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player ready...More than 20 years have passed since the last time Evan McGlinn attempted to sail. He tried to shove off the coast of Nantucket Island, Mass., in a tiny sunfish, but the wind kept blowing him back to shore.
“I couldn’t even get it off the beach,” he said.
That was 1985, and McGlinn, 44, of Mineral Point, Wis., is about to embark on a more daunting sail as a crew member on the 36-foot Guaranteed Period in the 98th running of the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac.
The world’s longest freshwater sailboat race begins at noon Saturday on Lake Michigan after the 10:30 a.m. parade of boats past Navy Pier. The fleet of about 300 boats with about 3,000 sailors will set sail for Mackinac Island, Mich., hoping for fair winds but knowing anything from gale-force storms to still air might confront them.
“I am very much a newcomer,” said McGlinn, catalog editorial director for Land’s End Business Outfitters, one of the venerable race’s main sponsors.
Although not literally true, it sounds as if McGlinn won the employee-of-the-month contest.
The Guaranteed Period does feature a veteran captain. Randy Adolphs, 57, of Madison, Wis., has sailed the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Red Sea and on the Great Lakes and leads a crew of 11, meeting for the first time this week. Six sailors are from Duluth and have worked together as a team before, Adolphs said, and four are “pretty inexperienced. Honestly, I don’t want it to be too stormy. Southwesterly breezes would be nice.”
The boat to watch in the race is the 86-foot Windquest owned by Illinois’ Doug DeVos and captained by Tom Giesler, a 17-year Mac race veteran. The 19-member crew will be after the race’s monohull elapsed time record of 23 hours 30 minutes 24 seconds set by Pyewacket in 2002. Race spokeswoman Christie Kirchner said event organizers are passing out 200 transponders this year to enable each of those boats to be tracked on the lake through the chicagoyachtclub.org Web site.
McGlinn said his main chore on the trip might be fetching coffee and admitted he has read up on Lake Michigan and realizes that it “is not exactly a mill pond.”
He definitely plans to bring a seasick patch.
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