First-time skipper sets sail for fun

Sometime before the start of the 76th Mills Trophy Race tomorrow night, Time Machine skipper Robert Gordenker will remind his crew, "Sailing and sail racing is about having fun - and winning is the most fun. But we are out here to have a good time and not get hurt."

Only a year ago, Gordenker was packing up to sail his first Mills race as tactician for a colleague at work.

"We had a very fun time, although we didn't do very well," he said. "What I enjoyed was the experience - the camaraderie of the crew and the accomplishment of going out and doing the race."

This time, he will be doing it at the helm of his boat, a very fast J/35 he purchased last September.

Built in 1986, the 35-foot sloop is an offshore racing classic. Its design was a precursor of the new-wave one-designs.

"It was a Lake Michigan boat with a tremendous reputation. This boat was feared on Lake Michigan," Gordenker said.

In fact, the boat was formerly know as CRISIS MODE, and won the National Offshore One Design regatta in Chicago last year.

Racing his own boat in the Mills, one of the oldest and most respected sailing events on the Great Lakes, has been on Gordenker's mind since he first sailed the race last year.

And he has devoted the intervening months to organizing a crew and getting his boat ready to participate.

A 42-year-old senior test engineer with a firm in Ann Arbor, Gordenker has taken the same methodical approach to launching a racing campaign that he uses to design and build test equipment.

"You could say I'm pretty organized. I basically started in January and we've had crew meetings every two weeks. A lot of work had to be done before the boat was ready to go into the water. We spent the first three months of the year working on it and just talking through what we were going to do and getting to know each other. It was really a big team-building experience."

Normally, Time Machine races with a crew of eight, including the skipper, but there will be nine aboard for the Mills.

Getting a crew together involved luck and e-mail, Gordenker said.

"I knew a couple folks to start with, but basically I talked to everyone I ran into who was interested in or knew about sailing."

"We didn't steal any crew from Lake Erie. They all are either new to racing or to the lake."

Except for a charter in the Caribbean, Gordenker hasn't done much sailing or racing in about 11 years.

But he is far from a novice. He has been sailing since he was 5 years old and has raced small boats, including 420s, 505s and 470s, extensively in Europe.

His mother is Dutch and he went with her to Veere, in the Netherlands, every year for summer vacation.

He went to sailing camp there for several years and then was selected to attend a special school for instructors. At 16 he was certified as an instructor and went on to teach sailing for three years.

An opportunity to sail with a colleague rekindled his enthusiasm for the sport two years ago, and he started racing again.

"I had heard a lot about the Mills," he said, "but I didn't race it until last year when the boat I crewed on used it as a tune-up for the Mackinac Race.

"It was the 75th anniversary race and that was special - and always fun."

The things that make the Mills especially challenging and fun, he said, are its course and the fact that it's a night race.

The race will start approximately 1.5 miles east of the Toledo Harbor Light at 5:30 p.m. tomorrow and is expected to finish at Put-in-Bay Saturday morning.

"A lot of people have said that because the race starts at night it's very different from other races, that navigation is more difficult and also that it's harder to sail fast because you're so used to looking at the sail to see if it's trimmed correctly," Gordenker said.

"At night, you can't see how the sails are bending and moving with the wind, so you have to rely on how the boat feels to know if it's sailing well.

"Also, you can tell other boats are out there because they have navigation lights, but you can't tell who's who. That's going to be an interesting thing for us."

Most boats competing for the Mills Trophy are grouped according to handicaps based on potential speed, so Time Machine will be racing in one of the last few classes to start. "We'll have to catch up and work our way through the entire fleet, past all the other boats, and that should be fun, too," Gordenker said.

"That's what we really expect of the race, just to have some fun," he said, wary of the jinx said to strike crews that get too cocky about their chances.

BY SHIRLEY LEVY

BLADE SPORTS WRITER