The Art of Racing on the Bay

Sailing with the Grand Traverse Yacht Club is nothing short of a truly northern experience.

By Patrick Sullivan | July 8, 2017

In the minutes leading up to the start of a Wednesday night sailboat race on West Grand Traverse Bay, the Grand Traverse Yacht Club’s longtime weekly tradition, vessels crowd together, each angling for an advantageous position on the water’s invisible starting line.

If you look out at the scene from shore, the cluster of boats and sails looks chaotic. It looks even more so aboard one of them. The Northern Express stowed away on the Rights of Mann, a 34-foot Sabre, for a mid-June Wednesday night race. This is our story.

NO PLACE TO HIDE
A little more than an hour before the race, the crew crowds on to the 1988 fiberglass craft, owned by Sam Bender, a New York City transplant whose accent betrays his East Coast origins.

The term “crowds” is apt, not because the boat is small, but because the crew includes extra people — at least a couple extra hands plus a stray reporter. Unlike most Wednesdays, and perhaps owing to the perfect weather (72 degrees, sunny, light wind), everyone showed up, plus a couple more. It might not be great weather for a sailboat race, but it’s great weather to be on the bay.

Although an optimal crew would be five, including the skipper, Bender would not hear of leaving anyone at shore, even the stragglers who showed up at the last minute; they’re part of the crew, and they’ll be part of the crew this evening.

With eight people aboard, this reporter goes in search of a spot where he won’t be in the way but can still hear the lively back-and-forth banter between Bender and his crew. That rules out the cozy cabin down below. The right spot turns out to be a corner near the stern, just to the side of the captain’s wheel. But that spot turns out to be ever-shifting, as weight needs to be moved from one side of the boat to the other.

“Tonight it might be nice to have extra bodies on the leeward side,” said Jed Mooney, a Grand Traverse Yacht Club board member who joined the Bender’s crew as a sort of sailing guru.

Translation: Every time the boat tacks, the dead weight hiding in the corner near the stern must to squeeze to the other side of the boat while attempting to cause as little trouble as possible.

GRAND TOURING RACERS
There are three classes of boat that take part in the yacht club’s Wednesday night races. The fastest and most serious are also the smallest — the Melges 24s, sleek white wedges that skim along the water with crews of three or four. The allure of racing Melges is that all of the boats are virtually identical, so the race is close to a true test of a crew’s sailing ability.

Next are two classes called Grand Touring Fleet — larger sailboats that either sail with spinnakers, those bulbous sails that float out in front of their boats like Thanksgiving Day parade balloons, or with just jib and main sails. The spinnakers add considerable speed to their boats, so the crews that use them need more experience.

The Rights of Mann sails in the jib and main class.

“We signed up for the jib and main because we don’t have the experience, and it’s a little less complicated,” Bender said.

The Rights of Mann’s crew is not new to sailing or racing, but they are new to racing together, and that’s what presents the evening’s main challenge. Sails must be trimmed to the optimal tightness, turns must be carried off with as much efficiency as the crew can manage, and each movement of each crew member must be carefully orchestrated. 

As the crews got ready to race, the jib and main boats motor out into the bay on diesel power, getting out to where the sails can be raised.

When the motor is cut, the sails go up and, once the wind fills the sails, there is a palpable change in the propulsion of the craft. The boat leans into the water and picks up speed.

Six-or-so miles per hour have never felt so exhilarating.

It’s a light-wind evening, however, and that first gust would be the Rights’ strongest of the day. The crew tacks to turn back to the west and settles in to listen to instructions about the imminent race broadcast over the boat’s radio.

GETTING READY FOR A START
Around 5:30pm, more than a half hour before the starting horn sounds, there’s a little time to sail around the bay and get a sense for what the wind is like. That means a series of tacks, a maneuver where the wheel is turned and the boat changes direction, moving the sails out of the wind so that they swing to the opposite side to find the wind again. For a crew that’s just getting used to working together, it’s a move that takes a few practice tries and some yelling above the wheezing of the winch before it starts to come off smoothly.

But this pre-race sail cannot take the boat just anywhere in the bay. First, each crew has to be careful to stay out of the way of other sailboats. And, as 6pm approaches, the bay seemingly fills up with boats. Suddenly they’re everywhere, traveling in all directions, and somehow they’re managing not to crash into each other. There is something beautiful in the improvised choreography, and it’s hard to imagine how it works in strong winds when every boat is sailing three or four times as fast.

And yet there is still another consideration as the seconds tick away toward the start time: All boats must keep an eye on the committee boat, which is already lined up with a buoy for the start of the Melges 24 races and soon will position itself elsewhere to send off the spinnaker class boats.

The invisible line between the committee boat and the appointed buoy make up the starting point of the race, a line that’ll earn you a penalty if you cross it before the race starts — but could earn you an edge if you’re just close enough when the starting horn sounds.

The timing is part art and part science, because getting a 34-foot hulk of fiberglass to slow down or speed up at the collective will of a crew who are not used to working together is a complicated matter — and one that requires lots of practice.

UP NORTH TRANSPLANT
Bender and his wife, Susan, visited northern Michigan 30 years ago, and they liked the place. When they retired a couple years ago, they decided to move here almost out of the blue.

Bender said sailing was not what drew him to Traverse City, but once he got here, he couldn’t resist the allure.

“When I first moved here, I thought I would learn to play golf, but I opted for the boat instead,” he said.

In a way, Bender is both a seasoned sailor and a novice. He’d owned a boat years ago in New York and sailed on the Hudson River. When he got to northern Michigan, he applied for membership at the Grand Traverse Yacht Club, volunteered to pitch in, and found himself on some crews.

Last fall, he decided to bring a sailboat from Connecticut to northern Michigan.

“This is really my first season at it — we did a half season last year,” he said. “This is a new crew, and we just started working together.”

Slowly, he’s cobbled together a crew from people he met at the yacht club and people he met at the Newcomers’ Club of Grand Traverse.

“I know I’m not the best sailor. I know I’m not the fastest boat,” Bender said. “If we do well, we do well. I don’t want it to be a negative experience is the best way to put it.”

Sailing in this kind of race takes a captain who tells his crew what to do, but there’s a democratic atmosphere on Bender’s boat because everyone is learning their roles and everyone is free to make suggestions. 

“For my needs, I like to have people that are congenial. I’m not doing this to squabble and argue,” Bender said. “Sometimes I think maybe I’d just like to go cruising, but I like the excitement.”

“OTHER PEOPLE’S BOATS”
When the horn sounds at 6:15pm, the Rights of Mann is in a good position, but soon finds itself calmed with several other boats between its sails and the wind. There isn’t that much wind to go around, and it’s going to be a slow race.

Mooney fell in love with sailing early and made a career out of it. He grew up in Gross Pointe and raced at yacht clubs there; he learned to sail at Camp Lookout, south of Frankfort.

He’s been a competitive sailor since junior high, and he’s raced the [Bayview] Port Huron to Mackinac sailboat race nine times and the Chicago [Yacht Club Race] to Mackinac six times.

“I just got hooked — I just started sailing and racing as much as I could,” Mooney said.

He owns a business, Mooney Marine Services, that does maintenance, repairs and custom rigging. The business grew out of his love of sailing.

“Basically the business came from helping the people who took me sailing maintain their boats as a thank you,” he said. “I’m a proud member of the ‘other people’s boats’ yacht club.”

Mooney met Bender at the yacht club, and when Bender bought his boat last year, he asked Mooney to join his crew. In Mooney, Bender found a ringer. Over the years he’s been on crews that have dominated the Wednesday night races.

The experience on Rights is different, though, because of the inexperience of the crew. Bender said that over time the crew could develop and become more competitive.

Mooney said it is satisfying to help along a group of people who don’t have a lot of race experience.

Sailboat racing, really, is as old as sailing itself, he said. For centuries, sailing was the mode of transport in the world, and there was a real advantage in doing it well: Fishermen wanted to be the first to the fishing grounds and first back to port with the catch. That took good sailing skills.

“These sailors had to make their boats perform the best they could, and that was before racing,” he said. “Racing is just a development of that sort of attention to performance under sail.”

THE PERSONALITY OF THE BOAT
The race is made of up three legs that stretch between buoys back and forth across the bay. Tonight’s race has a calm quality because the wind is so mild; sailing between these turns and around the buoys is smooth and uneventful. There’s time to talk and enjoy the scenery.

Crew member Bill Byrne started sailed competitively after college with friends at the Gross Isle Yacht Club.

In 2014, he moved to Traverse City to retire and decided to take up sailing again. He bought a 19-foot sailboat and took classes. He met Bender at the Newcomers’ Club, and when Bender got his boat, Bender asked Byrne to join his crew.

Different crews include people of all ages and from diverse backgrounds. Byrne said it’s important to find the kind of crew that suits you.

“I think part of it is kind of the combined personality of the boat, the way people’s personalities mesh on the boat,” he said. “You’re under a little bit of strain, especially when you’re racing, and you’ve got to click as a group.”

Byrne said it’s not the speed that he finds alluring, it’s the character of the motion.

“What’s really kind of captured me — sailboats don’t go very fast, relative to power boats, but you’re much closer to the water,” Byrne said. “When the boat’s heeled over, and the water starts to flow over the side, there’s that sensation of speed that kind of gives you that exhilarating feeling. It’s the wind against the sails. It’s the tension on the lines, on the sheets. It’s all of that that starts to get into play.”

RELATIVE CALM
The relative peace of the sailboat race this Wednesday stands in stark contrast to what the crew experienced a week earlier, when they found themselves in the path of a quickly approaching thunderstorm. The crew could see the storm barreling in from the western horizon as they raced.

“It was pretty impressive,” said Catherine Allchin, a seasoned sailor from Suttons Bay who was invited to lend some experience to Bender’s boat. “It was like we were trying to beat the storm, you know? And we got into shore, and the rains hit. We were just deluged right as we got the boat tied up, so it was good timing.”

Some of the crew, like Allchin, have been yacht club members for years, and they’ve jumped from boat to boat. Others simply show up and walk on to any crew that’ll take them.

The week before, Allchin said a young man who’d learned to sail when he was little showed up at the yacht club. Mooney had invited him to join his crew, but when the evening arrived, Bender learned of another boat that was short-handed, so they sent the young man there.

Everyone was happy to see the kid came back the next week to race on the same boat.

“He’s like, ‘Hey, I really want to sail,’” Allchin said.

You don’t necessarily need sailing experience to show up and sail, though it helps. What you do need is a strong desire and willingness to learn.

“If you let them know at the yacht club that you’re interested and want to be on a crew, they’ll do their best to help you get on a boat,” Allchin said.

Allchin likes the temperament of the Isle of Mann’s crew. They want to race as fast as they can, but they’re not consumed by the competition.

“There are those who really thrive on the winning aspect and being very competitive, and then there are those who want to go out and do the best that they can,” she said. “In my lifetime, I have raced aggressively, and I enjoy being on a boat where people want to learn and where you’re passing it on.”