vintage? Their plan? Go nonstop, “hot bunking” by sleeping in shifts in the limited space. Plan B? Best guess: Mustang suit puppy pile.
Welcome to the R2AK, Team Rho Your Boat. Adventure cred + engineering nerdery, if your boat wasn’t the maritime embodiment of humility, you’d probably be intolerable.