Capt. Lou Clark and Capt. Shelley Morton traded in their sea legs and yachts for a Land Rover nicknamed Diva and eight days in the desert when they competed in the 2024 Rebelle Rally. The Rebelle Rally is the first women’s off-road navigation rally competition in the United States, covering 2,500 kilometers across the Nevada and California desert. Blending the art of road-driving with precise navigation, the Rally does not allow cell phones or GPSs throughout the competition. It isn’t a speed race, but a unique and demanding event based on the elements of headings, hidden checkpoints, time, and distance using maps, compasses, and roadbooks. For Clark and Morton, participating in the Rally seemed like fate. When the two met at a Yacht Sales and the Law networking event, Clark had just competed in the 2022 Rally. Morton remembered a friend competing in it in the past, so the two began chatting, and then stayed chatting about it until Clark rang up Morton on a whim. “She called me up and said, ‘Hey, we’re doing the Rebelle Rally next year,’” Morton said. “I was like, ‘Oh… okay, sounds good!’” While this was Morton’s first experience competing in the Rally, Clark was yearning to compete again after finding a passion for the competition. “I found myself in a group of 120 women who were happy tinkering with cars and entirely capable women fixing their own mechanical breakdowns,” Clark said. “I kind of felt at home, it felt a bit like I’d found my people.” Dubbing the 2023 Rally her “Redemption Rally” after a disheartening team experience in the last, Clark convinced Morton, who has a degree in computer mapping, to join her. After some preparation — including sewing epaulets to their custom vests, buying captain hats, and devising a team name, Port (Clark) and Starboard (Morton) — the two left to the starting line in Tonopah, Nevada. “It’s eight days of nonstop,” Morton said. “You’re up at 5 a.m. or before and there’s always something to do.” While the pair were eager to start, they soon realized how tough the rally really was. Morton took the lead on mapping and compass work while Clark drove, hunting for checkpoints to stay in the competition. Unlike a regular race, winning the Rally is based on points gained through reaching checkpoints and completing Enduro Challenges. Teams are given a checkpoint guide each morning with key information the team must use to plot the checkpoints on paper maps. The guides might include a latitude or longitude, or it may reference a heading and distance from another checkpoint. “A lot of those checkpoints will have an opening and closing time, so you can’t get to them before a certain time or after a certain time, otherwise you’ve lost them,” Clark said. Besides checkpoints, the pair had to complete timed navigation challenges called Enduro Challenges. These challenges require competitors to follow a roadbook along a route, arriving at different points in between at exact times. “If you realize that you had to slow down, you’ve got to recalculate how much you’ve traveled, how much you’ve got left, and what average speed should be for that next section,” Clark said. “And within the Enduro, it’s not like take a right on Main Street,” Morton said. “It’s telling you that you need to take a right when you get to a boulder or a barn, so you’re like, ‘Well, is it that boulder?’” Plotting points with difficult directions isn’t easy, especially against seasoned Rally veterans, but Clark said Morton did an exceptional job. “We don’t have a lot of Rally territory here in South Florida, but [Morton] did an amazing job at taking that on,” Clark said. “I wasn’t anywhere near [her] level, by a long shot, and that was probably the biggest part of the prep.” While the pair did well on navigating and driving, one equipment overlook cost them hours of time. Their car, Diva, received sponsored Pirelli tires throughout the competition, but the team kept the factory size rims. The large factory rims didn’t have enough side wall, so Diva was blowing through tires, “like nobody’s business.” “There was a silver lining,” Clark said. “We were like a Formula 1 team out there — we were in and out in like eight minutes.” Clark and Morton started strong, finishing seventh overall on day one, but by the end, the rims had done their damage, and the team finished 48 out of 58 in their class. While they might not have placed as high as they wanted to, the pair enjoyed the camaraderie even more than the competition. “There are some teams that are extremely competitive, whereas we were not as competitive,” Morton said. “We ended up forming an alliance, if you want to call it that, and I wish we would have figured that out a little bit sooner as it was going to be more enjoyable overall if we didn’t keep ourselves in a silo.” The team’s most memorable moment came on the last day — cresting a hill and seeing the final base camp in Joshua Tree National Park in California. “We really wanted to finish, not be towed in, so I think I welled up a little bit when we saw base camp,” Morton said. Finishing what both deem to be one of the hardest things they’ve ever done brought immense satisfaction and happiness to Clark and Morton, and Clark is ready to compete again. “I’m romancing the partner back into the game again,” Clark said. “I’ve signed up again and I’m hoping to God that Shelley will say yes eventually.” The two believe their competition experience together, along with some car adjustments, can propel them up the rankings in the next competition. “We learned so much it sort of feels like it’d be great to put that into use and give it one more shot. Don’t you think so?” Clark asked a smiling Morton. While Team Port and Starboard have yet to decide if they’re bringing yachting to the desert once more, they both know the camaraderie and chemistry from the Rally only strengthened their tight-knit friendship.