RACE TO ALASKA / JUNE 2026
SV Elusive
We were going to Alaska anyways… Might as well gather some data along the way!
See the trackVictoria → Ketchikan in 7 days, 22 hours, and 40 minutes
Air quality along the way
Choose a measurement and a day.
Click the track for a reading.
Loading the June archive…
Dark sections have no sensor readings.
THE READINGS
Click a reading to find its position on the map.
All times are in UTC-7. Gaps in the readings are left blank.
THE CREW
Team Outliers
Team Outliers are a Vancouver-based crew skippered by Professor Steven Rogak, a longtime sailor and R2AK veteran.
The crew finished seventh, arriving in Ketchikan, Alaska 7 days, 22 hours and 40 minutes after departing Victoria, BC. They sailed aboard Elusive, a 1983 J/29 with custom mods including a pedal drive and various sensors to collect position, wind speed, and air quality!
Steven Rogak · Ian Fenner · Charlotte Silverman · Spencer Hill · Tess Jakubec · Med Fermi
Elusive R2AK page ↗ Race tracker & results ↗THE EXPERIMENT
Air quality data collection enabled by a low(er) cost sensor package
Some of us are researchers who study air pollution. With a passage to Alaska ahead of us, we figured: why not gather data along the way?
Prof. Naomi Zimmerman lent us one of her lab’s QuantAQ Modulair units, which logged particles, gases, temperature and humidity while the crew sailed north. It was a fun experiment to fit around the sailing, and part of a wider Outliers project which measured ocean currents, wind speed, and more.
A few notes about data
The sensor took measurements every minute during the race. These were then calibrated by Zimmerman graduate student Hugo Dignoes Ricart, and are displayed as 5-minute averages. Lower-cost sensors are sensitive to changes in humidity, temperature, and other environmental factors. The data here should be considered of-interest, but is not quality-assured.
Position data came from onboard GPS measurements as well as the official R2AK tracker. This map uses the official R2AK track, with each sensor reading matched to the nearest tracker time. The sensor did momentarily lose power for one section (shown as a dark line). No air quality readings were imputed or interpolated.
Introductory land outlines: Natural Earth.