Sailing in North Dakota?

We were just two hours into the trip, and I was already adrift and naked. The sailboat was tracking away from me, and the lake water was endless and hazy blue to all points of the compass. A minute before, as the thirty-four-foot Sovereign ticked up to seven knots in a strong wind, I’d been surfing off the stern, hands clenched around a rope, my clothed body dragging and skipping on the water of Lake Sakakawea (pronounced sah-kah-kah-WEE-ah), one of the region’s best-kept boating secrets.

Our sailboat—a gleaming white seagull of a craft with teakwood floors and a cabin that sleeps five—left from the marina at Hazen Bay around noon. It was mid-July, windy, sunny, ninety degrees and rising, and Mike Quinn, a U.S. Coast Guard–licensed captain who guides overnight voyages on the lake, stood at the wheel. “Let out the headsail a little bit,” he said. “OK, now let off the main cleat.”

Three friends and I had driven nine hours from Minneapolis to meet Quinn for a two-day participatory sailing trip on Sakakawea. The lake, the country’s third-largest manmade reservoir, reaches 178 miles across the state. Part of the Missouri River, it appeared as a giant squiggle on our map, working west from the middle of the state. We knew almost nothing about the lake, but rumors of a nearly boat-free inland sea that, in size, rivaled Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the great reservoirs of the Colorado River in the desert southwest, had prompted us to sign up for the trip, site unseen.

I was curious to see what sailing in North Dakota could entail. Wheat fields and the arid Great Plains seem the antithesis of anything nautical or maritime. What sailing soul, I wondered, would live in such a landlocked locale?

That person, I soon discovered, was Mike Quinn, a gregarious free spirit of fifty-eight years who works a day job as a municipal judge. Quinn runs guided day trips and overnights on the lake through his company, Sail Sakakawea, captaining experienced sailors and first-timers alike on the lake he’s sailed for years. “People don’t believe that you can sail in North Dakota,” Quinn said on our first morning at his home in the tiny town of Hazen. Over coffee and eggs, Quinn told tales of his time on the lake, pulling anecdotes from his trips with family, friends, and clients, and drawing descriptive comparisons with locations as far-flung as the Caribbean and the planet Mars. “Crystal clear blue water, coal, and scoria deposits on the hills, brick-red pumice on the shore, you’re going to be amazed,” he promised.

We launched from the marina on Hazen Bay, a twenty-minute drive from Quinn’s home, near the eastern end of the lake. The giant lake—a 368,000-acre reservoir with 1,200 miles of shoreline—was created in 1954 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the colossal Garrison Dam in central North Dakota. Named after the young Shoshone guide who led Lewis and Clark through North Dakota in 1804, Sakakawea seeps far west and into the canyons of the state’s precipitous Badlands region; it reaches depths of up to 180 feet.

Stanley Barton, a friend from Minnetonka and an experienced sailor, stacked the anchor chain in a hatch as we motored out. Digital gauges mounted above the cabin door flickered to life. “This is beautiful,” said Barton, who grew up in Milwaukee, sailing on Lake Michigan. “We’re going to have some real sailing today!” Another friend, T. C. Worley, and I worked below deck organizing gear, stowing sleeping bags, and putting sodas and steaks on ice. Captain Quinn stood at the wheel, a polished stainless steel hoop, four feet in diameter and with six spokes. “We’ll get wind out beyond this bay,” he said.