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wind, but the engine would not catch. He tried again, tried everything he knew, then gave up and made a Mayday call on the radio.
    As he gave his location and described the man in the water, the boat shook as it was slammed aground by a wave. It quickly rolled onto its side, driven into a groin in the shallows. William took a few seconds to get his bearings—to calculate the water depth and the waves and the distance to shore—and then unclipped his tether, yanked the cord to inflate his PFD, and jumped overboard.
    It took a long time to scramble up on the shore, and he lay on the beach panting as the first rescue boat roared out of the harbor headed for the bar.
    Soon he heard a helicopter.
    They found Hank’s body an hour later.
WingNuts
    At age 51, Mark had been sailing his whole life along with his younger brother, Peter. As kids they raced small sailboats on lakes, graduating to larger boats and races on Lake Michigan and elsewhere. No question, they were highly capable sailors. Previous to the 2011 Race to Mackinac, Mark had done the two-day Chicago–Mac five times and Peter four, along with dozens of other races. Suzanne, Mark’s girlfriend, and one of the crew this year, was doing her third Chicago–Mac and had also sailed across the Atlantic. When you looked at their credentials they seemed like professional racers, but they held jobs in the “real world.” Still, they seemed sailors first, and were skilled, able competitors.
    Mark and Peter were also members of a close-knit extended family. With cousins John and Stanton, they’d purchased
Wing-Nuts
, their current entry in the race, and they sailed it together, along with Peter’s son. In photos they looked like a poster family for club racing.
    They were excited for another Chicago–Mac and had hopes of winning the sport-boat class.
    Held by the Chicago Yacht Club, the Chicago–Mac has been an annual event for a century, making it one of the oldest organized races in the United States. Well over 300 sailboats usually compete, with 345 registered in 2011. Lake Michigan, the race site, is scarcely a “lake” in any sense of that word except for being fresh water. Conditions on the 333–nautical mile course across the length of Lake Michigan to Lake Huron rival those of an ocean and often change radically over the 2 to 3 days most boats need to complete the course. In July the only thing predictable about the weather is that it will likely be unpredictable—at least to some extent. Thunderstorms and squalls, often violent, can rapidly sweep the area, sometimes seemingly faster than radar and thebest forecasting can see them coming. Boats are often damaged and crew injured. But for all this, there had never been a race-related death.

    WingNuts
under sail in 2010. (AP Photo/G. Randall Goss)
    Suzanne, Mark, his three co-owners, and three others comprised the crew of
WingNuts
, a modified Kiwi 35, a sailboat that looked very unusual at first view. Like the fast racing boats used in the Volvo Ocean Race and many others, the Kiwi had a lightweight planing hull that was ballasted primarily by a heavy bulb at the bottom of a long, thin keel. At 35 feet,
WingNuts
displaced only some 4,000 pounds, about 1,400 of which was ballast. The primary beam of the hull was only a little over 8 feet, providing minimum wetted surface, and the boat carried a proportionally large amount of sail.
    But what made a Kiwi unusual was its “wings,” which extended out 3 feet from the hull on both sides, a couple feet above the water. While on a typical race boat the crew sat on the rail on the windward side using their body weight to help keep the boat upright, on a Kiwi the crew could move their whole bodies out of the cockpit far to the side to provide greater leverage. When well balanced by the combined righting forces of the keel and crew weight, the boat could carry more sail without being blown over, and thus sailed very