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To get a sense of my favorite skipper's 2026 Everglades Challenge, you could just watch this video clip from Nate "Natedog" Villardebo on repeat for 94 hours, 8 minutes, and 22 seconds. And a glorious sunshiney adventure it would be. You could alternate with the following video from Jahn Moresailesaid's pre-race delivery to Fort DeSoto for a little variety on the 327.07 miles.
Plus we severely under-packed electrons. The water ballast tanks, which help keep Zygote hiked flat against the wind and allow the carbon-fiber creature to move like a scalded cat are powered by a nifty Lithium battery that fainted on day 3. Which meant that my favorite skipper, TwoBeers, was obliged to sail at turtle pace. Likewise, the repowering packs for his phone, GPS, etc. gave him their best efforts and then said, "Go on without me, Comrade." Still, TwoBeers had only just finished building Zygote, and his stated ambition was to simply get the boat from St. Pete Beach to Key Largo.
At the risk of encyclopediaing this trip, TwoBeers' adventure went a bit like this:  Spotting Andyman and Natedog coming in Rabbit Pass, TwoBeers paused on his way out of Check Point 2 by Chocko Island so he could buddy-sail with them. Was he short of navigation? I ask. Nope, the tablet AND the Garmin were operational. He just wanted to hang out? Yeah. Plus Andyman lent him his extra paddle, since of course the pedal drive had busted 13 hours into the adventure. As it turned out, that nice long kayak paddle, a back-up to the pedal-drive, was still in the van. Oops.  Andyman and Natedog highlighted in red because their tracker lost track for a bit... The two boats, plus Crazyrussian on a catamaran, leapfrogged their way together all the way to Check Point 3. On the RaceOwl site, the three boat names often covered one another, nestled like spoons on the virtual map.  Watching from shore, I saw a distinct cowlick as the wind shifted and swirled just shy of the Cape Sables, and I imagined it was going to be an unpleasant sail through it. Gusty conditions (to 59 mph!) possible. I texted my intel. It's one of the nice things about this race, you can call or text or send smoke signals during the event.  I was, sadly, right about the cowlick. "Every time the place I wanted to go was 45 degrees off the bow, the wind came around on the nose. And piped up." "I went right up to shore at the capes," Jeff said. "The waves were so much less awful in there, but I had to short tack over and over. I can't wait to see my track. It must be 90 tacks I made." "Yeah," Andyman said. "It was so gorgeous for a while, and then it wasn't."  Zygote made it to the entrance to Flamingo, Check Point 3, first of the three, but did not enter the tiny pass. His tracking dot paused. I figured he was waiting for a favorable tide. So when I woke up at 5 to see he'd moved, but not very far, I was a little concerned. Maybe his anchor dragged, I thought. Then at 6 his dot was crawling again, only it seemed erratic. Hmmmm. At 630, I was actively worried. Twobeers appeared to be sailing AWAY from the checkpoint. Lack of sleep can do terrible things to a person. Not just to the racer, but to the ground control as well, to be honest. At quarter to 7, I did the thing: I called the Checkpoint captain at Flamingo. Hi, I said, hey, I'm a little concerned about TwoBeers. Could they see him? I was worried that my skipper might be losing his ever loving mind. I think I actually used that phrase, a nod maybe to Bones on classic Star Trek. Gil at Flamingo assured me that I was doing the right thing by calling. It was, he told me gently, too dark for him to see anything (damn Daylight Savings Time), but that he'd take a look as soon as he could. As we talked, Jeff's tiny blip on the map turned around and started creeping toward to Flamingo.  45 minutes later, an unknown number called: Gil made Jeff talk to me to assure me that he was compos mentis. My skipper sounded cheerful and still determined to get to the finish. Tom Ray, bless his photographer's eye, posted a lovely proof-of-life photo on Facebook. To the Finish Tuesday to Wednesday morning From Flamingo, the wind was out of the northeast at around 7, making it a beamy reach, and while both Andyman and Jeff tried for the eastern route, there just wasn't enough water. Being short on navigation power, Twobeers decided to shadow Andyman. They faffed around for a bit and then pointed their boats along the conservative southern route across Florida Bay.  Sailorking and Possum at the finish! SailorKing and Possum, leaving Flamingo at the same time, did not faff around, having already decided on the southern route. As Jeff said, "They slaughtered us." Without water in the ballast tanks, Zygote struggled to stay upright once the breeze gets up over 10. This is a fact that the boat had made abundantly clear to Jeff, but was much less obvious to his buddies Andyman and Natedog aboard their Highlander, Bubbles Up. Why was Jeff going so slow? What was wrong with him? A flurry of text messages ensued as the two boats poked across Florida Bay. Andyman and Natedog did not like the look of things. They were going to hover around Zygote. They told Jeff to anchor up, hop onto their boat, and come back to finish after a rest on shore. Jeff eventually demonstrated the ballast issue, filling a tank by hand while Andyman held the bowsprit of Zygote on the stern of Bubbles Up. With a full tank, Zygote headed off like a bolting quarter-horse, but, alas, had to dump ballast to tack and resumed moving at a glacial pace. So the two traveled as a caravan for a while, the sun slowly sinking in the west. At 8:45, as Bubbles Up nipped through the cut at Toilet Seat pass, Zygote missed the cut and ran solidly aground. Andy hopped off his boat and came over to help push Zygote off the bank, but to no avail. The tide was rushing out.  Like Max Smart says, "Missed it by THAT much." On shore later, TwoBeers admits he suspected that his friends had deliberately put him on the hard. They swear it was a mistake. In any case, the options were few as the stars came out and the tide continued to ebb away. Jeff waved his friends along, left me a voice mail, got out his MRE and prepared for a hot meal before settling into his sleeping bag. He was asleep before he could finish preparing his "Beans and Chili." At five, I woke to the muted ping of a message on my phone: Jeff was on the move. It was only 8 miles or so from Toilet Seat to the finish. I was really happy to punt on the variety of rescue mission measures I'd been cooking up with Jeff's bevy of friends: Moresailesaid's call for Bob's inflatable to be deployed, Steve's offer to zip down to Marathon and maybe borrow a boat, DSea's suggestion of sailing one of the EC boats down to Toilet Seat and assess my favorite skipper's acuity, etc. etc. Meanwhile, Zygote was enjoying the light morning breeze, sliding northeast up the Florida Keys. I tracked the little dot as it came through Baker Cut into Buttonwood sound, and then...kept going. Good lord, I thought, is he going to Gilbertson's for a breakfast burrito?  I called him, and he answered, chipper as a cricket. Hey babe, I said, are you going to tack? What, he said. I can see you and you're going past the finish. I'm coming up on marker —is it 92? I'm like 20 miles out. You aren't. The boys said I was. Well, I said, I promise you are not. Are you on starboard, with both blue sails up? Ye-esss. Okay, I'm looking RIGHT at you. You need to check over your shoulder at the black schooner and the big cell phone tower. Pause. Oh, yeah. I'll be right there.  Zygote landed at quarter after 8 on Wednesday, to a chorus of cheers and bleary fist-pumps. The assessment from nearly every finisher: this EC might have been the hardest one they remember. I concur. Thanks to everyone for the phone calls and messages of support and congratulations for Twobeers! It never fails to amaze me. We are fortunate beyond words.
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 North Atlantic Ocean, FLORIDA? Really? While my favorite skipper, TwoBeers, is on his single-handed adventure race down the west coast of Florida, I have some time to reflect and, more importantly, observe. That's actually the essence of shore crew: we watch. And get ready to deploy whatever needs deploying.  Saturday, Day 1: The Everglades Challenge started this morning (well, it started years ago, but this year's race began today at Fort DeSoto Beach), which means that — what day is it? Saturday? STILL? — I have a few chores to squeeze in between checking on my racing friends. For instance, our building contractor (addition to the house. Long story. No, I don't know when it will be done.) told me I needed to visit a certain restaurant and, let me quote: "Check out the tiles in the men's room. I think they are exactly what you want." I have been known to invade these boyish strongholds, sometimes as a lark, more often by mistake, a few times out of expedience. The taboo is strong, but it's not unbreakable. So alrighty then.  I betook myself to the busy restaurant, ordered some soup to go, and after casing the establishment and gauging lines-of-sight, I told the counter staff about my quest. They laughed and said, it's the same tile in the women's. Saved from sketchy lurkage, I visited the tile and crossed one thing off my list. Later, hunched over my bowl of açaí sorbet (you don't know what you are missing), I wrote a blog about the start, and then idly hit refresh on the tracking sites for a while before embarking on the second round of packing: This Time It's Overland. Clothes for me, clothes for Jeff—not forgetting shoes for himself, because THAT's a rookie move—the food I'd rather not rebuy for the next few days, beverages, blah blah. The usual accoutrements of a family vacation, plus the supportive gear for the boat trailer (a recent Facebook marketplace deal, which means also a bit of a wildcard in terms of roadworthiness) and our matronly creeper van.  On the race tracker, the gang of boats went from one big blob of overlapped names to a slightly more stretched out list: as one might expect, a couple of catamarans worked to the lead early, with Spawn (Go Moresailesaid! Go DSea!) right there in the mix. Not too far behind, Zygote was hanging tough, and as the breeze faded, on came the paddlers. The race is unique in many ways, though the idea of racing a 20-foot-long beach catamaran against a racing kayak against a roto-molded trimaran against a...well, it boggles the mind. No, there is no handicapping. It's a mad dash. Anyone can win the event overall, though each boat is also scored in its division. At ten at night, with the first couple of boats tagging Check Point 1, I got a text from Jeff. His tracker placed him near Stump Pass. "A f#@$ the pedal drive broke." Another unique aspect of this event is that you can double up your propulsion: sailing and rowing, for example. Plus, you can pump and ooch and scull, all of which is frowned upon in traditional sailing competitions. Zygote was built for solo sailing, and since rowing presents a real navigational conundrum (where are we heading?), Jeff worked rather hard on installing a pedal drive. It's a nifty contraption, with a belt (not chain), and a flexible driveshaft, and a two-blade propeller. He pedals while sitting on an inflatable seat, giving himself a magisterial view of the horizon ahead, as well as extra boat speed that helps when needed. It worked great, until, evidently it did not.  Still he looked pretty cheerful as he checked into Check Point 1. Sunday, Day 2: Oooh! bonus! Daylight Savings Time. Suddenly it's dark at 7 in the morning. Sarcastic enthusiasm! It's a drive to Key Largo, and the traffic is only going to get worse. Mid coffee-brew, I get a text from my good neighbors with a photo. Somebody is dumpster-diving at the construction site, they thought I should know.
Wrestling with the boat-trailer, I consider the long history of scrappers: rag and bone men, mudlarks, people who recycle cooking oil for car fuel. It's a respectable if not very respected job that does good in the world. Before driving his overladen truck to the next spot, the scrapper introduces himself as Keith and we part company maybe both reassured by our shared humanity.  Messages start dinging on my phone before I reach to the highway. I do the thing where you look at your phone at a red light and decide whether anyone needs a real answer or if they can wait until I stop to check the hubs of the trailer. They can wait till I can check the hubs. It's an uneventful drive, mercifully. Almost no maniacal driving incidents (I did avoid Miami, which helps my odds), and the forest fires from last week were extinguished, perhaps by the rain from last night. Navigating by intuition: even though I really enjoy the southern old Route 41 trip across the Everglades, randomly (is it? is it ever random? Is it the Burnt Toast Theory?) found myself tootling along 75 Alligator Alley. A gorgeous day, and the hubs of the trailer stayed out of the hot zone. Yay! It's such a relief to get to the aqua road dividers of the Overseas Highway. I've gawked at 4-foot-long iguanas basking along this stretch into the Keys, but thanks to the recent cold snap, and perhaps to my better driving impulses, I don't spot a single one. Jeff calls as I'm passing Gilbertson's Resort asking me about the timing of the tides at Caxambas Pass and Indian Key Pass. Another unique feature of the event: outside communication is permitted, even welcomed. We can't meet them and resupply the racers, but we can talk to them about the weather et cetera.  I send him the tide info from the safety of a parking lot and then joyfully make my way to Jim and Cheryl's house, where I stow the Marketplace trailer, bless its twenty-ton heart. Anchored for the night at the quirky little resort, I find some supper with race mom Paula Paddledancer, and sleep the naps of the righteous. Each time I wake, I fumble for reading glasses and my screen to check on my favorite skipper and the host of other ducklings out on the water. Monday, Day 3: Overnight, Jeff has had a good sleep in the boat outside Indian Key pass, waiting for the right tide to help him into Chocko. After he STILL had not pressed his okay button when I woke at 230, I just called him. What a pleasant surprise to have him pick up on the first ring with his usual greeting. Clearly sleepy, but cheerful and moving about, my sweet TwoBeers is ready to chat. Normally (based on a dozen previous Challenges), Jeff is judicious in how much of the adventure he shares with me. Considerate of my worries, he might only later dribble out the alarming tale of how this bad thing happened, or how he managed to snatch safety from certain danger. So when he says, yeah, I tacked once with the ballast tank half full. I suppress my natural expression of alarm. The boat did great, he announces, it heeled to a point — and there I am on the high side! — but then it stopped. Good design. I don't even ask how he un-buggered that situation. Then he mentions how much water he pumped out of the hull. He pumped until he got tired and there was still water in there. The boat was feeling sluggish, he tells me, and going downwind, he caught the first water over the bow. I hold my tongue. We know there's a leak. It wasn't much of a leak, according to his pre-race discussion. I'd held back from nagging him yesterday about checking on it. To set the scene, when TwoBeers says he stopped bailing before the boat was empty because he was tired, that's — a thing. There's not a lot of quit in the man. I take a deep, calming breath: I'll be sure to remind you to pump it out, I say. Yeah, he says, good idea. Then he narrates through what he calls a "twirlybird death spin," when Zygote doesn't have enough way on to steer, but the tide causes the boat to pirouette slowly — a 360 degree spin — before another bit of wind comes along. He uses such phrases as, "whee!" and "here we go." Does my laughter have a slightly hysterical edge? Pshaw! How was supper, I ask. Oh, he says, I had a beer and I drank a breakfast shake and just fell asleep. I might turn and burn at Chocko he tells me. Or I might anchor out and get some more shut-eye. This is heartening news. Shows his judgement is good despite having (she counts on her fingers) less than 6 hours of sleep in the past 31 hours. We say goodnight, and I snuggle back under my air-conditioned covers. Day 3: Monday after sunrise A beautiful day in the Florida Keys. There is nothing quite so tropical as a sunrise down here, where the boisterous morning wind is soft with moisture and the white coral dust is as dry as chalk on my flip-flopped feet.  More anon...
 Every year a bunch of misfit toys——I mean non-motorized adventure vehicles——make their way to the high tide line of Fort DeSoto Beach in St. Pete, and on the first Saturday in March, they take to the water and head South.  My favorite skipper built two of these vessels. Designed by OH Rodgers, and built mostly by Jeff and OH, but with assists from a squadron of friends, two boats, Spawn and Zygote, set sail on—respectively—their 13th? and inaugural Everglades Challenges earlier today. They have 300 miles to go until the finish line in Key Largo. They are equipped with a lot of safety gear, personal locators, sweet treats, bottles of frozen water, and on one of the two at least, a couple of beers. From my perspective on shore, it's heartwarming the support both the Spawn team and my own TwoBeers gets. There's a crowd of well-wishers and curious folks. They had a kinda paparazzi swarming them, which is just cool.  Three amigos! Plus for Jeff, this means supportive stablemates who waited to be sure Zygote made the leap into the water. Bit of a funny story, actually, when we arrived Saturday, we found Zygote nosed down nearly to the surf line. Evidently, she slipped her hobbles and skidded down the beach overnight. It was the nervous work of moments to put idle hands to work and hoist her back up the high tide line. Delayed briefly by in incoming freighter, the fleet waited like a good dog getting a treat, and when the horn sounded, Jeff gave a bit of encouragement and Zygote made a run for it. Only to slew to starboard off the rollers. The boat is carbon fiber reinforced with fiber glass, but she is a little hefty when she hit the sand. The event really is a challenge: it's a challenge to GET to the beach, what with building and outfitting and making time. And it's a challenge to get off the beach: for instance, by rule, only the boat's crew is allowed to push the boat into the water. None of the spectators is allowed to help, so we watched with bated breath. Note how his stablemates, Dave "DSea" Clement and Jahn "Moresailesaid" Tihansky, who are sailing Spawn this year, give him legal assistance. Waiting for Zygote to clear Spawn's pathway into the water, they watch until Zygote is in the water before stepping in. Once the boat hits the water, the other WaterTribe rule comes into play: WaterTribers can always render assistance to one another. So that's when the Spawnsters help gather up the rollers (all beach gear has to travel with the vessel) and bring it out to Jeff so Zygote doesn't head out unmanned into the briney blue. Shortly thereafter, Spawn took to the water without incident, moving with almost matronly grace down to the water and out over the horizon. And now we hit refresh on the tracker. Again. And again. And again. Knock wood. 
A boat building project like Zygote seems to move so slowly—months passing with only the mold finished, seasons of laying carbon fiber, months of sanding and gluing, and endless weeks of sanding and painting, long long days of bolting on hardware—and then, capering about like a squirrel on crack, the project is—must be!—done enough because the day is here. The Everglades Challenge, an unsupported adventure race that starts at Fort DeSoto in St. Pete, FL and finishes 300 or so miles later in Key Largo, FL begins at 8:30 on this coming Saturday, March 8. It's the event at which my favorite skipper (known in this race as TwoBeers) has been aiming all of his time and energy in building this new single-handed OH Rodgers-designed carbon-fiber sailboat. Video and commentary courtesy Jahn "Moresailesaid" Tihansky. For all the dangers I perceive in the venture of taking a small boat out onto big water for 300 miles—THIS TIME SOLO!—I'm happy to report that my favorite skipper is not a fool. I'm grateful that TwoBeers had a Plan A (sail Zygote!) for the 2026 Everglades Challenge, plus a Plan B (sail a borrowed Hobie TI!), a Plan C (hop into Spawn and make it three men in a boat!), and a Plan D (bring a friend!).  And now that the pesky water-tank troubles are patched up, she said with a grimace... Water tanks on Zygote, for those who want to hear my explanation, appear on either side of the barky as well as below the deck. Each tank can be filled and emptied separately, and serve in place of a moving, breathing, complaining crew member. So instead of requesting that his crew hike harder, TwoBeers flips a switch and the windward tank fills up with around 400 lbs of righting moment. When things get a bit nautically frisky, 400 lbs of water in the lower middle tank will encourage the lively Zygote to simmer down. In an ideal world, and onboard the battle-tested Spawn, the water tank system performs as designed: it holds water, vents air, and can be emptied in a twinkling. On Zygote, up until a couple of days ago, the tank dribbled like a Great Dane at a bowl of water on a clean kitchen floor. According to Jeff, the tank filled in 4 minutes, but emptied itself in around 6. That math don't quite math.  Jeff is sitting on top of the starboard tank. The small square at the back of the tank is the release flap. Photo courtesy of Jahn "JT" Tihansky. Zygote's dribbling was caused, Great Danewise, by loose flaps. The rapid-release trap doors at the back of the top tanks did not seat firmly enough to hold water. I have it on good authority that it has been remedied. We live in hope and cross our fingers.
So here are our variously reliable links to track the progress of the racers. The WaterTribe website gets overloaded with spectators, but it's got the logos we've come to rely on, and can be widened to show all competitors in all classes (kayaks and paddle boards, catamarans and monohulls, etc.) or narrowed down to one class or an individual competitor. https://watertribe.com/Events/ChallengeGMapper.aspx The Garmin InReach site only shows a single boat's position. In this case, TwoBeers. https://share.garmin.com/N9OY8TwoBeers The RaceOwl site is quicker to load than WaterTribeand shows the boats minus their logos. It might be a bit slow on the uptake but it's a good choice to track the gang. https://www.raceowl.com/EC2026 Click on one of the photos below or an html address above to get to the tracker of your choice.
Thanks all y'all for coming along on this adventure!
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