Chicago - Mackinac Tracking the Mac

by Elizabeth Kerr on 16 Jul 2011 The Chicago Yacht club's massive 103rd Race to Mackinac - presented by Veuve Clicquot fleet heads north this weekend with possibly the largest sailing fleet being tracked in the world.

While there are many companies around the world that provide tracking from 50-150 boats, this iconic event has a fleet of 361 (similar to 2010) and every boat in the race has a satellite tracking unit on it.

'Tracking was introduced to the Mackinac in 2010, however it was quite late in the pre-event process before we were able to find Traverse City-based IonEarth to assist us. In the first year, we were scrambling. However, we’ve worked very hard this year to address some small but critical hardware improvements and refine the interface to work exactly the way we want.

Chicago Yacht Club’s Greg Freeman, Mackinac Committee Chairman said, 'This has been a major project for the event. It’s a big exercise logistically, but we have been in touch with IonEarth on a weekly basis and have had a 'bird's eye view' of the refinements as they have developed. We are all pretty confident that we have things the way we want it and are looking for a great experience this year.

Jerry Miller and his two business partners from IonEarth are behind this project. The organization itself has evolved since 1992 as a result of some interesting twists and turns. At the outset, this high tech engineering business developed a satellite system to track oil pipeline ‘pigs’ which zoom hundreds of miles across the country, often underground.

Every time a 'pig' passed a strategically located sensor, the information was sent up to a satellite and then back down to be displayed onto a computer screen.

Jerry, a seasoned Mackinac sailor, decided to modify the technology and use it on his yacht in the 2005 Mackinac Race. With the motivation of a fixed deadline set, they were able to duct-tape a tracking unit to the front of the boat to track its route and apparently it worked quite successfully.

Next, they applied the units to entrants in the Baja 1000, a 1,062 mile off-road race that takes place on Mexico's Baja California Peninsula in late November. That, too, was a success and changed the whole dynamics of the sport.

Clearly, the applications became limitless. In the world-famous Iditarod, each team of 12 to 16 dogs and their musher cover over 1,150 miles in 10 to 17 days, from Anchorage, in south central Alaska, to Nome on the western Bering Sea coast, IonEarth was the tracking system of choice and the units survived extraordinary conditions from some of the roughest terrain Mother Nature has to offer, including jagged mountain ranges, frozen rivers, dense forest, desolate tundra and miles of windswept coastlines. Add to that temperatures far below zero and winds that can cause a complete loss of visibility.

In many ways, these events paved the way for developing a system for yacht racing. And in early 2010, IonEarth was asked to develop, build and supply 400 tracking units for the 102nd Chicago Mac. And the 103rd!

400 units, designed, assembled and tested in Traverse City arrived at the Chicago Yacht Club last Wednesday. Set up in alphabetically order by boat name, these 100% waterproof units, come with double-sided tape and a lanyard for extra security!

'What's really neat, of course,' Jerry says, 'is the ability to know where they are at any time. So we know, even before the skipper's do, where the forgotten ones have been left. We bring extra units out on the water at the start of the race to provide a spare unit that has been left ashore.!'

IonEarth has worked with the Chicago Yacht Club to ensure friends, family, stakeholders and media can follow the race right from the 'get go'! Go to http://www.cycracetomackinac.com/ and hit RACE TRACKING! You can follow one boat, one section or every one of the 361 boats in the race.

Right now the tracking is live with the two Cruising fleets powering north. The racing fleets join the action from 1130 today off Navy Pier.