By Scott Atkinson | Hour Detroit Magazine | Published January 3, 2023

In 2022, the veteran sailor served as the historic Bayview Yacht Club’s first female commodore

On June 17, 2012, Lynn Kotwicki was cooking out at the Atlantic Ocean, staring at a world the rest of us can’t see. What to us would only appear as an endless expanse of water is to Kotwicki an aquatic landscape of bumpy waves and rolling, hilly swells plains of still water and currents that run through them like rivers.

Kotwicki was about to set sail for the biennial Newport Bermuda Race – 635 miles out into the Atlantic over the course of two days. She was the only woman on the 15-person crew, sailing and sleeping in alternating four-hour shifts, and also the highest ranking. Gender norms be damned. Kotwicki was “command central,” as she put it just before setting off. When she speaks on a boat, people listen.

That’s part of the reason why she was named commodore — that is, head honcho — of the Bayview Yacht Club for 2022, the first woman in its 108-year history.

It’s also because she’s been on the water her entire life — well, almost. She was 2 days old before she was first on a boat.

She started sailboat racing with her father after her mother died when she was 9, in 1981. Suddenly a single father, her dad thought his racing days were over until a friend suggested their crew be their own kids. She was 13 the first time she raced the Port Huron to Mackinac race, which usually takes three days.

“It was my turn to give back,” she says now of being named the 2022 commodore, a job that is far more than a cool title. During her tenure, she oversaw a $5 million overhaul of the yacht club located across from the easternmost part of Belle Isle. When the club decided to change the clubhouse menu, she had the final word on what everyone could eat. Any issue in the club is her issue. When the weekly Windsor Yacht Club races on Lake St. Clair end, she can’t just kick back and have a beer. She mingles, makes sure everyone (the club has just shy of 1,000 members) is happy.

That’s in addition to her day job as an independent management consultant, working with major organizations including health care and automotive.

Bayview isn’t Detroit’s only yacht club, but aside from being over a century old, what Kotwicki says stands it apart from others is that it’s primarily a racing club. Inside the clubhouse, one wall is dedicated to the dozens of trophies on display, won all over the world by Bayview members. She estimates that about half of the membership races outside the state and as many as a third race internationally.

She is among that third. Over the course of the sailing season, she races twice a week locally and travels throughout the year to various spots on the globe to race as well.

“She is a trailblazer,” says Trish Kirkman, her friend and crewmate and treasurer of Bayview. “She has the respect of all the members, male or female … She’s a leader. In the boardroom … watching her interact with everyone, she’s just awesome.”

In late September 2022, Kotwicki was rigging up Hot Ticket, the team boat she races on locally, for the Windsor race. As they secured halyard and discussed the winds, Kirkman told the story of the previous week’s race, when they pulled from behind to win after Kotwicki noticed something no one else saw.

They were back in the Detroit River, on the final stretch, resigned to second place. The wind was coming from behind them — but not for long. In the distance ahead of them, Kotwicki spotted a flagpole (“It’s always there,” she says), where she noticed the wind changed.

She warned her crew and told them how to prepare. The finish line was 500 yards away.

The other boat didn’t read the wind and “wiped out,” as Kotwicki puts it, tipping almost completely over. Hot Ticket sailed past, taking first.

Kotwicki isn’t one to talk about herself. And so, as the team docked the boat the following week (they took second), Kirkman pipes up instead: “She’s a badass.”