The Trans-Superior Race is held every two years.  Beginning at Gros Cap light just outside Sault Ste. Marie. Ontario, and ending 338 nautical miles west at the suspension bridge in Duluth, Minnesota, it is the longest fresh-water race in the world.  It usually takes about three days to complete; obviously faster if you’re a bigger boat, and slower if you’re smaller.  The only rule on the course is to keep Copper Harbour light to port.

But it’s never a simple race.  Lake Superior is notoriously tempermental mostly due to its chilly nature (it’s temperature changes only by one degree Fahrenheit between winter and summer), which tends to affect weather patterns in ‘interesting’ ways.  The rhum line is, as a matter of course, identical to the inbound and outbound shipping lanes, and those ships are very big and very quiet, and very fast; I’ve been startled on a few occasions even in reasonably clear weather.  Three days isn’t particularly long, but it’s certainly long enough for most, and sailors are more often relieved to finish rather than excited.  To do well in the race requires some skill, a lot of concentration, and equal parts good luck for you and bad luck for your competitors.

Locking Through.

I’ve done the race three times now, and finished reasonably well the first two.  In fact, we won our division in 2007.  Going into this edition we had a reputation to defend, but we also had a new competitor with the same rating as ours: True North, a custom C&C 37 built especially for the Canada Cup race quite some time ago, possibly the mid-1970’s.  I’m not quite sure.  True North is long, stout, and heavy, with a masthead rig – better suited to heavy weather off the wind.  Straight Jacket is shorter, much taller, and much lighter, with a fractional rig – better suited to light weather on the beat.  Two very different boats with exactly the same rating in a race that could throw every possible condition at you. Our collected forecasts were calling for a mostly light and variable race – our advantage.

Or so we thought.  The race began with heavy air on the stern – more wind than forecasted.  True North with its masthead hoist and four extra feet of waterline confidently walked away from us.  Granted, we were fast, but we simply could not overcome the physical limitations of a shorter waterline and a vastly smaller spinnaker in those conditions.  For eight hours those conditions continued, and then it got worse – dense fog and thunderstorms.

We had kept a more northerly course after Whitefish, taking us above rhum line in favor of a slightly faster angle of sail.  As a result, when the thunderstorms ran through the fleet, we only caught their fading power.  The boats south of us, including True North, were able to benefit from the full force of the wind coming down from those systems, adding even more miles to their lead in addition to being closer to the rhum line.

Thunderstorms and fog are a poisonous mix. Navigating in the fog is difficult at best, forcing you to concentrate on the instruments, robbing you of the usual sensations that assure you of your course.  You may be driving straight, but your senses tell you that you’re turning.  You check the compass again – it says you’re going straight, but doubt creeps in.  You force yourself to trust the instruments.  You look up to check your trim, you begin to luff, you look down at the compass to find that you’ve strayed 15 degrees off course.  Repeat for four hours.  The lightning doesn’t help.  The system could be miles away, but the lightning travels farther and envelopes you in the fog, the light being extended among the water molecules all around.  Each flash is like someone turning on a 100-watt bulb for a second, leaving you effectively blind in the dark again.  And then again, and then again. Throw in the constant threat of tankers running up your stern, and you’ve got the makings for a stressful night.

At around 6am, the wind began to increase again, quickly.  When it hit 20 knots and was showing no sign of slowing down, we made the decision to douse the chute, which was the correct decision – by the time we released the halyard, the wind was up to 25 knots.  By the time we had the chute on board, it was at 30.  Then some mayhem began.  All hands came up, and we reefed the main.  The wind didn’t abate, and we lost our course a number of times even with the skipper at the helm.  This passing system was throwing all manner of havoc at us, but was managed well enough, until the system passed and things calmed down.  Then we made our own havoc.

During the cleanup, the spinnaker halyard got loose and flew up, getting tangled in the genoa halyard that was holding up our radar reflector. In trying to separate them, someone gave a little too much tug and tore the reflector apart, but the spinnaker halyard stayed tangled.  I then attempted to pull the spinnaker halyard down by gently pulling the genoa halyard down, hoping to bring the tangle down with it where I could separate it.  I pulled slowly, bringing genoa halyard down to me, but the tangle did not move.  I pulled some more, and then realized that my hand was resting on the mast – on the spinnaker halyard where it goes up, preventing it from coming down.  I let go, pulled a little more, and then heard a ‘thwip’ sound on the mast.  I immediately realized what I had done – I had pulled the genoa halyard clean through the clutch and turning blocks, right into the mast.  I swore, a lot.  We were bare-headed, with one halyard stuck up near the second spreader and another inside the mast.  We had one halyard left, and we needed it to go up and fix my mistakes.  I felt like the biggest fool on the lake.

So, for the next hour-and-a-half, I dangled around, 60 feet in the air, banging around in residual waves, rescuing the spinnaker halyard and then refeeding the genoa halyard.  It took several attempts, but eventually we sorted it out and continued on our way.

Three hours later, the same genoa halyard snapped during a head-sail change.  Fortunately, it snapped about two feet from the shackle, so were able to re-tie it without loosing much length and refeed it more quickly having learned from our mistakes made a few hours earlier.   Then a few hours after that, the other spinnaker halyard snapped, loosing its cover at the clutch.  That one we could not repair.

The fog – thick as paint – stayed with us until Tuesday.  It would give us some visibility from time to time, sometimes as much as half a mile, but then it would quickly quit its teasing and wrap us back up again, so thick we could barely see the top of the mast.  The wind never did get light like the forecast predicted, and our course continued to trend north as the favored tack pushed us farther away from the rhum line.

The forecast began to call for light to medium north winds in western Lake Superior, and our hopes began to rise.  We knew that True North had gotten away from us, but we were in terrific position to reap the greatest benefit of those winds, and we began to talk excitedly of a long spinnaker run into Duluth, perhaps even catching True North.

The forecast proved false.  But it did get light; too light.  By Monday night, it got so light we stopped and lost control of the boat.  Our only consolation was the hope that the rest of the fleet was subject to the same conditions.

Good Sailing

Eventually, by early Tuesday morning, the wind returned afresh, and we began to make very good speed on flat water, directly toward the finish.  The fog disappeared.  For the first time since the start, we saw blue sky and sun.  Our ETA into Duluth continually improved.  We figured that True North very likely was untouchable at this point, but the other boats were still in play.  We could come away with a second-place finish.  So we cruised along, feeling better but still unsure, until 5pm.

Three hours from the finish, the wind shut completely off.  We stood upright, and as if someone pushed a brake pedal we went from 6.5 knots to zero.  Again.  We would move a bit here and there, but we could not link puffs or lines, and we watched in horror as boats passed us assuredly to the east.  It so happened that these following boats saw us stop, so they tacked back out, stayed in some wind and scooped right by us.  It took us nearly ten more hours to finish, at 2:52am, in third place, exactly two hours out of second place, 3 days and 12 hours after starting.

True North had finished 14 hours earlier.