Crawling Across Cut Glass to Sail
If you want to be good, sail in college. For low dues you sail lots of races. The maneuvers sink into your bones. It's no accident that both Rolex Sailors of the Year, Augie Diaz and Hannah Swett, were All Americans. And even at schools with professional coaches and powerhouse sailing programs, there's enough of the driving all night to regattas in beater cars and scrounging fixit parts and sleeping on floors and red-eyeing home for exams on Monday (darned right there's a party on Saturday night) that no one need be deprived of their rightful craziness-of-youth experience. Sarah Martin, apparently, is having one of those experiences as we see her here at the Sugar Bowl Regatta at Tulane. Did she ever finish reading those sailing instructions?
Sarah Martin hits the wall at the Sugar Bowl Regatta
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Beyond the big programs—which are sorely few—the craziness of youth becomes a huge asset, because at lots of schools you gotta want it so bad you'd crawl across cut glass to sail. At the University of South Alabama (USA), it took years just to get the notion of a sailing club past the safety committee. "I guess they thought we'd all drown," says Shaun Small.
At Kenyon College in Ohio, what Robert Northrup calls "our little, loud sailing team" was resuscitated a few years ago on the inspiration to hunt down a legendary Club 420 from the days of yore. "We found it, all right," Northrup says. "Uncovered. The four of us had quite a clean-up day."
Kenyon now has 4 boats (dues are $5/semester) and recruits aggressively. Northrup says, "Picture us on campus with boats on trailers, blasting bluegrass to attract attention." By contrast, powerhouse Tufts might send 40 sailors to 12 regattas on a single busy weekend.
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2004 Inter-Collegiate Nationals
Schedule:
ICSA Women's North American Dinghy Championship 5/26-28
Afterguard and Annual Meeting 5/29
ICSA/Layline North American Team Race Championship 5/30-6/1
ICSA/Gill North American Dinghy Championship 6/2-4 Site: Cascade Locks (Marine Park), Oregon
The event site is located in the scenic Columbia River Gorge, approx. 45 minutes East of Portland and 20 minutes West of Hood River. The Gorge is known throughout the world as a premier windsurfing venue, and the Locks are developing a comparable reputation among dinghy, skiff, and fast-keelboat sailors.
Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association of North America
Columbia Gorge Racing Association
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Here's USA again: The club eventually got a charter, but $1,000 per semester from the student government doesn't go far. It was scary to invest in a fundraiser BBQ at nearby Buccaneer YC, recalls Sarah Martin: "What if we got stuck with a pile of expensive food? But just about every member of the club showed up to support us. We made $1,500 and bought 3 used 420s—you can imagine the boats—and we bought used gear on eBay, and the local YC's came through with loaners. We were in business. USA still does BBQ's, but the best moneymaker is our T-shirt, Top ten reasons why sailing is better than sex. Number 3, for example: "No one expects you to sail with just one partner for the rest of your life."
Karl Kleinschrodt and others spent last summer building a USA team pier on the grounds of Buccaneer YC, using pilings blown out of another pier by a hurricane, and the team hosted its first regatta last September. From a year ago when the team had only 3 people who knew how to sail, Kleinschrodt, now a sophomore, has trained 7 skippers and 12 crew, some of whom had never been on a boat before. Kleinschrodt says, "We have freshmen now and new blood coming. Whenever I'm with high school sailors I make sure they know we have a team." [Karl, put this stuff on your resume—Ed.]
There's an upside, if you can make a go of such efforts. At the University of California, Berkeley, the sailing team has been student-run, usually without a coach, since the 1930s and on through its first dinghy regattas in the 1950s to now. Blessed by strong traditions and alumni support, CAL is a powerhouse among student-run teams; the struggles are real but not frantic, and it's exactly what some people want. Current sophomore Anne Conway helped start a sailing club in high school in high school in Stockton, California, then chose Cal, in part, "Because the sailing team is student-run. We decide how we train and who goes to regattas. We're responsible for ourselves."
Worried about the future of sailing? You worry too much.
—Kimball Livingston
Waiting for a turn in the sailing rotation
Kimball Livingston - SAIL
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