The art of stand-up backpack passagemaking

We battle-scarred veterans of the Chicago-Mackinac Race know better than to take the challenge of sailing the length of Lake Michigan lightly. The 333-mile course to the northerly extremity of the great, fickle and sometimes ferocious inland sea is strewn with disappointment and misery, broken dreams and discarded hubris. And so we prepare elaborately for this midsummer’s confrontation with the elements. A savvy Mac sailor’s kit is replete with gear for blistering heat and paralyzing cold, as well as the expected drenchings from sea and sky. Boats are generously stocked with food and drink to sustain crews through the rigor of three or four-hour watches.

That’s how it is, at least, on the boats that qualify to enter the race, all of which have cabins, bunks, heads and galleys. It was a little different on Dieter Reichelt’s boat. Though not entered in the race, he started with the fleet off Chicago. In preparation, he packed a bottle of water, a bag of trail mix, a compass, a Lake Michigan chart, some glue, duct tape and a few spare parts in a backpack and pulled on a wetsuit. Then he took off in the general direction of Mackinac Island.

On a sailboard.

He sailed some 400 miles. He stood “watches” that lasted as long as 14 hours—literally stood. He spent days standing on his 12-foot longboard and taking, in the most intimate way a sailor can, everything the lake dished out. With no fuss and only the bother of bumping into a rock off a Michigan beach, he made it to the island, his board gliding on a July evening’s dying breeze under the Mackinac Bridge and past Round Island Lighthouse, which marks the Mackinac Race finish.

Dieter Reichelt did this in 1989, but it was news to me until this spring. If he had had a publicist and a sponsor, as is the norm today for people who pull off feats like this, we’d all have known about it. As it was, he got a mention in the Chicago Sun Times.

With the help of a mutual friend, I found him, by telephone, on St. Armands Key, Florida, and learned something about this German immigrant who discovered boardsailing when it was a new and exotic sport and has since sailed thousands of miles on this variant of a sailboat that was designed for passages measured in hundreds of yards.

On that Mackinac passage, he tacked east in light air. When the wind died altogether, he lay down on his board in the middle of Lake Michigan and snoozed for a few hours. Then, with a revived breeze, he sailed east some more until, many hours and miles later, he hit the beach at Michigan City, Indiana, after dark. So began the drill that took him up the lake—long days of sailing followed by nights on shore, in a motel if there was one nearby, on the beach if not. “The beach was fine,” Dieter said. “I would just dig a hole in the sand and pull the sail over me.”

The light airs gave way to a cold front that came with a boisterous northerly. Dieter and his board beat up the lake, tacking as far as 30 miles out through waves so big they broke over his backpack. As tough a slog as it was, he preferred it to having to balance for hours on the board in light air. “In the heavy weather it was better, I could hook in and lean against the pressure of the sail in my harness.” When he needed a break, he’d let the sail flop on the water, sit down on the board and bob around for a while like so much flotsam.

Sailing away from a beach at the start of another heavy-air day, his Mistral competition longboard hit a rock, opening up a gash in the fiberglass. “The pressure of sailing into the waves was forcing water into the board,” Dieter said. “So I sailed the board backwards to the beach. Then I fixed the hole.” He did that with the two-part glue from the backpack. Later the duct tape he carried there would come in handy too—to fix a tear in the sail.

A couple of days later, when he took off from the beach at Charlevoix, Michigan, he found himself in windsurfer’s nirvana—in a fresh reaching breeze in the crystalline air over the limpid of water of the glorious northern reaches of Lake Michigan. He planed north, skirted the treacherous reefs of Ile aux Galets, cut the corner around Waugoshance Point and across Gray’s Reef (where Mackinac racers dare not go, by rule of the race and the rule of common sense) and then down the Straits of Mackinac—60 miles in an exhilarating daylong sprint to the finish. It took him 12 days, of which 117 hours were spent on the water.

Dieter was 48 when he did that. Now he’s 63, living a retirement (from a career as a mechanical engineer in the Chicago area) cleverly designed to afford maximum opportunity for boardsailing on the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Michigan. His love affair with sailboards began in 1979 at Club Med in Guadeloupe with a lesson in boardsailing from a French girl who, Dieter said, “didn’t know much about it—it was so new.”

Dieter got to know a lot about it (he sailed in a boardsailing world championship in the Canary islands in 1985), and by the time he made his jaunt to Mackinac he was veteran of a good many sailboard marathons of his own making.

Once he entered a sailboard regatta held at Ephraim, Wisconsin, on Green Bay, and traveled to the event by—how else?—sailboard. He sailed 240 miles up the western shore of Lake Michigan, through the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal and along the Door County peninsula. He arrived on the first day of racing, but too late for the first start. He shed his backpack on shore, and made it to the starting line for the second race.

Then he and his board took a ferry to Washington Island, from where they set out across the lake, bound for Leland, Michigan. It proved to be a more harrowing voyage than usual by Dieter’s no-fuss standards. He had recruited some commercial fishermen from the island to accompany the sailboard in a small, steel fishing boat. It was a rough crossing, and it got worse for the fishermen when they ran out of fuel. “We were near South Manitou Island, and I was able to pull them in there with the sailboard,” Dieter said. Yes, that is what he said—that he towed the fishing boat with a sailboard.

The Coast Guard took them all to nearby Leland, where they, and the sailboard, were held for a while by Michigan DNR officers who were quite sure something illegal was going on because Dieter’s story about crossing the lake on sailboard was too strange to be believed.

Dieter was finally able to liberate the sailboard. A good thing too, because he had to get to Muskegon for a sailboard competition. Naturally, he sailed there. It was only 175 miles away.

Dieter may be retired, but certainly not from long-distance boardsailing. A couple of summers ago he sailed his board across the lake from Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, with two other board sailors. “We thought it would take four hours, but the wind stopped in the middle of the lake and it took us more than 13 hours,” Dieter recalled. Outside of that, there was nothing remarkable about the outing.
I think I’ve learned something from Dieter. For this year’s Mac Race, I’m going to ask each crewmember to pack everything—personal gear, food and even some repair supplies for the boat—in a small backpack. I’m still debating the idea of 14-hour watches.