Lake Pontchartrain Sailing — Pontchartrain & Tammany Yacht Clubs

Six hundred thirty square miles of brackish water, averaging twelve to fifteen feet deep, with a southwest breeze that holds nearly year-round. Lake Pontchartrain is what kept New Orleans sailors racing when yellow fever emptied the city every summer, what let them hold the oldest point-to-point regatta in the Western Hemisphere starting in 1850, and what still fills weekend courses with keels today. The north shore carries two clubs. The Pontchartrain Yacht Club in Mandeville was founded in 1967. The Tammany Yacht Club in Slidell's Oak Harbor opened in 1980. Both welcome reciprocal guest members — call ahead to arrange a visit. The tradition they anchor runs deeper than either. The Southern Yacht Club of New Orleans, second oldest in the United States, held its organizational meeting at the Pass Christian Hotel on July 21, 1849. In 1857 it relocated to New Orleans and moved its regattas to Lake Pontchartrain, where they've run since. The Race to the Coast, which started July 4, 1850, still begins on the lake's New Orleans shore and finishes in Gulfport, Mississippi. What you're sailing is an estuary — narrow passage to the Gulf, tidal changes, fresh water from six rivers mixing with salt. The lake formed 4,000 to 2,600 years ago as the Mississippi Delta built its southern and eastern edges with alluvial deposit. It's wide enough to let you forget you're inland. The wind is reliable. The fetch is real.