Monday, October 24, 2011

Sad Chapter is Written into Stories of the Race to Mackinac

Some of the Beneteau 36.7 yachts leaving Chicago in the Race to Mackinac - Chicago Yacht Club & Event MediaSome of the Beneteau 36.7 yachts leaving Chicago in the Race to Mackinac - Chicago Yacht Club & Event MediaThe rich and varied history of the classic Chicago-to-Mackinac sailboat race has been fatality-free, until the 2011 contest.

The 103rd Race to Mackinac is history now, and like all the preceding Mac races that have come and gone, the countless sagas and stories from the multitude that sail it, are the nuts and bolts of that history. Unfortunately, what is certain to be the most prominent story from the 103rd, is the one with the news no one ever wanted to hear.

By noon Monday, July 18, 2011, the Chicago Yacht Club had posted the sad, stark announcement on its homepage:

".. ..it is with great regret that the Chicago Yacht Club acknowledges the deaths of two sailors who were competing in the 2011 Chicago Yacht Club's Race to Mackinac.

"A severe thunderstorm crossed Lake Michigan around midnight EDT last night. Wind gusts were reported at 52 knots with waves of 4-6 feet. . . .Wingnuts had capsized in these severe conditions"

The loss of the skipper, Mark Morley, 51, and crew member Suzanne Bickel, 41, both of Saginaw, MI, occurred approximately 13 nautical miles northwest of Charlevoix, MI. Both were experienced Mac race sailors, the club said. Their boat, Wingnuts, was a Kiwi 35, competing in the Sportboat section.

The sense of dread and disappointment this news spread among Mac race watchers everywhere is captured perfectly in a lament for lost sailors at Bree’s Mackinac Island blog. The deaths of Morley and Bickel are unprecedented. Of the many thousands who have sailed this legendary Lake Michigan race – from the first contest between two sloops and three schooners in 1898 to the 300-plus competitors of contemporary times – no one had ever been lost to the lake before.

Intense storms are not infrequent on Lake Michigan, and boats – but not lives – have been lost. The seventh Chicago-to-Mackinac race occurred in 1911 (in the early years the race was held intermittently) in an 80-mph gale, and one boat was wrecked on the rocks of Fisherman’s Island, not far from today’s tragedy. In 1937, which went down in Mac race history as "the year of the Big Blow," only 8 boats out of a fleet of 42, finished.

More recently, according to the CYC’s history of the race, in 2002, "a cold front shifting northerly broke booms, dismasted one boat, capsized the 44-foot multihull Caliente …." But this year was different, as the vivid account portrayed by David Schmidt, editor at Sail-World USA, asserts.

Peter Wenzler, a co-skipper of the boat Fast Tango told Schmidt: "The wind had been coming down in vertical shafts …. It just never stopped …. There was more wind than I’ve ever experienced in 35 years of racing all over the Great Lakes, and on the oceans …. This thing was different."

Wenzler’s extensive remarks in the Sail-World interview are genuine eye-witness history. He estimated his boat had been within 5 miles of the Wingnuts, and speculated that conditions for the smaller boat must have been "far, far worse."

In stories of tragedy we often seek and find solace in the survivors – those who make it through the struggle – and in lessons to be learned, and heroic actions. The 2011 Mac race has those stories, too. Bill Emery of South Shore Yacht Club in Milwaukee, and his crew on Gungnir also sailed through the storm, and probably passed within miles of the distressed boat.

Reached by phone Tuesday, Emery said his crew was able to make some careful adjustments in their sailing, as they tracked the coming melee with weather radar. About half the boats in the race, he guessed, have similar access to weather radar. The storm system, he said, had a bow echo cloud formation associated with series of squalls and thunderstorms.

Emery also made note of the fact that for so many of the 300-plus boats in the race, lake conditions were entirely different. Many boats reached Mackinac Island in fast conditions ahead of the storm, and a good number were behind it, but there were dozens of boats whose fate intersected with it.

Six Lives Are Saved; Crew of Sociable Are Heroes

When Wingnuts capsized around midnight EST, Sunday night, two were lost, but 6 others with the boat were lucky enough to free themselves from the safety harnesses that tethered them to the boat and hang on in the stormy lake. A short distance away, Robert Arzbaecher of Milwaukee, and his crew on the sailboat, Sociable, thought they heard a whistle from the open water. Then they caught sight of a small, faint light, and began to steer towards it.

"A needle in the haystack," Azbaecher told a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter. Without "a light on the life jackets, we would never have seen that." The crew of the Sociable found five of the Wingnuts crew on top of the capsized boat, and a sixth crew member in the water. They retrieved all six and directed other boats, as they began to arrive, in the search for the missing two until the Coast Guard arrived. In an earlier edition of the Journal Sentinel, Captain Joe McGuiness, sector commander of the U.S. Coast Guard in Sault Ste. Marie, MI, praised the crew of the Sociable for saving these lives.

Copyright Kathlin F. Sickel. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.Kathlin Sickel, M.K. Sickel photo

Kathlin F. Sickel -

Reading and writing in print and online. So much to uncover and report. Join me; let's see what we can discover.

Some of the Beneteau 36.7 yachts leaving Chicago in the Race to Mackinac - Chicago Yacht Club & Event Media Some of the Beneteau 36.7 yachts leaving Chicago in the Race to Mackinac - Chicago Yacht Club & Event Media

Peter Wenzler tells Sail-World about the storm that claimed two sailors in the 2011 Mac Race - Chicago Yacht Club & Event Media Peter Wenzler tells Sail-World about the storm that claimed two sailors in the 2011 Mac Race - Chicago Yacht Club & Event Media

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