My trip to Alaska on an 18 foot catamaran

Posted by Joanna Ludlow

On June 4^th 2015 my good friend Phil and I set sail from Port Townsend Washington heading towards Victoria BC. We had decided to participate in the inaugural Race to Alaska in January and 6 months of constant prep had landed us exactly where we needed to be: on a very small boat wearing 8 layers of wool in the middle of the Strait of Georgia. What followed was 14 days of many “mosts” – most scared, most cold, most beautiful, most intense, most worthwhile.

Phil is an expert level sailor and was fresh from completing a single-handed trip from BC to Australia over the past year and a half. I had been sailing a handful of times and was still trying to decipher “port” from “starboard” when the race gun sounded.  I’m still grappling with exactly how to understand everything that happened on the trip so I’ll start with a few lists.

Things I learned about the ocean:

1. It’s cold
2. Whales are everywhere all the time
3. It does not care about boats or humans

Things I learned about sailing:

1. How to tie a Bowline knot
2. Sailing is scary
3. Wind is confusing

The race itself attracted an exciting group of people. One example of this came from about an hour before the race started in Port Townsend, I was chatting with another participant who was in the middle of stitching up a gash he had given himself on his hand. It looked like a painful process and surprisingly bloody but I thought I should watch in case I needed to stitch up Phil during the trip. 

The only two rules of the race were that the boat had to be motor-free – wind or human powered only – and you had to be self-supported. This meant that you couldn’t prearrange for a friend to drop off a hot meal along the way. The lack of rules made for a huge array of different craft at the start line. Everything from a single person kayak or a 6 person canoe to a number of 200k dollar trimarans were competing against each other, and every racer felt just as eligible for the prize money as the next. Our boat was an 18 foot catamaran. It was light, fast and extremely exposed. This certainly wasn’t the ideal craft when we were hit with northerly gales trying to run through Johnstone Strait. We ended up hiding out in a bay on Quadra Island for 4 nights waiting for the winds to die down.

To save on weight we didn’t bring any additional clothing and ate only a powdered meal replacement three times a day. We stopped in and filled up our water at any streams or small towns we saw along the way and loaded up on Snickers bars whenever we could to supplement our meals.

65 teams started in Port Townsend, Washington and in the end only 15 made it up to Alaska. We were number 8 to finish and the first boat in under 20 feet. We could not have been happier to even survive the trip let alone finish in the top 10. In short, we will never do this again but knowing what we know now we would certainly elect to do it the first time around.