Five Miles to Mackinac
Five Miles to Mackinac
by Tory Enerson
When I decided to write an article about the 2007 Race to Macinac the first order of business was to select a title. I could have named it the Slow Road to Macinac, for obvious reasons, or Mac Truck, because that is how heavy our boat felt plodding through the water with less than three knots of breeze for what seemed like forever. I even toyed with the idea of calling it Mac and Cheese considering that it looked more and more like we may have to resort to that fourth dinner, commonly a couple of hastily stashed boxes of macaroni and cheese. In the end I decided to choose the name I did because for Tsunami, the race was really all about the last five miles, but I will get to that later.
The race started in exciting fashion. The blustery wind was reaching velocity in the low thirties coming from our sterns, making for what appeared to be the perfect angle directly up the rhumb line and possible record finishes for 2007. With that in mind, Tsunami's intention was to stay just to the left of the fleet in anticipation of a shift in that direction, but to not stray to far from coarse. That proved to be next to impossible. The 40.7 fleet immediately showed its difference of ideas as the fleet practically split in two with Tsunami directly in the middle. The boats to left didn’t have spinnakers up and were climbing higher and higher, blending into the North suburb shoreline in little time. Collaboration, the three time (in a row) 40.7 Mac champion, had her shoot full and was bearing down on the far right side of the coarse heading for Michigan. That definitely factored into our decision to abandon our staying to the left idea as it is tough to split from the King of port to ports in order to pursue ones own ideas that are really guesses at best. So up the middle we went, pointing right at Big Sable and Point Bessie. The first time that the wind died it turned into a sort of forced consolidation of the fleet. The boats to the left came down in search of breeze and a better angle and the boats to the right tacked. At that point Collaboration, the furthest right boat, La Tempete, at one point the furthest left boat, Tsunami, and Das Boat were all floundering around in two knots of breeze within two or three boats of each other. Tsunami was the most leeward of the boats so when the wind filled in we got it last and were instantly left some twenty lengths behind. Little did we know we would never see those three yachts again until we darkened the door of the Pink Pony.
I could go on and on about angles and wind and what we did to try and deal with the next thirty hours or so of less than three knots of breeze (that may be a little exaggeration but it certainly felt that long, and after fighting through it I deserve to embellish a bit, right?) but to be totally honest, it has all blended together in my mind as one giant lull, never to be referred to again. One of the biggest debates on Tsunami this year in preparation for the race was "How many cases of beer should we bring?" Well thank God we opted to bring one more case than we did last year! I can here the jeers now, 'no wonder they came in eighth, they were probably drunk', etc. etc. Well, all I can say to that is that first off, we were never drunk, just trying to stay warm. And secondly, Tsunami had never been a boat to conform closely to the standard rules of the race coarse, I mean we are out there to have fun, Right? At some point in the first day we got a call from my wife Wendy. She called to say how cute our two year old son Hayden was, at home playing with Tsunami's coffee pot. Ooops!! Our skipper Don Hayes' mood suddenly took a dive south as he loves his coffee in the morning as much as his son Bryan and I love beer the other twenty three hours of the day. Rest assured, due to the ingeniousness of our crew member Robert Hills (Sailor Bob to those who know him), we were able to rig up a method for boiling water and a melida to make coffee with using only empty beer cans. Lucky for Tsunami that we had plenty of those lying around. Enough said about that I think.
After endlessly trudging along we finally reached Point Bessie with the Manitou Passage in our sight. We checked the weather buoy information, surveyed the angles, and looked for best breeze on the water. As it was, all the information we had told us that it was one of those rare moments in the Mac Race when it seemed to be the right thing to do was to go out side the 'tous and hopefully avoid what we thought was a giant hole inside the passage. One has to keep in mind that at this point, we hadn’t seen another 40.7 for at least a day or so. Convinced we were in dead last, not only in section but in fleet, we decided to take the gamble and go with our plan to round the northwest side of the Manitous. We were able to stay in a nice line of breeze as we reached the southern tip of South Manitou when Ben spotted on the horizon, his former boat and our good friends Vayu, going outside the 'Tous as well. Great, finally another boat to zero in on and test our abilities against. We were bringing the wind with us and managed over the coarse of a few hours to close the gap significantly, now able to easily make out Vayu's yellow and red triton spinnaker with the naked eye. The wind was lightening some and by the time we were north of the islands, we were pretty much abeam of Vayu and back in the race. We used our glasses to look at the boats we had passed by going around and by one crew members count, there were over one hundred boats stuck in the passage, languishing in little to no breeze. After dinner, night had swallowed the long day before her, and it was time for my shift to get some rest in preparation for the final push to Macinac. "The only thing we care about is that you guys don’t lose sight of Vayu" was our direction to the shift on deck. When we arose at the given time, twenty minutes early if my recollection is correct, we asked immediately, "Where is Vayu?" The responses we got were less than encouraging. They said that one of two things had happened to her. Either she went back out side of Beaver Island, yeah right, or some series of alien green lights swallowed them up from our hip and that we should be sure to check that Vayu's crew was, in fact, still human when we got to the island. "Just go to bed guys, please, we got it from here." After being on shift in the black of night for about an hour we spotted Vayu on the inside of us and ahead by a few boat lengths. With her back in our sights again we were ready for the sunrise and what we were sure would be an exciting and close finish.
As we entered Grays Reef with the wind to our stern we spotted Barracuda just ahead of Vayu who was about twenty boat lengths ahead of us. Fantastic, now we suddenly had a chance to reel in two boats. Gibing through the reef we decided to keep our shoot up going into the straits even though we would be sailing at about sixty degrees apparent while the lead boat of the three had gone with a jib. Barracuda was heading to the right of the straits either by choice or because she had a jib up and had to keep high. Vayu hoisted her a-sail and was able to over take Barracuda in little time from leeward with her greater sail area. We don’t have an a-sail, but the wind was lightening and we were comfortable that we could hold our shoot, even if we couldn’t climb up to the same plane that our competitors were on. Before we knew it we were through the lee of both boats and ahead. The wind lightened further and we all ended up having to go with jibs, the wind now coming almost directly from the Grand Hotel. We covered Barracuda, which continued to favor the right side of the channel, as Vayu tacked over to the left side, splitting with the two of us. As we passed under the bridge, we were comfortably ahead of Barracuda when we started to take bearings on Vayu all the way on the other side. She had gained significantly and we were definitely concerned with who would cross who at this point. We still had starboard advantage on her, but she had done a great job closing the gap, thus giving me my title to this article, Five Miles to Mackinac. As we converged we were still ahead but by only two or three boat lengths. We decided that the most important advantage this close to the finish would be to keep starboard advantage so we tacked directly in front of Vayu, prompting her to immediately tack back to the left clearing her air. This is where all the fun began. Suddenly a fleet race of 333 miles had become a true match race with only a few miles to do battle. If you were close enough to this epic duel, you would have been able to hear the driving pulse of Led Zeppelins eastern inspired mantra Kashmir urging Tsunami through every tack. Attacking from the rear you could hear Vayu being pushed to get every inch out of her boat by the inspirational Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner ala Apocalypse Now. Vayu gained on every tack, though not enough to cross Tsunami due to our starboard advantage. With about a mile to go, Tsunami decided that the left had become too favored to continue holding our starboard position and we continued on to the other side. Vayu expertly changed gears and commenced with attacking us from the right. One tiny little shift either way would have been the whole 333 mile race. Back and forth, back and forth, (we later checked the GPS plotter on Vayu and counted eighteen tacks)but in the end it turned out that there just wasn’t enough race coarse left for Vayu to accomplish her goal and Tsunami sailed across the finish line with just a few seconds to spare, ending what was one of the most exciting moments in Mac history for everyone on the two boats. We later heard from many of the spectators both on land and sea, that it was the highlight of the finish line and made the long wait worthwhile. As it turned out, there were six 40.7s that finished within twenty eight minutes of each other. Just another validation of what a competitive fleet that we are all privileged to be a part of. I think that the only thing that can top the excitement that we found on the water is how much fun we had on the island and the return trip home, but that is a story for another day.
Finally, I would like to express our most sincere sadness and grief at the unfortunate fate of our sister ship Barracuda. We are very thankful that no one was harmed. Barracuda has been one of the fiercest competitors in our section and we always look forward to the challenge of facing her on the water. We wish her all the best in her endeavor to get back on the race coarse and would be happy to extend any and all assistance necessary, both from the yacht Tsunami and from the 40.7 fleet.
Tory Enerson
July 2007