Race Is On!
300 Boats Speed From Chicago to Mackinac
Racers Face Lake Michigan Challenge

Racers take off against the Chicago skyline in the historic Chicago-Mackinac Yacht race, which begins Saturday. (Photograph courtesy of CJVD International of Chicago.

As the 333-mile Chicago to Mackinac sailing race gets underway Saturday, July 16, with more than 300 boats leaving Chicago’s Monroe Harbor at 1 p.m., Island time, Lake Michigan and the weather, as in the past, likely will affect the race’s outcome.

In July of 1925, 21 yachts started the race, but within the first 12 hours, six boats were blown back to Chicago.

Wind gusts up to 75 miles per hour (65 knots) greeted mariners in 1937. Only eight boats finished out of the 42 that started the race.

Wind again plagued racers in 1970 when they encountered 16 hours of north winds that were clocked over 60 miles per hour. That race began with 167 yachts, but more than 50 percent of them took refuge in harbors, crippled with broken masts, torn sails, and seasick crews.

The worst summer storm recorded took place during the race in 1911. Hurricane-force winds with gusts peaking at 80 miles per hour hammered the 11 starting boats and 142 crew members, but not before temperatures dropped to freezing, and as the winds kicked in, so did a rainstorm that soaked everything and everyone.

During the storm, the legendary mahogany-hulled yacht Vencedor was caught in waves that thrashed the boat mercilessly between two boulders on a reef. The crew was rescued without injury, but the boat was reduced to fragments. All 142 sailors that participated that year survived the storm and safely made it to Mackinac.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTThe 1912 and 1913 races where shortened to end in Harbor Springs because crews wanted to avoided the rocky Gray’s Reef passage sailors needed to clear on their way to Mackinac.

Not all races have been besieged with high winds. Last year, the regatta was clocked as one of the slowest in history with sailors fighting off boredom when the breeze suddenly disappeared around midnight on the first day of competition. The calm made for exhausting, intensive sailing as the race dragged on for four days. Only 226 boats finished, while 96 withdrew. This was the slowest race in 30 Years with Genuine Risk finishing in 32 hours, 56 minutes, compared to the fastest time set in 2002 of 23 hours, 30 minutes, 34 seconds by Roy Disney’s boat Pyewacket.

This year is the 97th running of the Chicago Yacht Club’s Race to Mackinac, but this year actually marks the 107th anniversary of the race’s founding in 1898. Several years passed between the first and second race and, in other years, the event was suspended for a period during World War I and World War II. In two other years, the race ended at Harbor Springs.

The race is organized by the Chicago Yacht Club and is the world’s longest annual freshwater yacht race.