In the first official McIntyre Mini Globe Race, a 2025 sailing race around the world for tiny yachts, Pamlico County had a sizable presence. 

The only American among the 14 yachters in the MGR was Seattle adventurer Josh Kali, whose race team leader and significant other is Cathy Cahoon, daughter of Janci and Doug Cahoon of Arapahoe. 

Kali used his in-laws’ home as his base in January 2025 while setting up for his 223-day trip, which started Feb. 23, 2025, from the island of Antigua.

And the forms for his boat were built by B&B Yacht Designs of Bayboro, the only American company licensed to manufacture the Globe 5.80 yacht kits used in the race.

Kali completed the 24,000-mile race in a boat just 19 feet long, with nothing but wind to power it. 

Although he had worked as a marine technician, putting together yachts in a Seattle shipyard, he had little experience with sailing — and almost never in salt water. 

Kali is an accomplished mountain climber whose feats include a solo climb up North America’s highest peak, Denali (also known as Mount McKinley) in Alaska.
He said mountain climbing was getting a little old and that he was ready to try something new. He read about the MGR on a blog and decided to try it.
The race is the brainchild of Don McIntyre, an Australian adventurer who came up with the idea of a race that would feature tiny, homemade yachts built from plans or kits, sailed solo by skippers ready to brave the swells of the oceans to test their endurance, courage and skill. 

Most of the yachters in the race were European or Australian, and two were women.

Kali, who said he “got out of mountain climbing so I could go sailing,” ordered a kit and assembled his boat over 2½ years. He launched it in October 2024, just four months before the MGR and had limited time to test it.

He named his vessel the Skookum. “It’s a shout out to the Pacific Northwest Native Americans,” he said. “It means ultimate, strong, brave.” 

He shared a “funny story” about the name.

“I met a guy in Tonga who had grown up sailing in Vancouver, B.C., so he was a Northwest guy,” Kali said. “And he came, looked at the boat inside and out, and after he had seen it for a while, he said, ‘This is one skookum boat.’ He had no idea that was its name. And that is exactly how you use it in context, so I was like, ‘Dude! That’s so validating. Thank you!’ I knew I chose the right name at that moment. I had considered calling it Rock and Roll.”

Janci Cahoon said the unusually cold winter in early 2025 made things tough for Kali while he was in Pamlico County. She recalls people having to sweep snow off the Oriental Harbor docks.

After Kali finalized his race plans, he set off for Beaufort, North Carolina, and then made the 1,500-mile sail to Antigua, where the race would launch and finish. 

It began with a westward run for Panama. “They didn’t use the (Panama) Canal,” Janci Cahoon said. “They had to carry their boats across by trailer.” 

From the Pacific, the skippers headed for the journey’s longest single leg, a 4,300-mile stretch  to the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. “That was 41 days at sea,” Kali said. 

He’d loaded 180 liters of water (about 47 gallons) and reached that first stop with about 20 liters (just over 5 gallons) remaining. 

Food was not a problem as there’s plenty of room to store it, he said. But water, he noted, required more care. Skippers were required to leave each port with at least 110 liters on board. 

He was careful to use the stored water only to hydrate. “I was able to catch water, so I was able to take baths and wash clothes and that sort of thing,” he said. 

He did his cooking on an alcohol-fueled range.He made daily reports — a race requirement —  to Cathy Cahoon and she met him at some of the stops on the global run. 

Along with those reports, Kali kept himself from feeling alone by playing his ukulele and holding conversations with the Skookum. 

“I talked to my boat a lot,” he said. “People asked if I talked to myself, I said, ‘No, I talk to my boat.’ I’m like, ‘Thank you buddy, thank you, thank you!’”

One might wonder how a boat with a 19-foot length and 7-foot beam handled the massive swells of the Pacific Ocean. John Arndt, publisher of Latitude 38, a West Coast sailing magazine, said  in an interview with Kali that little boats handle the swells better than big ones. 

They sail the waves “like a cork in a bottle,” he said.

Kali told Arndt his boat never let him down. “There were times the waves were over the transom and you were thinking, gosh, what’s going to happen, and the little boat just rises with the water,” he said. “It’s a credit to the designer and the design of the boat.”
The boats had designated stops where all the skippers gathered before setting out again. Their recorded race times were the days, hours, minutes and even seconds it took to go from one port to the next. The stops were divided into five legs of varying distances.

The stops included Antigua, Panama, the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Tonga, Fiji, Darwin in Australia, the Cocos Islands, Mauritius, Durban and Cape Town in South Africa, St. Helena Island in the Atlantic, Recife in Brazil, and then Antigua again. 

Kali said the ongoing friendship he developed with the other skippers is what he cherished most about the voyage. “Because we’re all the same brand of crazy, you know, we definitely had a strong bond,” he said. “We all stay in touch.” 

In the end, 11 boats reached the finish line, with some entrants pulling out due to health issues or after running out of funds. Kali said he nearly ran out of funds himself, but his sponsors came through. 

The winner was Swiss sailor Renaud Stitelmann with a time of 180 days and 11 hours. Kali was 11th with 223 days, but he said his goal was simply to finish and keep his boat in optimal condition. 

He said the Skookum needed the fewest repairs among the boats.

He sailed the Skookum back to  Oriental Harbor on May 13, to much fanfare from city officials and family members, with some coming from as far away as Virginia. 

Commissioner Paul Jordan declared it Josh Kali Day in the city while Oriental Mayor Pro Tem Paul Jordan read an official welcoming proclamation from Mayor Sally Belangia.

In a statement about the race, McIntyre had noted, “The MGR is a classic and challenging race and a very real adventure not for the faint-hearted. But it shows clearly that the human spirit has no bounds if the dream is strong enough and a person believes in themselves.”Asked if he would do the race again Kali grinned and responded with an emphatic “No!” But he said he would not give up sailing. He hopes to take part in a 2028 sailing race to Alaska. 

He may even try mountain climbing again. “I met a guy from Australia who wants to get into mountain climbing,” he explained. “I said, ‘Why not?’” 

They have unofficial plans to visit Denali. Beyond that, Kali joked that he also plans to re-learn how to wear shoes. 

He already sold the Skookum to a man in Kansas who hopes to do the next MGR, in 2029. 

Kali shared some of the life lessons from his journey circumnavigating the globe.  “I learned how to be patient. I learned how to be accepting,” he said. “I learned how to just take things as they come. I learned how to just let things go and to say, ‘This is how it is’ and to adapt to situations.”

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