Training for the Ultimate Florida Challenge adventure race has been ramping up around here. Slowly. We all know how long it takes to recover from a simple bout of tendonitis. 

Over the summer at the Farm, Captain TwoBeers hiked a few miles every morning (minus a couple of lay-days for fishing and sailboat racing), and each week we tried for at least one tandem kayak trip. ​

The tandem boat is an excellent addition to our summers. Instead of tethering my kayak shamefully to Jeff's when the mileage on my hinky shoulder is up, I've got built-in rescue propulsion. AND it feels like I am contributing to his fitness regimen.

​Each time I set down my paddle and pick up the camera, the binocs, the Googlemaps, it's for the Spawn team effort.

I'm not just dreamily contemplating the scenery, dang it, I'm coaching. 

But as summer passed, we stepped up. Jeff hunted down and ordered a racing canoe made of Kevlar®.  The supply-chain kinks felt palpable as the small factory in Wisconsin kept us apprised of when/if they were able to start building again.  

Our faith in capitalism was rewarded when a nice fella drove up in his truck and unloaded the as-yet-unnamed canoe one sunny October day.

Thanks to the advice of young Chip Clifton, the team will be using kayak paddles on the canoe –– a seemingly small distinction, but one that should save mileage on everyone's hinky shoulders.

So while Moresailesaid and TwoBeers are working on their physical stamina and paddling skills, as well as sailing all sorts of boats in all sorts of events, I am thinking about the ground-control challenges.    

It's an unsupported adventure race, which means that between stages, our heroes are on their own. They can stay at hotels if they want (they won't, but they could), or eat at a fancy restaurant along the way (they might, weather dictating). And at the end of each stage, I can meet up with them, replenish their supplies, usher them into hot showers, et cetera.  

​There will be a lot of road to cover chasing the team, which also translates into a lot of tourist-y opportunity for me.  Fort Clinch, for instance, is a race check-in point, and ALSO where they switch from sailing Spawn to paddling the as-yet-unnamed canoe.  

What did I know about Fort Clinch? Absolutely nothing. I might guess it's a former military outpost, probably historical, possibly a good spot for making out.  

NOTE:
​The Ultimate Florida Challenge begins on the first Saturday in March at sunrise at Fort Desoto beach.  Depending on what time a person keeps, either the clock is ticking or the drums are calling...

Imagine butterflies metamorphosing –– but in reverse. One by one, brightly-colored creatures alight and begin removing their orange and yellow vests, their chartreuse-and-black drysuits, scarlet wetsuits, gloves, booties.

They are encrusted with salt. Their swollen, water-softened hands quiver. They struggle with zips and buckles, sometimes having to stop for a revivifying sip of nectar.

But they finally peel their waterproofing cocoons and emerge at Key Largo: smaller, barer, larval.

The transformation needs only a blast of the hot shower and some hours of sleep before, voilá! they transform into human caterpillars again, full of stories and potential, committed to mowing some vittles.

Off Cape Sable, as Spawn of Frankenscot skitters along under spinnaker a, a 5-foot-long tarpon lifts itself clear of the surface –– four or five feet out of the water –– big jaws agape, sides shining like a mirror, and splashes down just shy of the boat's port water-wing. 

A near miss to a legendary fish story. Moresailesaid, from the other side of the boat, "What the hell was that?"

At Checkpoint 2, Bill Wright is the volunteer in charge of the administration of the race. Under Bill's watch, the duties include gleefully filming the technique of each team as they navigate the viscous grey mud that separates water from shore at low tide.  

His videos are accompanied by an evil chuckle worthy of a Bond villain.

Stumbling Thunder recounted the singular joy of sailing out Murray Channel to find a –– is it a congress of manatee?–– manateeing around.

He also said he was surprised by the number of porpoises that swam up to the boat to give the program the side-eye, as if to say, "Y'all crazy!"  Mind you, he and JustAnotherSailor were on a 2-hour watch system, so they were not as sleep-deprived on the mighty Dovekie as might others have been on their various other kooky vessels. 

So, my favorite skipper, TwoBeers along with Moresailesaid sailed in the kind of conditions that are hard to top for Spawn racing down the coast: good breeze, mostly NNE, with favorable tides and excellent luck.

"We've never pancaked so much," announced TwoBeers, meaning that the boat was skim-boarding along large swaths of the racecourse, occasionally outrunning the scrim of water and belly-flopping into the soft sandy mud. The new gasket he'd installed along the centerboard worked well, but sadly, they forgot to close the automatic bailer. Hello Old Faithful of stinky mudflat mud.  

The team crossed Florida Bay in an astounding 4 hours moving like a scalded cat under reefed main and jib. The water-ballast and trapezes came into play on and off.

As they often express, they got their wish to finish before the second sunset, each sailor getting a couple of hours' worth of naps as the boat planed off on a (port) run. 

In fact, the vast majority of the Challenge was completed on port, aside from the odd tack and jibe through passes.

Prudent superstition did not permit them to utter the words "record" until they were safely ashore in Key Largo, but they  finished in something like 33 hours, breaking their own course monohull record from a few years ago by a smashing three hours. 

We stretched out the clean-up and putting away of gear for a few days in Key Largo so that we could share in the triumph of other finishers; the event passes so quickly!

​Until next year...

Crossing the Sunshine Skyway as playful gusts of wind nudge my RV from one side of the lane to the other, I dart a quick look to my right.

Of course the fleet of adventure racers is long over the horizon. Even knowing that my TwoBeers and Moresailesaid are sporting fine Gortex® waterproofs, I knock wood that they're hauling (dry) butt ahead of the rain.

​Rain that is just starting to ping against the windshield.

When my favorite skipper and Moresailesaid push Spawn off the beach for the Everglades Challenge each March, their focus is 100% on getting to Key Largo.  

The event is an "unsupported" adventure race, which means the racers carry whatever they expect to need. Preparation is key: for months, I'll find lists of how many AA and AAA batteries, of food ideas, of which things need fixing.

​There are long looong phone calls about how best to stow gear.

I stay out of most of it. I consider myself a quartermaster rather than a chef d'équipe for the team. I obtain and make stuff in advance of the event.  

But when they take off at 7 am on the first Saturday in March, my focus changes.

I'm ground control, so I keep an eagle eye on their SPOT track. And another eagle eye on the weather news.

And another on the WaterTribe tracking page and on the RaceOwl page when the WaterTribe page gets bogged down. 

Plus one more on what's shaking on the social networks. Oh, and maybe a peek at the weather radar.

How many eyes is that?

(Whatever you do, do NOT Google "eagle spider." Jayshusmaryandjoseph)

Among the many management challenges of the Everglades Challenge each year, the only thing tougher than organizing batteries and gear and the boys' socks  –– for me –– is keeping a lid on worry.

Knocking wood and crossing fingers and so on.

For the full history of the Spawn program, browse around on the blog. The event is marked by thrills, spills, no frills, and saltwater crocs. Plus sleep deprivation (for those on the water and for us on shore keeping an eye on them) and a fixation on the weather.

Each boat is equipped with a satelite tracker as well as a cartload of safety gear.

The naturally socially-distanced event selects for mad-scientists and salty mariner types alike. Still, my own Dr. Frankenstein made only a few small adjustments to his program for 2021.

He rewired the water-ballast pumps and beefed up the battery situation. He added hinges and latches to the ports leading to the forward "stateroom."

He rejiggered the storage bags. He shaved a few inches from the rudders and added tent-poles to make roomier camping accommodations.

The race begins at sunrise on Saturday, March 6, 2021.

Click on the map below for a link to the WaterTribe tracking map.  BTW, that site is sometimes overloaded during the event. 

Additionally, I will try to update the Spawn Facebook page with news as the event unfolds over the weekend.  

​Fingers crossed and knocking wood...

Oldgeezering: the tendency of anyone over the age of 20 to start reminiscing about how the world has changed.

​Identify by use of temporal phrases like "when I was a kid," "back in the day," "nowadays."

Also, Proustian locational references: "the video arcade," "my grandfather's farm," "the five-and-dime."

Oldgeezering in practice:

When I was a kid, my dad used to drag us around behind a boat in pretty much anything that floated. Once it was a wide mahogany door: hard to grip –– and there must have been some additional flotation, right? Huh. It's all blur of water up the nose.
    
The safety rules were few but iron-clad: lifejackets for all kids and somebody was charged to act as spotter. NEVER take eyes off your mark. 

I guess I was spotting for cousin B in this picture.

Check out that flex. Daddo looks mighty buff; always with the Ray-Bans, the cigarette (gasoline canisters be danged!) and the bottle of beer.  

Kids these days –– they don't even.  

Fans of the team will be surprised to know that zero major innovations are planned for the 2021 event (starts the first Saturday in March at dawn at Fort Desoto Beach! Bring bagpipes!).  Of course three months does leave room for all sorts of shenanigans. We'll see.

Thanks to Dave Helmick, Dave Clement, Andy Hayward, and Nate Villardebo, most excellent WaterTribesmen, who offered help, companionship, and a place to park. Good luck in the most challenging part of the Challenge: getting to the beach.
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*Time of year coming up...when armchair adventurers and make-it-real dreamers to prepare to participate in (or just watch) adventure: human powered watercraft (from kayaks to SUPs to catamarans, etc.) take an unsupported 300-mile-long voyage south along Florida's west coast. 

​The event offers both genuine danger (the waiver spells it out: "You could die") and possibilities within a budget's reach (a couple hundred bucks worth of required equipment, a little boat, ten days of vacation...). 

The starting line –– the high tide line on the beach –– offers an astonishing vision of people living their dreams. And alarming, of course. 

Mr. Linton has been fishing pretty regularly, though because of last summer's red tide, he can't bring anything home. Social distancing is easy on the water. 

And naturally, he has a lot of boat-work to fill his days on shore.  

The two 2.4 Meter boats (one fresh, one experienced) are slowly coming into alignment. Jeff's re-rigged the older boat so that it's indistinguishable from the newer one. Fresh paint, fresh lines, carbon-fiber bits and bobs. He orders stuff on-line and obsessively checks delivery times.  He splices lines while watching Bosch in the evenings.

Given that many of our upcoming regattas have been cancelled, he seems content.

And me, I'm always looking forward to a chunk of time in which to write but as it happens, I've been distracted by real life. It's hard to make up a story more exciting than the news right now.  

So instead, I'm doing a lot of reading (check out my goodreads shelf for the bookwormy details).

​And making stuff.

We're avoiding the grocery store –– taco Tuesday involved some freezer-burned ground beef that I might normally have donated to the fishes, but it tasted fine with the fresh greens from the garden –– and keeping our IRL social distance from the world. I've become a big fan of FaceTime right now for actual social interaction. Yay internet!

I'm hoping to settle into whatever this new normal is and get back to my keyboard sometime soon, but in the the meanwhile, as they say in one of my favorite movies, "Rule #32: Enjoy the little things."

Wishing you safety and kindness from here...

The event begins on the first Saturday in March from the beach at Fort DeSoto in St. Petersburg.  This year, because of the small craft advisory in place for breeze, the race started under a weather hold and Plan B –– which meant that instead of having the 100+ paddle-craft, catamarans, sailing vessels, SUPs, and windsurfers scamper into the sea at sunrise to the majestic caterwauling of bagpipes, not much happened for a couple of hours.  

The incessant checking of the tracker began, somewhat less frantically for me this year as our dear friend Charli Clifton had taken on the on-shore chase-car driver duties.  He had the trailer in tow and would be picking up the boat and team at the end of their trip –– we hoped in Key Largo. 

Spawn had many miles to go before sleep, many miles, but also promises to keep.  JT(Jahn Tihansky, aka Moresailhesaid) and my favorite skipper Jeff "TwoBeers" Linton are busy guys.  JT had airline reservations while Jeff's next sailing engagement started the following Wednesday (ooh! Merlin to Eleuthra!). 

They hoped that the northerly winds would hold and catapult them all the way down. But if wishes were horses, and horses could fly? You'd have to really watch your step.  

As they tracked down the coast, conditions continued freshy-freshy in the low-20's.  Spawn beelined across Tampa Bay with a reefed main and jib, and then threaded the needle of Passage Key and Anna Maria, hugging the shore. Some swim-bouys may have been seen on the seaward side of Spawn. Oopsie!

On the long swoop south east along the coast, the boys crossed tacks with stable-mates DC and SailorEd. Each team tried to gauge whether the breeze was better by shore or farther out. The jury never really settled on a side.

Because the conditions were so up and down, with the wind dying and then puffing a LOT, the Spawnsters set up their "triple rig." 

In the three or so minutes when the wind was lighter, JT and Jeff deployed the screetcher (a big, roller-furling jib with a free luff, ideal for either light air upwind, or off-wind work), and then as a black-beauty puff came barreling down on them, they'd quickly roll up the screecher and sail on reefed main and jib alone. When the puff passed, out came the screecher again...all the way to Gasparilla Pass (almost to Boca Grande).

Like downshifting for hills. 

Into Chockloskee at low tide meant an Abbot and Costello routine involving JT, knee-deep mud, a lost (and found!) shoe, and an attempt to check in without having a check-in box in play. A 100-foot trek through stinking saltwater mud for essentially naught.

The text he sent is telling: "Just left Chok. No lockbox ."   So many words go in that space between the x and the period!  

While JT was so employed, Jeff slowly and cautiously walked in the mud to turn Spawn around ("to get the weather gauge") for departure.  

Once they got JT back aboard and mostly de-mudded, our doughty crew shook out the reef, and proceeded with a favorable current and a tailwind. As a cheerful change of habit, no oyster bars jumped out and bit them.

At around 5, predawn, the leg to Cape Sable turned kindly. The boys were able to dry off and snatch a bit of shut eye.

They call it Cape Sable, but it's made up of three small bumps along the coast, each unnamed except as they relate to a person's progress (first, second, third...).  At the first cape, the wind was out of the northeast at around 8 knots. At the second, Northeast at 12.  By the third, KATIE BAR THE DOOR! The wind was blowing around 25 knots right out of the east.

We often remark on the speed at which the weather changes. For Spawn, in the course of 20 minutes, the conditions went from idle pleasure cruise to very heavy sailing indeed.  Knowing that they had the tide at least with them into Flamingo, the Spawnsters beached the boat before rounding the third cape.
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They took down the jib and put up the smaller storm jib. They put the reef back in to the main. They reapplied unguent to their sit-upons and girded up their loins.

It took something like 5 hours to travel that final 10 miles to Checkpoint 3. The wind was howling from exactly the direction they wanted to travel.  The tide running against that wind made for yet another agitate cycle in their washing machine.

They ultimately decided to overstand the mark, sailing beyond Flamingo and then trying to skate downwind into the harbor rather than short-tacking up the coast.  Once they got to windward of Flamingo, they had a sort of slalom downwind course between mangrove islands.

Shooting along, hoping to reach a minuscule powerboat channel, they sailed right up to some standing seabirds working along the backside of some mangroves. Standing seabirds –– as any boater will tell you –– is a sure sign of impending land.  

Of course, in hindsight, it was a wise –– if bitter –– decision to stop early.  More than half of the fleet bailed out early. In discussions afterwards, the words "epic" "gnarly" and "nightmarish" were tossed about freely. There were triumphs and actual tragedies.  

But on our boat neither triumph nor tragedy, we are grateful to report. Another 24 hours of pounding upwind? The mighty Spawn never made a peep, never leaked, never balked, but the main bulkhead definitely felt the conditions.

And of course, next year, the Spawnsters will be clearing their schedule to make time for a day's delay should conditions require.  

As Click and Clack Tappet used to say, "Well, it's happened again."

​Another eleven and a half months have passed and it's time for the annual Everglades Challenge race.  Which is, as I suppose most of my dear readers know, an unsupported adventure race that sends a flotilla of human-powered water vessels down the left coast of Florida from Fort DeSoto beach in St. Petersburg all the way down and across the Everglades to Key Largo.

Don't know about this? Want to waste a perfectly good period of time? Go over to the right, scroll down and click on "Everglades Challenge" and read all I've had to bibble-bable tittle-tattle about it.)

My favorite skipper (and boat-builder), known as "TwoBeers," heads a team of friends who designed, built, sailed, modified, sailed, modified, sailed, and modified yet again a boat called Spawn of Frankenscot.

​The boat is a sloop of 22 feet designed by OH "Ningee" Rodgers. TwoBeers sails with Jahn "Moresailhesaid" Tihansky. He's supported by Amy Smith "Bookworm" Linton, Mark "EnsignRumsDOWN!" Taylor, and ––new this year!–– Charlie "Gaagii" Clifton. 

The sweet sloop has changed over time, but the current freshness involves the water take-up system.

This chapter begins on a dark but not-too-stormy night.  

The setting: a fantastic oyster bar (the kind that serves beverages, not the kind that plagues our team's path to Key Largo).  ​BTW, if you like lively viands such as oysters on the half shell, go to Eustis and check this place out: The Oyster Troff.

Next thing you know, the take-up system for Spawn's water ballast (see here and here for last year's explanation) has been finessed so that the team doesn't have to pump water into the ballast tank by hand. 

​Instead, H2O will be scooped up by ingenious plumbing.  Jamey used a 3-D printer to fashion the spring-loaded cartridge that allows our team to lower the PVC pipe so that gallons of ocean shoot right into the system.

That salty goodness whooshes up a hose to the cross-beam.

Then it flows into the tank, where it provides a righting moment at 8 pounds per gallon.  The 35-gallon tank is roughly the equivalent of one hefty but non-complaining, non beer-drinking gurgling dude.

Jamey created a super-nifty, bling-y, customized air-vent for the tanks, since, as we know, a vent can provide an unexpected way for water to make its way into the tank.  If things were to get, you know, flippy-whippy, a person does NOT want water to fill one of these water wings.  

You might not be able to tell, but that vent is made of sparkly gold plastic.

Jamey claims that color plastic was the only material at hand for the 3-D printer, but I think we can all agree it looks pretty dang gangster.  And that's good. 

After five Everglades Challenge campaigns, Team Spawn has grown, shall we say, more laid-back in the pre-race race.

​Oh, we expect a last-minute Amazon or Sierra Trading Post order, and for sure a midnight run to for groceries, but the process of preparing for the event seems less daunting each year.

And as far as super-neat-o modifications? This year the focus has been on the water-ballast supply system. What is known in the biz as "plumbing."  TwoBeers and I have spent some quality time contemplating white PVC elbows at the hardware store.

TwoBeers is working with a friend from the military-industrial complex, a former youth sailor and current engineer (Hi Jamey!) to speed up and refine the pump/drain system.  

The Top Secret plans involve springs, 3-D printings, and the Home Depot. Glimpsed here are some of the highly technical and science-y parameters:

No, seriously, it's written in Sharpie on the back on an old envelope. As we followers of Spawn have come to expect...

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