Bay View resident and Midwest Women’s Sailing Conference instructor Tyann Zehms is preparing for the journey of a lifetime — a 750-mile boat race from Port Townsend, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska.
To qualify for the race, Zehms must first complete a 40-mile challenge in 36 hours — without calling for a rescue. If she completes that challenge, she’ll make it to the main event, starting June 17. She says the journey should take her just under three weeks.
“I'm not going to sail at night,” she says. “I'm not going to try to charge crazy weather. I'm just going to keep it easy, keep it simple, keep it safe. So if that all goes to plan, it'll probably be about 18, 20 days.”
If Zehms gets first place, she stands to win $10,000. If she gets second place, she'll receive a set of steak knives. The race has just a few rules: 1) She can’t be followed by a support boat, and 2) her vessel can’t have a motor on board.
A vessel fit for the journey
That second rule is no problem for Zehms, who spent three years building a 24-foot outrigger canoe in her basement. The boat is called “Sweet Creature.”
“While I was building, that's a lot of hours by yourself,” Zehms says. “And I started to think about what I would do with it afterwards. And then I heard about the race and I was like, ‘Wouldn't that be cool to do something like this?’”
But like most boat projects, the build didn't go quite as planned.
“We had to do a little bit of deconstructing of a wall to get it out the stairway,” Zehms says. “You know, a couple little frames out, scoot the boat out of the basement when it was time, and then just frame it back in.”
Zehms says her wife wasn’t thrilled about the basement remodel. But despite the hiccups, building her own boat for the race comes with certain advantages too.
“The upside of being the one who built it is that I know everything about it,” she explains. “If I hear something creak, if I hear something weird, I know almost exactly where it is and I might even know why.”
Zehms will be racing under the team name, “Moana Moproblems.” The name is a nod to both the canoe’s Polynesian-influenced construction style, and to a film that has inspired Zehms as a woman in a male-dominated sport like sailing.
“I totally relate with that storyline: a young woman kind of being shoved by society in one direction, and then she's like, ‘Nope, I'm going to do this and be way better at it,’” she says.
Preparing for the race
“Sweet Creature” moors near South Shore Yacht Club, where Zehms says Lake Michigan has been an excellent training ground.
“When you're sailing on the Great Lakes, you get very used to quickly changing conditions,” she says. “The water is always cold. You can never really settle into whatever the breeze is, because you know it's going to change. And [that’s] all going to come in very handy when I'm out on the ocean.”
But there are a few things Lake Michigan can’t prepare her for, including the whirlpools and whales of the Pacific.
“I mean, look at how small that boat is,” says Zehms. “The average size of an orca is at least that, if not a little bit bigger."
Out on the water, Zehms will be both crew and skipper. But whatever comes her way, she’ll be relying on her past racing experience and her confidence in her skills as a sailor.
"I can just trust that I know what I'm doing, and it'll work out or it won't,” Zehms says. “And I'll find out really quick, one way or the other. ... It's a little macabre, but it's weirdly comforting, because it's like, once I get into that situation, I'll either adapt or I won't, and then I'll have to make a decision from there."
Stage 1 of Race to Alaska 2026 starts on June 14. If you want to follow along with Zehms’ progress online, she says a tracker app will be available through Race to Alaska’s website soon. You can also sign up for general Race to Alaska updates here.
“It'll show you where we are, what speed we're doing, what direction we're heading,” she says.
