When STEM meets Rum

Photographer Jan Anderson provides this ‘report’ on the 2019 Round the County Race, held November 9-10 amid the beautiful and challenging waters of San Juan County, Washington:

Many sailors believe that “RTC” stands for Round the County. This year’s RTC actually revealed its true meaning, Reversing the Confluence, a lesser known trans-galactic term used for centuries by Dark Forces of Inadvertent Evil.

It’s simply an FOAC (Fate of Astronomic Coincidence) that this year’s event coincided with the two days out of every NTDE (National Tidal Datum Epoch) that the rotation of the earth matches exactly the surface winds over the entire Pacific Northwest.

The surface winds were actually blowing an historic 435 knots (counter-clockwise, as observed from the earth’s center), which miraculously matched (knot for knot) the actual tangential velocity of the surface of the earth in the San Juan Islands (clockwise, as observed from exo-atmospheric low earth orbit). Result: an apparent wind of ZERO knots over the region, and hence the entire race course.

Occasionally we witnessed bursts of 3 to 5 knots of breeze locally, and even a steady 12 knots … for awhile … then nothing. These aberrations were largely due to two factors:

(1) the occasional desperate and nearly-rabid roll tacking being perpetrated on the larger PHRF boats by their formerly fanatic one-design crews, hence fanning the boats around them, and
(2) the patches of limited visibility that caused a rarely seen local warming effect on the Cascadia Fault, resulting in regional trans-deep-sea-atmospheric flatulence wherever the sea met the land.

Throw in occasional extreme doses of rum, rhythmic grunting, and abruptly fabricated sea chanteys, and clearly, you’ve got an event just as faux-colorful as real-exciting.

For photos of all the extreme action, click here.