PORT TOWNSEND — Under a dramatic sky, the first WA360 race launched Monday morning, sending sailors, kayakers, rowers and standup paddleboarders across Port Townsend Bay for a grand loop around.

Fifty-six teams — with names such as Boogie Barge, Fingers Crossed and Fun While Lost — set out on the 360-mile course, which has Olympia as its first checkpoint.

Hosted by the Northwest Maritime Center, the race is trackable at NWmaritime.org/WA360.

After the 6 a.m. start, what struck race boss Daniel Evans was “the diversity of choice. There were three ways to go south,” he said.

“A bunch went out into Admiralty Inlet and down the east side of Marrowstone Island,” while others shot straight through toward Port Ludlow and still others went for the Kilisut Harbor cut.

With the light winds, the racer type Evans calls “super badass human-powered” did exceedingly well.

Team Wave Forager, aka Ken Deem of Tacoma, took the lead in his Maas 24 rowing shell, leaving a flock of sailboats in his wake. Close by was Team Bendracer, Daniel Staudigel and Jason Magness of Bend, Ore., in their 21-foot Stellar Advantage kayak.

The rower and the two paddlers looked to be buddy-boating, Evans said, something done for safety or for conversation. Evans figured it was a case of conversation among racers at the top of their game.

The WA360 is a counterclockwise run replacing, at least this year, the Race to Alaska.

That event, a 750-mile wind- and human-powered competition, starts in normal years in Port Townsend to finish in Ketchikan, Alaska; $10,000 goes to the winner and a set of steak knives to the second-place team.

Its route crosses Canadian waters, so, with the border closed, the R2AK has been canceled two years in a row.

WA360’s route has racers heading for Olympia, then up to Skagit Bay, Bellingham and Point Roberts before coming back to Port Townsend.

The event’s three classes, Evans said: “Go Fast” for the real racers, “Go Hard” for those using a boat they dragged out of the blackberry bushes, and “Human-Powered,” as in kayaks, SUPs and rowboats.

The prizes are “these really awesome world-championship belts,” Evans said, like the ones boxers wear; “they’re so cool: black belts with giant gold plates on them.”

Deem, one of the human-powered competitors, placed second in the Seventy48, the 70-mile outing that started at 7 p.m. Friday from Tacoma and finished in Port Townsend Sunday afternoon.

Standing on the beach with his wife, Alison, at 5:45 a.m. Monday, Deem looked relaxed. The weekend’s race took him just 10 hours, 20 minutes — a kind of trial run for the WA360.

Now that he knows everything is working well, Deem plans to finish this race in time to celebrate the last day of school with his daughters, 6-year-old Lucy and 8-year-old Penelope, next week.

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Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladaily news.com.