Port Huron to Mackinac sailboat race: Madcap wins class after Chicago rescue
Wind snaps masts on Lake Michigan, then goes flat on Lake Huron
Karma is the guy on the Chiefs *and* the crew that rescued a man overboard a week ago in Lake Michigan.
John and Marian Hoskins, co-owners of Madcap, won their class in the 100th Bayview Mackinac race on Sunday.
Just a few days earlier, they placed second in class on their Santa Cruz 52 in the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac. During that event, their crew dropped out to respond to a distress call and then re-entered the competition.
At the moment, the Madcap crew is stunned by it all.
“It’s hard to reconcile,” Marian Hoskins, 55, of Lake Bluff, Illinois told Shifting Gears on Monday. “We’re still on a high from winning first place. We’re so grateful the wind didn’t die before we finished. This is what we’ve been praying for. Karma was on our side, for sure.
Looking back, the crew can’t stop thinking of Shawn Dougherty, 56, of Seattle, Washington, after storm winds tossed him off Callisto, a J/125 owned by Jim Murray of Lake Bluff, Illinois, at night.
“It was so lucky that it was such a perfect recovery. But we were prepared. We had done the man-overboard drills. We worked the safety gear. We made our own luck,” said Marian Hoskins, who pulled the sailor out of the water with the help of a college football player-turned sailor.
Sailors fought rain, lightning and brutal winds in Chicago. Sailors struggled to find wind on Lake Huron to even get going. Race coordinators delayed the start as a result.
“It was night and day, coming out of Port Huron,” Marian Hoskins said.
‘Most bizarre thing you’ve ever seen’
“The forecasted wind was fighting with the sea breeze, trying to come in with the land heating up. The air was trying to circulate on the land, and it was like the wind was in circles,” Hoskins said. “Boats were sailing in every direction. It was the most bizarre thing you’ve ever seen.”
Racing out of Chicago was, she said, “champagne sailing.”
It was all downwind, Marian Hoskins said. “We were fighting to get out of Port Huron because the wind was so light … It was two completely different races.”
Now, she said, “We’re trying to just decompress.”
Madcap has raced four Bayview Mackinac Race courses, making the podium every time. The crew last won on the longer, Cove Island course in 2017. This year’s race was the shorter, original 1925 route.
“This weekend, we didn’t have to worry about thunderstorms or rain. We just had to worry about sailing the boat fast. That was refreshing,” said John Hoskins, 47, a Lake Michigan Hall of Fame sailor who competes internationally. “It seems like most of the races we do now have some sort of storm to contend with or a threat of a storm.”
Not this week. The crew had to just keep the boat inching along.
“It takes focus of patience,” he said. “It can be extremely frustrating as you see people sail away from you … As we kind of made the turn toward the top of Michigan, there was more breeze toward shore but it was slow to get over there ... We used binoculars to look at other boats and wind on the water.”
Boats bunched up in packs, he said. “There was a lot of compression.”
A ‘home team’ cheered by Detroit
People stopped to congratulate Hoskins and the Madcap crew everywhere they went.
Charlie Trost of Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, race chairman of the 2024 Bayview Mackinac Race, said the back-to-back performance of the Madcap crew is “very cool” — and impressive.
“They’re the hometown hero even though this isn’t their hometown. What they did last week was so honorable, everyone was pulling for them,” said Trost, 35, who raced Pendragon, a J/130.
While other sailors were drinking beer and margaritas mid-afternoon Monday at the Pink Pony, Trost was towing his itty bitty sons (aged 1, 3) in a carrier behind a bicycle to get them to nap amid the excitement.
By 10 p.m., Trost was relaxing on the patio of the Mackinac Island Yacht Club.
Eat, sleep and feelin’ good
Meanwhile, John and Marian Hoskins took their crew to dinner at “The Woods,” which delivers guests by horse and carriage. The couple is staying at the Bicycle Street Inn downtown and feeling “extremely happy and proud” of everything and everyone.
“It was a huge fleet with stiff, stiff competition,” John Hoskins said of the record 334 boats registered. “I knew this was going to be a really tough one to podium in, let alone win.”
He and other sailors will accept their awards during an island ceremony Tuesday.
Note: Phoebe Wall Howard covered sailing for the Detroit Free Press, and she has been going to Mackinac Island since childhood. Her Papa won his last Port Huron to Mackinac race on Chippewa, a Tartan 34C, in 2014 at age 85. Phoebe’s husband is past commodore of the Port Huron Yacht Club.