Watch Mackinac boat race from shoreline - or online.(News)

Byline: Dave Orrick Daily Herald Staff Writer

If you really want to hear the drama of the world's greatest freshwater sailboat race - this weekend's Race to Mackinac - you'll have to wait for the sailors themselves to tell the tales well after they round Gray's Reef, cross the finish line, moor down and start swilling rum.

But, thanks to one suburban skipper, regular folks with Internet access can follow the dayslong race, as crews battle each other on notoriously fickle seas of Lake Michigan on a 333-nautical-mile odyssey from Chicago to Mackinac Island on the northwest finger Lake Huron. The race started Saturday at noon.

"We're trying to make it more of a spectator sport," said Kim Flagstad, a Deer Park resident who runs Palatine-based FlagShip Integration Services Inc.

The company has developed a global-positioning transmitter - christened on as many as 75 yachts at Saturday's start - that will relay a boat's location, speed and heading via satellite to a computer program that will plot the data on a map of the race.

Such race tracking has been used in past Mackinac races, but Flagstad said after numerous equipment failures she decided to take on the task of redesigning the GPS transponders specifically for sailing.

The new design is easier to use, lighter, more durable and completely self-contained with a reliable battery, allowing the sailors to sail, and the fans to watch long after the masts have disappeared over the horizon.

"Well, not quite NASCAR," acknowledges Jim Hill, a crewmate and technical guru of the device, when questioned about a news release making an analogy to the car-racing circuit.

But, like many sailors, Hill, a Scottish-born Chicago resident, is quick to note that, "unlike any other sport, you can't just step on the sidelines and take a break" during endurance sailing races like "The Mac."

It's that total commitment (a crew's motto in rough seas is "puke over the side and get back to your job") that Flagstad, 52, says drew her into sailing when she was 38. That's a ripe age for any competitive sailboat captain to get a start, not to mention being one of the few women in a culture where macho is eclipsed only by favorable winds.

"I had been a golfer, and that just didn't cut it as a means to get away from my business," she said. "Somehow, when you step out on a boat and get out on the water, all your problems fade away. And when you get back, they're all so small and manageable."

But don't confuse that with Flagstad seeking some sort of mellow spa treatment off-hours. Other pursuits include motorcycling and soaring on fixed-wing gliders near her other home in Arizona.

This will be her sixth consecutive Mac. In 2001, she went full- on into the sport, buying her boat, Ozymandias IV, named after a Percy Shelley poem. It was the same year her husband, George Welch, died of emphysema.

"There's nothing more horrible than seeing the most important person in the universe die in front of you," she says. "At the age of 48 to lose a husband, you really assess everything."