R2AK 2026 - Agile Racing

Sunny days. Chatting, strategizing, enjoying a smooth sail. Probably some tea or coffee in our tumblers. When things got cold a great and effective way to warm up was a nice cup o'.

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It took a few weeks to recover and now that the boat is cleaned up, fixed up and ready to be shipped, I’m looking back at photos and videos and am reliving much of the emotions and experiences along the way.

So many people and companies came together to help us to make this adventure a success. When it came to our freeze dried meals, we needed food that not only supplied the necessary nutrition, it also had to taste great. Penny and her team at Westcoast Kitchen supplied meals that fit the bill to a T. They were easy to prepare and we really liked the double sized portion as we could cook for two in one bag. Gotta admit, the Chili sold out fast as did the West Coasters.
Westcoast Kitchen can be found right here on Vancouver Island where they grow many of the ingredients used in their meals on their own farm. Talk about “Farm to Galley”.! Thanks you so much to Penny and her most amazing staff. Richard, Cooper and myself are grateful for your support.

Be sure to look for Westcoast Kitchen meals at your local outdoor outfitters or order direct online at https://www.westcoastkitchen.ca/.

Exhaustion. That's it. We took any rare moments of calm that we could get to rest our muscles and eyes. Here's Richard sleeping on deck while Dave sleeps below.

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They say the is a upwind - downwind race. We'd argue it's an upwind race. Here's us putting away a spinnaker bag that was placed in a ready position due to some wishful thinking. It always seemed like the mornings we'd think we were getting some good light winds from a Southerly direction. And it always seemed by ~11am they'd be howling in from the North.

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It wasn't all hell and high water. Here's the guys peddling through a dense fog. This was after anchoring for the night before making our rounding of Cape Caution the next day. The lack of wind provided a nice bit of warmth for us as we exercised our way slowly through the pea soup.

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After sailing through the night from Bella Bella to get to Laredo sound this is the start of an awesome almost 18 hour downwind run. We were pretty tired so just sailing under headsail. Unfortunately though it was also the start of what was about 24 hours straight of rain.

"Good thing you had rain gear"... When it rains like that non-stop and you have no shelter it's destined to soak through to the core. 24 hours of rain also meant no sunshine for our solar panels. So at the end of this run right about 3/4 way through the Principe Channel and north end of Banks Island we ran out of battery power and lost our GPS and lights. Again. Thankfully we were near the Hecate Strait which is wide open deep water and we could navigate via compass North the remaining miles to Ketchikan.

Did we mention this is the part we started collecting rain water to drink as well?

Fun times.

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Finally got access to some of the gopro footage, limited it was because of our power issues. If I'm remembering correctly this is filmed in the Queen Charlotte Strait just after exiting Johnstone Strait. We were heading east to get cloes to shore.

Funny enough in the pristine wilderness that we were in one of the most shocking events of the trip was hearing a massive explosion somewhere in the distance. We assume it was a mining operation in Northern BC.

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