Cold, squalls and shooting stars all part of race across Lake Superior

DULUTH – The low-pressure sailing race across a few miles of Lake Superior on Wednesday bore no comparison to the 326-nautical mile Trans Superior that begins this week.

But Nicky Kumerow was on a boat, taking every opportunity to prepare.

The 34-year-old Duluth teacher is part of an all-female crew sailing the Duluth Yacht Club-run Trans Superior, which travels from the lower end of the Great Lake near Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., to Duluth. It’s Kumerow’s first time tackling the race, which can take up to four days.

“It is a really long race in the largest and coldest freshwater lake,” Kumerow said. “I am nervous.”

The Duluth Yacht Club in its current form has been operating more than 50 years, but some version of a yacht club has existed in Duluth since the city’s beginnings in the late 1800s.

The club holds regular Wednesday summer races at the tip of Lake Superior — with prime viewing from the Lakewalk —and has more than 200 members. Two Michiganders created the Trans Superior in 1969, and the Duluth club has been involved from the start.

Keith Stauber, a 73-year-old Duluthian and retired railroad worker, is helming the 35-foot Papa Gaucho II in his 24th Trans Superior, fresh off a victory in his class for the Chicago Yacht Club’s Chicago-to-Mackinac Island race on lakes Michigan and Huron. Two of his daughters are part of his crew of nine.

Competition for the biennial race has grown, with its largest number of entrants anyone can recall, at about 50 this year. It includes boats from Canada and other Midwestern states.

Barker’s Island Marina general manager Eric Thomas has two boats in the race. He’ll be on the Polar Bear with a crew of four.

The race can be intense and trying, he said, and is most difficult in the beginning when the boat is upwind, creating a frigid and uncomfortable stretch of time. He’s had sails knocked flat by “epic” squalls, and has spent hours watching the sun come up, with the water shifting from black to varying shades of blue.

“That faint glow in the morning really buoys your mood,” he said.

Race veterans describe periods of rough waters with no land in sight, solitude and a night sky absent of light. They’ve sailed near massive lakers and salties, which always have the right of way, and witnessed shooting stars and northern lights.

“It’s a 35-foot world,” Keith Stauber said.

Former Trans Superior chair Kris Henry is joining Kumerow on the boat Blondie. Their team is sailing in honor of a transgender former crew member who died by suicide last year. It’s also Henry’s first time in the race. She bought a boat decades ago to serve as a cabin, with no intention to sail, but was encouraged by yacht club members to learn.

Compared with other yacht clubs, it’s inclusive and approachable, she said.

Some members have boats and some don’t; some of those boats are large and expensive and some are basic and small.

The casual, everyone-is-welcome scene means it’s easy to hop on a boat and pick up knowledge, and has led to growth for the club, with members ranging from kids to age 92.