The Longest Freshwater Race on Earth

The Supermac Race, an extension of the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac and a precursor to this Saturday's start of the Bell's Beer Bayview Mackinac Race, wound up with 31 entrants, and after four dropouts, 27 finishers. Among those finishers, it was the smaller boats that fared the best, just as they had in the "Chicago Mac" (which started on Lake Michigan July 11th).

"Supermac racers are those that keep racing, without stopping, after their Chicago Mac finish (at Mackinac Island) to a Port Huron finish line, for a total of 500 nautical miles," explained Supermac Co-Chair and Bell's Beer Bayview Mackinac Chair Peter Wenzler, who sailed aboard Bill Alcott's 65-foot Equation. "The smaller boats started first in the Chicago Mac, but halfway through the race the fleet inverted and the big boats got ahead. However, the wind was such that the larger boats had to beat their way to the Supermac finish while the smaller boats got to run in 30 knots of breeze, so it became their race."

Equation finished third over the line behind Peter and Christopher Thornton's Volvo 70 Il Mostro and Rick Warner's ORMA 60 Arete, in that order, but corrected out to fourth in Monohull Class 1. (Il Mostro corrected out to sixth Equation's same class, while Arete finished third in the Multihull Class.) Winning Multihull Class was Jonathan Alvord's Corsair F-31R Triceratops, while taking Monohull Classes 2, 3 and 4, respectively, were Bill Martin's 70-foot Stripes, Gintaras Karaitis's Schock 41 Quick Silver and Michael Leland's Najad 332 Hope. To Wenzler's point, the top three finishers in Monohull Class 3 (for the smallest boats), also finished top-three overall. They were the aforementioned Hope, Tim Prophit's Fast Tango, and David Keys's C&C 35 Shamrock.

Organizers were the Bayview, Chicago and Port Huron Yacht Clubs, who billed this as the longest fresh water race on earth. According to Wenzler, most of the boats are planning to compete in the Bayview Mac, so collectively, all three events have to be the most exciting 10 days of racing fun on the Great Lakes.

This year marks the 91st running of the Bell's Beer Bayview Mackinac Race and the 107th running of the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac.

Full results here [PDF]