Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac
annual freshwater yacht race in the United States
The Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac is a 333-mile (289 nmi; 536 km) annual yacht race starting in Lake Michigan off Chicago, Illinois, and ending in Lake Huron off Mackinac Island, Michigan. It is hosted and managed by the Chicago Yacht Club. The "Mac" (as it is known) was first run in 1898 and is the oldest annual freshwater distance race in the world. The race hosts several hundred competitors each year and over 3,000 sailors.
Course
The race starts at the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse just off Navy Pier, heads northeast to cross Lake Michigan, enters Lake Huron at the Straits of Mackinac, and finishes in the Round Island Channel, off Mackinac Island, Michigan. The race course runs 333 mi (536 km). In 2011, 361 boats entered the race. Steve Fossett set the overall race record, 18 hours, 50 minutes, in 1998 with the multihull yacht, Stars and Stripes. Team Maverick, in 2024, set the monohull record, 22 hours, 24 minutes, and 23 seconds. Beating the previous record set 22 years ago by more than an hour.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.