Jordan Hanssen
Season 3-Pacific Ocean, Season 8-Port Townsend
Find Jordan:
IG: @jordanhanssen FB: Jordan Eugene Hanssen
Season 8:
This is a tinyboatsession session before a funeral–a funeral for a this boat that I’m sitting in.
This is the JAMES ROBERT HANSSEN. The boat is named after my father who died of asthma when I was three. I’ve rowed it across two oceans with folks that are still my best friends. Once we raced across the North Atlantic and got a Guinness World Record, and the second time we rowed from Senegal, towards Miami. We capsized 25 miles east of the Bermuda Triangle. For a moment we were lost. But we were saved by the USCG and the M/V Heijin. Because Wade Lunzy, the CEO of our main sponsor, the Canadian Wildlife Federation, believed in us we were able to mount a search to recover the boat.
It was damaged but found a spot at the Foss Seaport Waterway Museum for ten years telling its stories. Priorities changed and the museum could not keep it. It was no longer safe to row oceans. It needed an end fitting of what it meant. We worked with the Washington Department of Natural resources and the Race boss of Seventy/48 and Race to Alaska to have a fitting send off. A funeral of sorts–a boat wake if you will.
Her last mission was a 70 mile beer run from Tacoma to Port Townsend for a party, ‘The Ruckus’ celebrating the end of the 70/48 and the start of the R2AK. We arrived and rolled her on her trailer to the party and served beer out of her and put her back in the water.
Sometime before the party and the funeral I did this tinyboatsession. If you look behind me you can see pictures of people on the boat. These are folks who were part of this project that have died.
About a hundred people came out on a flotilla to watch us row her last mile. Two bagpipers played in a boat next to her. We rolled her out of the water for the last time. The crowd had grown to two hundred. With all these hands we pushed her to the back of the boatyard and where a backhoe and a dumpster was waiting. We watched and heard and I saw men I’d know twenty years weep for the first time. Click Here for more about the Rowboat Funeral
From Season 3:
Hi, I'm Jordan. I'm the guy with a camera in one hand and an oar or paddle in the other. Tinyboatsession is a passion project born out of the first few weeks of the pandemic when I randomly saw a man playing the saxophone in a tinyboat at sunset. From that unexpected beautiful moment, it has become a string of over 200 of these moments from the banks of the Mississippi River to the Pacific ocean. I've been honored by all these artists who said yes when I asked them: "Do you have a song in your heart that you want to sing on a tinyboat?”
I don't have a background in music. Playing myself was not something I considered when I started. Tinyboatsession has taken a few twists and turns. Two of the major ones were a sailboat trip across the sea and a harmonica. Eric from Season 1 invited me to help him sail his boat across the sea, and an old friend of mine convinced me to pick up a harmonica and see if I could add a few of my own. These are the cracks I took at it somewhere between Hawaii and Seattle. -Jordan
