Looking forward to improving skills and exploring shores with all of you again. Love seeing all the little boats about, especially the ones behind. Putting another paint coat on Alfred and tweaking the rigging so that may be possible. Tor is building a new fuel tank for Cygnus support boat and hopes to be done in time or I am beach camping. Sand flys & Mozys Yikes! Although Pats cooking & Peters Bread on the Rock will brighten us to endure any adversity I am sure.

We are looking forward to exploring new areas around Cortes Island and meeting up with old and new raid teams again. Heidi is sailing and Tor is on support boat Cygnus Crew.

My first “capital R” raid was the 2018 Barefoot, but I’d been working up to it all my life. Not very efficiently, however… I’m a little old guy, a complete weakling, with the smallest boat that is able to register (by ignoring its 1-inch shortfall of length requirement). A brainwave occurred at the last minute before that event… I convinced a very strong, and much younger, rower to jump ship and sign on with LUNA, which made the whole affair almost possible. Well actually, that adventure turned out to be so easy 😉 this year I’m raising the stakes, foregoing the unfair advantage of big burly Tim at the oars, and signing up my 125-lb wife (Filleting Queen, Chris) as crew. Watch out, you whippersnappers!!

LUNA is an almost 12′ long SCAMP, built in my single-car townhouse garage, that has taken me and my beloved (and occasionally other much-loved crew members) on the most amazing adventures from the Salish Seas to the Columbia River. Our most recent longish voyage was this year’s Salish 100, Olympia to Port Townsend… by sail and oar only.

Scott is an oceanographer-father based in Seattle who learned to sail on the reservoirs of Colorado. He’s cruised Puget Sound and the San Juans aboard a Wharram Tiki 21 with occasional forays into the Gulf Islands and Desolation Sound. Cora is his favorite child and is always better than her brother at everything. She has strengths in everything and her weaknesses include nothing. She made this entire site by herself with no help from anyone, including Scott.

Scott built Manuoku (a modified Hitia 17) with Thomas Nielsen for the 2015 Race to Alaska in part to continue exploring the crab claw sailing rig and pedal-powered boats. After getting beaten up by the Qualicum winds of Nanaimo, Manuoku had a great voyage as far north as Telegraph Cove. Of all the R2AK adventures on that trip, though, the most ecstatic moments were the short, competitive sub-races that developed by luck occasionally between a few small boats with like-minded sailing friends. We’re ready for more of that kind of joy. Manuoku competed in the inaugural 2018 “Seventy 48” human-power-only race (32nd out of 101) and Barefoot Raid in 2018 (4th, with 44 points).

Last year I participated in the Barefoot raid, sailing a “Melonseed”. Much to my chagrin, I learned that a fixed rig and tiny interior made for a frustrating raid. I bailed after the row from Lesquiti to Hornby with shame. Two days later I vowed to be ready for 2019! It was such a great experience meeting a really great group of people and sailing in such amazing environs that I had to “TriHardr” this time. So I built a boat over the winter, with a marginally larger interior …. and sails that have halyards! Please accept my humble application to do it right this time, I’ve been dreaming about the 2019 Barefoot raid for 363 days!

If Colin Angus designed a boat for the R2AK it should be good enough for me!

Heather and Dan have been sailing small wooden boats up and down the coast since 2003 and have been dinghy sailors since 1969. As participants in stages 1 and 2 of the 2015 R2AK, Heather and Dan decided they had better ways to spend the next 2-3 weeks of their summer than bashing into gale-force headwinds, and sensibly turned around and went downwind instead.

Built in 1971, theirs is a 16 foot, wooden Mirror dinghy. She was originally built by Bells in England and shipped to Boston where she was sailed, but then eventually wrecked on a breakwater. She was advertised for free in Wooden Boat and Dan rescued her and restored her. Since then we have re-framed and reskinned Mirror Mirror. She is lightweight, at only 200 lbs with plenty of sail area at 70 sq. ft,  plus a full spinnaker.

Team Loobern’s is based off Gabriola Island. Combing a former raid winner (Mitch) and a one-time raider (Lucas) in a raid winning boat (Barracuda). It’s lookin good.

Last year’s winner Barracuda is an 18-foot Mower Dory built by the Silva Bay Shipyard School in 2005-2006, the year Lucas was there. It was also his adversary in the 2009 Raid.

Robin seems to have a double Masters degree in beach culture / small boat flying. Tim likes the beach and is kinda fond of sailing. Their boat is a Tornado named “Cheese.”

Thomas describes himself as an “enthusiastic bicoastal year-round sailor.” His boat is a 1978 Hobie 16 called Smurfette — a FrankenHobie. He writes:

“I bought her off the original owner a few years ago. He had bought the boat with his first pay check as a logger in 1978. Smurfette was the second of 3 Hobie 16s I bought over the last 5 years and uses the best, or least worn out parts from those 3 boats. She is part of the Denman Hobie Fleet.” 

Long coming late addition to team Gaspe Cured came in the form of Troy Jungen; our Mountaineering Wandering Bear who loves nothing better than a little gentle foray into the great outdoors. New to the sport of sailing, when you climb mountains for breakfast, pulling a few lines in the afternoon then dinner with beach fire side revelry seems like a summer dream. We shall love it all.

“Red” Elhe and “The Dread” Tobi make up the fearsome crew aboard the Red Urchin, loaned to them by a kindly and well-meaning man who really shouldn’t be loaning his hand-built 17-foot gaff sloop to pirates. But, his loss is the Barefoot RAID’s gain!

Pirate Urchin’s Crew Bio: The Dread Tobi began her career in small boat sailing and piracy as a lowly Anchor Wench on a 25’ sloop through the Bahamas back to Toronto, in which she touched the tiller exactly 8 times in 5 months. Plotting mutiny while stewing an angelfish over the Coleman, she succeed in diverting the captain’s attention long enough to steer them into drug runners, a white shark, into reefs and onwards to Cuba. She hasn’t been welcomed on another man’s boat since. Returning to Gabriola, she badgered the owner of Golden Eye (14’ gaff “tent sailboat” by ) until he gave it to her for a song, and sailed her back to Whaler Bay to meet the boat’s maker, Greg Foster. She then wrested the Red Urchin from the hands of Rick Corless in order to put her competitive skills to the ultimate test in the RAID. She takes no prisoners, leaves only bones. 

When Gabriola was formed by rising sea beds of sedimentary rock 40 million years ago, it needed some… soul… and it needed to toughen up. In due time, as legend goes, a fierce pair of lady ballz appeared in the form of the red-hued glacier named Elhe. She scoured and battered our shores, and in her wake sculpted the sandstone into the unique shapes we admire today. The spirited Elhe went on to further adventures, winning renown in lands as far as Mongolia, where she was dragged by a horse and shrugged it off with some hooch and sea salt in the woodstove glow of a yurt. The honorary aboriginal name bestowed upon her is “Little Stinker”, as her vivacious charm is matched only by her deadly competitive streak.

The Red Urchin is a 17’ John Welsford Pathfinder, built by Rick Corless of Gabriola Island. Begun in 2007, he finished her in time for the 2018 Barefoot Raid. Pirates Red and Dread take her over to see if they can push Red Urchin to her limits and not break Rick’s beautiful boat.

Quill Goldman grew up on B.C’s coast and is a graduate of the Silva Bay Shipyard School, class 99/2000. Co-builder and co-skipper of the winning boat of the first Shipyard School Raid, Quill went on to compete in all of these early events. After ringing the bell in Ketchikan as the “final winner” in 2015, Quill determined to return Raiding to the Salish Sea. After cooking up a course and a set of rules designed specifically to favour his own boat, he set out to lure unsuspecting participants into this rigged spectacle. As the prehistoric holder of the Raiding trophy, Quill’s will be the boat to beat if you want to take this prize home.

“The Dick Smiley was the final winner of the first R2AK. Designed by Tad Roberts for Barefoot Wooden Boats. This was also the only purpose built boat to complete that year’s course. With a Kevlar set in Ecopoxy on ply bottom and lapstrake topsides, the Dick Smiley is a modern classic that turns heads, mostly for its lack of a transom. This boat sports Dyneema rigging and Mylar sails on a carbon mast, and has carbon fibre appendages sprouting from its trunnel fastened, lapstrake hull.”