Traverse City To Host National Sailboat Championship

Traverse City will host the North American Championship of the Melges 24 this coming August. The races will take place on West Grand Traverse Bay.

The Grand Traverse Yacht Club (GTYC), which boasts the largest Melges 24 sailboat fleet in the United States, is hosting racers from across the country Aug. 16 through Aug. 20.

“This is a big deal,” says Liz Zimmerman, commodore of the Yacht Club. “We’ll have potentially 50 Melges 24s.”

The Melges 24 is a monohull class of sailboat designed for racing made by Melges Performance Sailboats in Wisconsin. They went into production in 1994, and currently there are 14 of them based at the GTYC. “We have the biggest club … in this design class,” says GTYC General Manager Jordan Owen.

Owen says the boat is popular here for a variety of reasons. “It has strong Midwestern roots. They’re available at a fairly reasonable cost – you can get a boat, trailer and sails for around $20,000. They’re easy to take care of and to pack and take with you,” he says.

Plus they are a great racing boat. “For a 24-foot boat they’re very fast and fun to sail.”

Zimmerman concurs. “They’re a smaller version of a go-fast sport boat,” she says. The boats are designed with a flat hull, allowing it to easily plane or skid across the water. The Melges 24 was named “Boat of the Year” in 1994 by Sailing World Magazine.

Zimmerman recently returned from Florida, where her husband Scott and daughter Katie participated in the Bacardi Invitational Regatta with their Melges 24, Bad Idea. “Our boat is usually in the top six in Traverse City. We were in the 20s of 25 in Miami.”

The Melges 24 sails with a crew of four or five. With some 50 boats expected – Zimmerman says 31 have already registered – that will mean somewhere between 200 and 250 crew and others participating.  Many of them will be part of the Traverse City fleet, but the regatta will draw racers from elsewhere in Michigan, Canada, and other parts of the U.S.

The races will be approximately four miles in length and Zimmerman says they will take about an hour to race, with three or four races per day. Weather permitting, of course.

Owen says the opportunity to host the North American Championship came about in large part because of the enthusiasm of the local club. “People go to other regattas and say, ‘Why don’t we have it here?’ We as a club host large regattas on a regular basis.  We hosted a national championship for the Melges 24 ten or so years ago. That’s one step below.”

West Bay is an ideal place to race given its size and depth to comfortably conduct sailboat races while others are out on the bay as well. “That weekend is the power boat poker run, but it’s a big bay. There are no issues.”

One thing Zimmerman is especially proud of is the fact that the GTYC and the Melges 24 fleet here have more female participants than she sees anywhere. “The Traverse City fleet is unique in there’s a lot of women. A lot of yacht racing … do not have a high percentage of women. Traverse City does. Most have at least one female, several more than one. In Miami, I saw five or six of 25 (crews) with a woman.”

Plus there’s her own role. “I’m the third female [GTYC] commodore in 60 years."