Blog posts for the 2025 WA360
The day after has come…. Trish and I (or PandaBob as Mary referred to us) finished the WA360 yesterday.
First, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Mary, for keeping everyone up to speed during the race. She jumped right in and did an amazing job, especially considering she had never used Linux, VSCode, Markdown, or Jekyll; and had never written any HTML before. After a 15-minute crash course, she just figured it out! She kept friends and family updated on Slack, Signal, Telegram, Facebook, text, and probably carrier pigeon. She was also an incredible source of emotional support throughout the race! She went above and beyond, and I can’t thank her enough.
Hatching a Plan for the Finish
At this point, we realized that we had a couple issues. The tides were at a point where you only had an ebb overnight and a flood through the day and it was like this for a few days. This meant that we would need to travel at night until we got down to about Deception Pass. This issue wasn’t bad by itself. The bigger issue was that we only had a day and a half of relatively calm weather before the westerlies started to get brutal across the Strait of Juan De Fuca. Due to these conditions, we decided that we would try to make a go for the finish, which was about 55 miles away, without setting up camp again. Adding the distance from Point Roberts, could we finish a Seventy48 at the end of the WA360?
