Mackinac Island is located in the narrow waters that connect Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The island, like much of the surrounding region, is breathtakingly beautiful with huge swaths of forests, dramatic bluffs, and limestone arches carved by erosion. The island has long been a hub of human activity: waterways have been a well used mode of transport for people and goods as long as people have had boats.
Nowadays, the island draws visitors as a beautiful and historical tourist attraction, and as the finish line for the longest annual freshwater sailing race in the world.
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I first learned to sail when I was about five years old
My parents owned a sailboat, called Saucy, in a three way partnership and we would go sailing as a family once or twice a month from May til September.
I loved it, and my older brother - who was the very definition of cool and was to be emulated in all ways - loved it too. It was only natural that I would follow in his footsteps and go to sailing camp every summer as soon as I was old enough.
At sailing camp, you learn with dinghies - small lightweight boats which hold one or two children and can capsize easily. With these small boats, there is always the possibility of losing control and flipping the boat, at which point you (and your sailing partner, if you have one) must flip the boat right side up and climb back in. This is a particularly effective environment for childhood learning because the treat of getting to swim around and escape the summer heat tempers the fear and anxiety around being overpowered and out of control.
I, more than most kids, had pretty acute anxiety about getting overpowered, I can still remember the churning sour knot in my stomach when I’d look out over the lake and see the wind whipping across the water. I’ve always been short and skinny, and while I was strong for my size, I still wasn’t strong in any absolute measure. I never had the option to just muscle my way back into control, if I wanted to stay in control of the boat I had to predict how it would act.
My anxiety, while initially causing avoidance behaviors, eventually forced me to be very attentive to my skills as a sailor.
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The CYCRTM, affectionately called ‘the Mac’, is a 333 mile race across Lake Michigan that starts in Chicago, IL and ends at Mackinac Island, MI. The path of the race takes you on a long trek Northeast across the lake, past the Manitou Islands, through the Grays reef shipping channel, and under the Mackinac bridge which connects the two land masses of the state of Michigan.
The race has been run 112 times over the past 123 years (and every year for the last century, except for the Summer of 2020). The race typically draws around 2-300 boats collectively carrying almost ten times as many sailors, the majority of whom hail from the states but some from as far away as Japan and New Zealand.
The race to Mackinac is a challenging race not only for its length - only the fastest boats finish in fewer than 30 hours and the slowest regularly take 60 or even 70 hours to make the
journey - but also for the dramatically variable weather on Lake Michigan. The conditions can be anywhere from a howling breeze accompanied by eight foot waves to no breeze and a perfectly flat reflective lake. You could have wind that forces a change of the sails every half hour or you could have a perfect gentle breeze so consistent the boat practically sails itself.
Sailing the Mac is a great achievement for any sailor, but it’s most common for a person to complete this race multiple times, I myself have done the race three times. But there is a special honor bestowed upon anyone who completes the Mac 25 times: the title of Old Goat, and entrance to the exclusive Old Goat party on the island after the race is finished. My dad has done 24 Macs as of the time I’m writing this. If all goes well, he’ll be an Old Goat this summer.
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Learning to sail in a dinghy is relatively safe, the physical hardware can’t handle anything too extreme, so neither must the sailors. But big boat sailing is a different story. Big boats are - well - bigger. The sails capture more wind, the ropes and shackles and other hardware are larger and stronger, there are more controles with which to fine tune the boat, and of course there are more things that can break.
Big boats are equipped to handle extreme weather and, with a little luck and a lot of practice, they can make it through almost any weather and emerge unscathed.
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The Mac is the closest I get to nature. At this point, with a MSci and two years into a PhD, I am unarguably an academic. My days consist of walking from my home to my desk on campus (the only regular exercise I get) and working on a computer in the bowels of an enormous building with a climate so controlled it’s impossible to know if the outside temperature is 10 degrees or 110. The demands of academia do not easily accommodate multiple days away from my work, classes, or colleagues, and so for much of the year I am effectively isolated from nature.
But on the racecourse, out in the middle of the lake where there’s no light pollution to dim the Milky Way, where the only thing I need to think about is making the most out of the current conditions, where the only thing keeping me from going over the lifelines in a storm is my safety tether, it’s different.
It’s one thing to know intellectually that “storms can be powerful”, to read in history books the myriad ways humans have invented to track the seasons in an attempt to make themselves safe from nature’s wrath.
It’s quite another to be sat in the middle of the lake - no land in sight, bundled in layers of foul weather gear, looking at the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen with streaks of pink and purple and yellow and orange, and a frame of dark clouds closing in - with a storm front full of wind and rain chasing us down, hearing the warnings of the chart plotter lightning detected within 3 miles and hoping with everything I have that the lightning will not hit us, that the wind will not rip our sails, that no one on the boat will get hurt.
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In the final stretch of the race, just five miles from the finish, every boat must pass under the largest suspension bridge in the Western hemisphere. Mackinac bridge carries road traffic between the mainland mitten and the upper peninsula of Michigan. The bridge spans almost four miles of water and has a clearance of 150 feet above the lake’s surface. From the road, it’s an impressive feat of engineering to be sure, but seen from the water? at night? it’s downright magical.
The bridge is adorned with lights, one set at the top of the distinctive suspension cables and another set below the road level pointed down at the water to illuminate it. From a distance, the bridge is a string of tiny specks of light, like a delicate beaded necklace. But as we approach, and the bridge begins to loom large and the last bit of twilight has faded from the sky, there’s an eerie effect from the lights.
The water between me and the bridge is illuminated. I can see that water, how its surface is moving and how the wind is behaving. But beneath the center of the bridge, there are no lights. The surface of the water disappears into an impenetrable wall of darkness and the dramatic lack of visual information is so stark that my sleep-addled brain struggles even to process it. My heart rate rises as we draw closer to the darkness, the bridge unimaginably large above us.
We are moving toward the most over-the-top metaphor of the unknown, frightening and fascinating.
And as cliche as it is, the only way is through. The place we are going is on the other side of the bridge, and so we must go through the darkness, there is no other option. As the bow leaves the light from the bridge, I hold my breath, I can hear my pulse in my ears, the boat continues to float along on the dark water that no one can see. I emerge on the other side of the bridge the same but different: I can again see the water around us, but I’m unable to see where we came from. Where before the future was shrouded and inaccessible, now the past. I cannot see it, I cannot return to it, there are still five more miles in the race and I have work to do.
The only place to go is forward. Toward the island, toward the finish line. Toward the real world.
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I give the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac four and a half stars.
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