Bart Snow thinks he knows the secret to a successful race. On board the Snow Cat, which he’ll captain for the seventh time in the 37th biennial Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race, he designates one cook. From feeding the seven members of the crew and organizing supplies to rising before dawn to make the first pot of coffee, the cook’s job, Snow thinks, is the most important one on the boat.
“We have a happy crew,” says Snow, a Marblehead native who is a longtime member of the town’s venerable Boston Yacht Club.
That’s his philosophy. There are other skippers who prefer to spread the cook’s tasks across the entire crew, giving every member their turn to help boost the spirit of camaraderie.
To each his own in the world of sailing. Of the nearly 80 boats registered to compete in this year’s Marblehead to Halifax race, which begins Sunday, July 9, some are as small as 30 feet, others twice as big. Some are “doublehanded,” with just two crew members; others require as many as 12 sailors.
The 363-mile journey is billed as the “granddaddy” of ocean races. It was inaugurated in 1905, one year before another East Coast classic, the Newport Bermuda Race. The Marblehead to Halifax race originally ran as an occasional, informal competition between sailors from the Boston and Eastern Yacht Clubs in Marblehead and the New York Yacht Club. In 1939, it was established as a biennial event, on years when the race to Bermuda isn’t scheduled.
In the early races, most crews needed five days to reach Halifax, the coastal capital of Nova Scotia. In 2011, Jim Grundy’s 75-foot Bella Pita set the course record in 30 hours, 46 minutes.
Winning is nice, but most captains enter the race simply for the experience.
“We’re trying to combine the competitive part of the race, get some adventure out of that, and also do some cruising adventure-seeking on the way back,” says J.B. Braun,, a leading sail designer.
Speaking on the phone from Bermuda, where he joined his colleagues on the Team Oracle design team for the 2017 America’s Cup last month, Braun said his sons, Ryan, 27, and Tucker, 17, will crew with him on the race to Halifax. His wife, Kelly, and daughter, Hayley, will join them on the Eos for the return voyage to Marblehead.
Like a lot of people who grow up in and around the picturesque coastal town, where the once-dominant fishing industry long ago gave way to recreational boating, Braun was enchanted by the sails on the Marblehead harbor. At age 5, he recalls, he was “mesmerized” by the sight of all those boats off the shoreline. He learned to sail in the YMCA program on Children’s Island, about 3½ miles off the town’s coast.
“It was something that just clicked,” he says. “For some reason I was kind of a natural at it.” As he grew up in the sport, he set a goal for himself to become an Olympian; in 1988, he served as an alternate for the Olympic Flying Dutchman class in Seoul.
Ann Coulombe shares race director duties with Richard Hinterhoeller, her counterpart in Halifax. She took an interesting path to the role, she says. Having sailed all her life, she began racing in 2000. Her colleagues happened to include several race directors and judges, so their conversations naturally steered toward racing logistics.
“I thought that’s what everyone talked about,” she says with a laugh. “The back end was interesting to me: the mechanics, how you put a race together and make sure it’s fun and safe, all the rules and regulations.”
After growing up in Quebec City, Coulombe spent time in Marblehead. (She now lives in Weston.) She knows the attraction of the race for local landlubbers and sailing novices, timed as it is just after the town’s Festival of Arts around Independence Day.
“One of the great things about racing out of Marblehead is it’s a family community, with people lining the shores, going out to the Neck,” she says. “People show up in boats to watch the start of the race. It’s reminiscent of what you’d find in Europe, where the whole community comes out to watch the start of the race.”
Bart Snow has ancestors — lots of them fishermen — reaching all the way back to the 1740s in Marblehead. The town’s former finance director, who retired in 2005, has had plenty of time to devote to one of the town’s signature attractions.
“We have a good time,” he says. “We’ve only won once, in 2013, but we’ll keep coming back.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.