The 35th Annual Carolina Keelboat One Design Regatta, held in early November on Lake Norman YC was a great success with 47 boats competing across five fleets, including the 30th edition of the U20 North American Championship.

U20 sailors had three races on Friday with conditions improving with each race. Jeff Linton, with crew Steve Shaw and Tim Porter, ended the day in first with Brad Boston, Curtis Florence and Zach Mason a close second and Mark Aspland, Mark Gise and Joe Asplaand in third. All three skippers shared their overview of the races and their tips during a debrief and social.

The weather forecast for Saturday promised instability and it held true. The fleets saw as much as 2 knots from every direction on the compass. The competitors were held ashore in postponement which provided ample time to catch up with friends.  The U20 fleet took advantage of the time and had a terrific two-hour session led by Steve Shaw of Shapes of Speed. The RC wisely cancelled all racing for the day by late afternoon.

Fortunately, Sunday’s forecast was for great breeze, building as the day went on, and it did. The wind was 10 to 15 with higher gusts, which delivered terrific conditions for the U20s, VX Ones, E Scows, J/24s and San Juan 21s. The SJ21s had three races while the other fleets had four races.  In the U20s, Jeff Linton won three of the four races to secure the championship with only 10 points. This victory marked Linton’s 60th National, North American, or world championship title, an extraordinary milestone.  Additionally, as the highest-placing first-time skipper at the U20 North Americans, Linton was awarded the Don Corey Award, adding another well-deserved honor to the weekend.

In second overall, Brad Boston finished with 17 points, while BJ Jones together with brother Bill and wife Emily, finished third with 19 points. Mark Aspland and Matt Rush rounded out the top 5.

Across the other fleets, John Polek dominated the E Scows, followed by Cliff Russell, and Steve Lyon in third.  Stanley Hassinger won the VX One fleet with John Porter and Jim Harris in second and third.  Dave Rink captured first in the J/24s with Jamie Davis and John Collins in second and third.  And the SJ21s saw Robert Bouknight edging out Mike Robinson by 1 point and Paul DiMarco finishing third.

Hearty thanks to all the competitors for coming to race at Lake Norman YC for these two milestone events, particularly the U20 sailors who came from California, Utah, Nevada, Ohio, Florida and Connecticut. Special praise to the club’s chef extraordinaire, Bill Mongrain, for three days of great breakfasts; all the RC team headed by PRO Ken Gorni; Mark Allen who brought beer from Two Roads Brewing in Connecticut; Ca’n Dar for sharing his music talent with everyone on Saturday night; Mark Jump Photography, Deborah Young Studio, JH Peterson and Pete Lalli for their terrific photos, along with all of the volunteers who worked tirelessly to make this a successful weekend.

Sponsors who generously contributed their support for the event include: Auctus Advisors, Brandspeed, Capn Dar, Charlotte Perio, Shapes of Speed, Two Roads Brewing, Ullman Sails and The Windward Rail.

The post With U20 Class Win, Jeff Linton Racks Title No. 60 appeared first on Sailing World.

The beauty, the appeal and the uniqueness of US Sailing’s annual Championship of Champions invitational is the brilliant concept of forcing champion sailors into an unfamiliar craft. Fundamental to the regatta is that a true test of prowess is not in what the sailors have mastered in their respective one-design classes, but what they can master in a matter of days, against a field of known and unknown greats, on foreign waters.

First raced in 1976, this annual regatta is officially the Jack Brown Trophy, named after a long serving US Sailing official. Entry is open to all one-design classes big and small, with US Sailing selecting as many as nineteen competitors who are either current national, North American, or world champions. The list of luminaries and past winners runs long and the regatta will mark its 50th Anniversary in September, hosted by the New Bedford YC. The provided one-design craft for this edition is the traditional 15-foot Marshall Sandpiper catboat, still built in New Bedford by Marshall Marine with active fleets across the Northeast.

A Who’s Who of One-Design Champions

This year’s roster of champions has numerous household names among the skippers and crews: from Lightning guru Ched Proctor to Texan MC Scow ace Bill Draheim, and San Diego’s Chuck Sinks who has recruited fellow San Diegan Chris Snow.

Sinks and Snow should be a formidable pair, but they—like all their competitors—are no guarantee. As neophyte catboat sailors, they’ll have to be mindful of their habits. Snow, who’s been summering on Cape Cod of late, recently made a recon trip to Pleasant Bay Community Boating in Harwich, Mass., which has a fleet of Sandpipers, says his outing was highly beneficial.

“The Sandpiper doesn’t have the same sensation as a sloop,” he says. “For those of us unfamiliar with the boat, it will require a good amount of feel and getting a handle on the angles. I think the people who will do well will not stress out too much.”

In his discovery outing, Snow and his wife, Mary, casually “did a bunch of tacks and tried to figure out the tacking angles.” They also did time runs at a mark to see how fast the 1,050-pound Sandpiper accelerates. “It was flat water, and a couple of times we stopped the boat completely,” Snow says. “So now we know it takes a long time to get going again.”

Insight From A Sandpiper Champ

That nugget of knowledge, says reigning Sandpiper National Champion skipper, Susie Klein, is in fact, the most important thing in catboat racing, a tip she learned early on from Tim Fallon, a well-known catboat sailor in the Northeast.

Fallon’s early advice, she says, was “Momentum, momentum, momentum.”

Klein races Sandpipers with her husband Jim Hammitt and both were top college sailors in the late 1970s (Klein at UC Berkeley and Hammitt at Harvard). They have had long and fruitful sailing careers that included a Tornado Olympic and shorthanded racing campaigns for Hammitt. Klein grew up racing high-performance dinghies on San Francisco Bay and internationally before stepping away from sailing for nearly 40 years to raise a family on the East Coast and at sea on their cruising boat while Hammitt taught at Harvard.

The white-hulled Sandpiper is Klein’s personal craft, and now 68 she is the Championship of Champion’s sole female skipper. She’s only owned the Sandpiper for a year, and while she’s obviously a quick study of catboat racing, she does share one important bit of advice for her inbound competitors: “You get four tacks maximum on the windward leg.”

And as for things related to the gaff, the throat, and the Sandpiper’s big white sail, she says there’s really no adjustments to be made aside from easing the gaff halyard on the downwind leg. Her recommendation to others for an upwind gaff halyard setting came from Fallon: “tighter than you think” to keep the leech loaded.

While Klein and Hammitt may be considered strong COC contenders as the newly crowned Sandpiper national champions in their first try, she confesses that they’re a good 125 pounds shy of the boat’s optimal crew weight of 400. And, by the way, she’s never raced on the Buzzard’s Bay, which can serve up stiff southerly and steep chop, so she will be keen to follow Fallon’s advice: keep the momentum and tack wisely.

Recent Championship of Champions Winners

• David Starck and Jenna Probst (sailed in Y Flyers)
• Peter Feldman (sailed in DragonFlite 95 RC yachts)
• Peter Keck (sailed in MC Scows)
• Connor Blouin, Samuel Blouin and JoAnn Fisher (sailed in Lightnings)
• Jake La Dow and Alexander Curtiss (sailed in Harbor 20s)

The post Inside the Championship of Champions: Sailors vs. Sandpipers appeared first on Sailing World.

on a recent archaeological dig through a stack of external hard drives for an elusive photo, I stumble upon an untitled folder dated 10 years ago. Opening an image in the preview window, I know exactly where I’m at: NOOD Regatta; Annapolis, Maryland; 2015.

That and the rest of the photos look and feel like ages ago. Scrolling them, I expect to see boats that I haven’t seen in a long time, but with each tap of the down arrow key, I’m stuck in a time warp. One by one, they’re all the same boats I’d seen a week earlier at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta in Annapolis.

There’s that same dark blue J/30 Avita and Bebop, and dozens of the same J/70s, Alberg 30s (minus the tie-dyes), J/22s…and the list goes on. These are the regulars, the local teams who race with us in Annapolis year after year, boats and faces aging in unison.

I’ve been working the SWRS-née-NOOD beat for 30 years, so whenever I arrive at the host club, I expect to see many of the same characters committed to their respective classes. The lifers. Considering how long I’ve been at it, I’m pretty good at recognizing and seeking out newcomers. Which is why I intentionally strike up a conversation with Sarah Olivieri and her father, Marshall Borris, wandering through J/80s on trailers at the Annapolis YC Sailing Center’s circle entrance, bustling with arrivals.

My hunch is correct. They’ve just pulled in from New Jersey and have that look of: What do we do next? What’s the launch procedure? Where do we register? Where do we put the trailer?

I lob a softball Olivieri’s way: “Where are you coming in from?”

She and her 78-year-old father have made the short drive from New Jersey without incident. Their J/80 is the one with stained white gelcoat hull and a large numerical Greek pi decal near the bow (she later explains to me that pi has a value of 80). They’ve owned this particular J/80 for seven years and have been racing it exclusively in the Hudson River Yacht Racing Association’s PHRF fleet. This regatta will be their first time ever racing Pi in a one-design fleet.

Olivieri is “superexcited.” Racing against 22 boats in a new venue, with a lot of experienced teams, is a big deal.

I agree, leave them to it, wander off, and then later contemplate how exciting it will be for them to no longer be the loners of their hometown PHRF fleet; to check in with the class, play the game differently, and see where they stand on the ol’ level playing field, not to mention a playing field new to them. Trailering and traveling takes a higher commitment, and that’s what makes fast teams fast. Regatta voyaging takes us out of our comfort zone.

Olivieri started sailing with her father on a J/24 at 8 years old. The family J/35 came in high school, and the J lineage includes a cruising J/30, a J/22 and now the J/80. They are the quintessential J-boat family.

When the J/80 Worlds were contested in Newport, Rhode Island, in 2022, Olivieri convinced her father to charter their boat for the regatta and watch and learn from the sidelines. She used the opportunity to ask questions and check out how other teams rigged their boats. The experience was revealing, she says. “I learned that people in the class are so nice, like nobody’s keeping secrets. They’ll tell you all their tricks, especially if you’re interested,” she says. “It made me feel really welcomed and that I could do it.

“I was like, ‘You know, Dad? We could do that. We could do level racing.’”
She raced the Helly Hansen regatta in Annapolis this past year as a crew, and “this year I was like, I gotta bring my boat. I’m gonna do it—my first regatta, level racing with my own boat.”

Saying is one thing, but doing requires commitment. For Olivieri, who’d never towed a big keelboat beyond her own ZIP code, that meant a lot of trailer prep and a new tow vehicle. Then came the discovery of a bottom-paint issue this spring. “I started to work on it, and at a certain point, I had to call it,” Olivieri says. “I’m like, ‘It’s as good as it’s going to be.’ The big thing, the big win, is getting there, doing it, having a good time. And, you know, we’ll fix whatever we can later.”

Olivieri taking full responsibility for Pi is a generational passing of the family sailing torch. She grew up “very much like the sailor’s daughter,” she says. “I was pit early on because he wanted me to be safe, but the most interesting transformation was a couple of years ago, when we started sharing being captain.”

Health issues had forced her father to step back from sailing, and with Olivieri on the helm with a new team, they won every single race and their first season. “That was a big year for me,” she says. “I was excited and scared, and I really had to do well for him. I put a lot of ­pressure on myself.”

As newcomers to J/80 fleet sailing, there is a new kind of pressure in Annapolis, however, and the first day’s results are what she expected. They didn’t finish last, which is a good thing, but isn’t because of the Chesapeake’s swift and unpredictable currents winds—child’s play compared with Olivieri’s Hudson River training grounds.

“Growing up, I used to think everywhere else must be harder, but for me, shifty is more like 180 degrees. There’s 3 knots of current and a lot of obstacles.”

All that trained her well for the Annapolis J/80 scrum. “What I’ve learned this weekend driving is that I’m not used to being close-quarters with other boats, except at the starts,” she tells me on the morning of the final day of racing. “I’m used to maneuvering really tight because of other obstacles. I felt very comfortable out there. I was very pleased. I’m like, ‘Give me 3 inches on each side, and I’m good.’”

With her father having to return home on the second day, Olivieri picked up a local connection, and they worked through the kinks.

“Everyone on the team is experienced,” she says, “but if we’re not experienced together, it’s gonna hurt a little—it’s all the little things. It’s the dance; it has to be in sync. I knew that coming down here.”

She also discovered that she’s surprisingly comfortable driving in the high-density fleet. She didn’t find it all the least bit intimidating. “People at home say, ‘Oh, it looks so scary to be with so many boats,’ but it’s not at all because everybody knows what they’re doing,” Olivieri says.

Her tactician for the weekend, David Doyle, is an experienced J/80 owner and racer, and he initially kept their starts on the conservative side. “He was nervous how I’d feel pushing up in the line, but he quickly learned that I’m very comfortable at very close quarters. So, eventually, we had some decent starts and some races.”

On the final day, a cold, windy and raining affair, Olivieri and her crew posted a sixth—a top-10 keeper and their best finish of the regatta. The whole experience was an epiphany of sorts for the one-design first-timer.

“I’ve realized here that I maybe know how to sail this boat faster than some of the class racers,” she tells me. “And that’s because at home we rarely have ideal J/80 conditions, and we race against boats that sail to their rating.”

She admits that she’s not as good—at the moment—with the tactics of being with other like boats, but adds, “I know how to sail it faster because of PHRF racing, where every second counts and you have to pay attention until you cross the line.”

Given her enthusiasm and commitment, I’m confident that I will see her again next year.

The post PHRF for One-Design Perfection appeared first on Sailing World.

Over the past three years, one father and his two 20-something daughters have consistently finished at the top of big fleets—on a ­doublehanded boat. You read that right: If two plus one is three, how is it possible for a trio of Haig family members to fit on board a two-person Melges 15? This was indeed a problem, until they solved it by buying a second boat. Now daughters Emily and Dana take turns racing, with their father, John, as permanent forward crew. Whenever one daughter creates the familial pairing, the other races with a friend. And obviously this interfamily rivalry has upped everyone’s game. Emily, for example, won the 2025 Melges 15 Winter Series overall, and Dana was third.

Dad, the lowly crew, rarely gets mentioned in the press.

Cooperative competitiveness is nothing new for the sisters; they were only one year apart in school. “We were always duking it out in high school,” Emily says. Both were selected Female Skipper of the Year at New Jersey’s Southern Regional High School and All-American skippers at MIT. “Dana was in the MIT class right behind me,” Emily says. “Selfishly, it was nice to have her on the same team, so I never had to worry about my younger sister beating me.”

Now that they’re both in the workforce, they’ve carried this team approach to the Melges 15 circuit. Dana enjoys racing in the same fleet with her sister, and says that they both benefit from talking between races, doing speed tests or split tacks before the races. “At the end of the day,” she says, “we’re competitors, but we’re still family. And she’s a great sailor. I’ve learned so much by sailing against her.”

As for their father, Dana says: “I’m sure it’s whiplash for him going back and forth between me and my sister. We definitely have differences in how we sail, so kudos to him for putting up with us.”

“Dad has some fun stories about Dana and me,” Emily says. “I’ll yell at him to do something, and she’ll yell at him to do the opposite thing. He’s like, ‘What do you expect from me?’ And I’m like: ‘To win, Dad. To win.’”

John Haig didn’t sail in college and accepts that the college crews his daughters are used to “do a lot more than I do.” When asked to compare his daughters, he says: “Emily is definitely more chill. But they’re college sailors, so they both get really hyped up.”

More specifically, he says that Emily usually wants him to focus on sail trim, while Dana wants him to look around more. One time, he says, “I’m literally watching the chute but also watching this airplane, and somehow Emily knew. She doesn’t want me to look around because then she feels like she’s doing something wrong—and I don’t really know enough to even think she is doing something wrong.”

Dana’s different, he continues. “At the start, she wants to know when people tack—and it’s completely behind me!”

The younger sister admits that she prefers as many eyes out of the boat as possible, “so I definitely ask Dad more questions.”

She parrots an example of their dialogue:

Dana: “What’s happening on the right side of the course?”

John: “I don’t know.”

Dana: “Well, look.”

John: “My neck hurts.” (“I’m not really flexible,” he says.)

Dana also remembers her dad once telling her that Emily doesn’t have him do as much work. “And I’m like, ‘Well, you’re ­sailing with me now. I love you!’”

The only jealous moment either Haig sisters mention is when their father bought the family’s first Melges 15. “My dad actually took my younger sister out to sail it—not me,” Emily says. “I’m still salty about that. He bought the boat, and I hadn’t even sailed it yet. I’m like, ‘OK, Dad, whatever.’”

But when planning for their first Melges 15 winter ­circuit began, Dana was still in school—and Emily, out in the workforce and hungry to keep dinghy sailing, jumped at the chance for a winter escape. She and John won the second regatta of the series and finished third at Midwinters. After that, it wasn’t long before—as Emily puts it—“we hit a point where we both always wanted to sail, so we ended up getting a second boat. Kind of crazy but a really great balance.”

“It’s definitely an adjustment going back and forth between college crews and sailing with our dad,” Dana adds. “In college sailing, you sail with the same person six days a week for sometimes years, so there’s a different level of muscle memory. I’d never really sailed with my dad before. It’s been a super-awesome experience. He’s a great sailor, and he’s in great shape. He can lock in and hike just as well as any college sailing crew.”

Emily agrees that their dad “hikes harder than anyone else, which is awesome.” But he did start out with a few bad habits. “He grew up sailing E Scows as a jib man,” one of the smaller crews. “So, he could jibe and cross the boat super early, and there were no problems. But he has like 40 to 50 pounds on Dana and me, so if he jibes early, we feel it.”

Their father also gets very stressed if they are in the top five. “Dana and I both had to train him: ‘No, Dad, we deserve to be here. This is normal. We’re ­actually gonna pass boats now!’”

Emily calls this “a fun transition between the one-off E Scow race, where maybe you’re in the top, versus the expectation of we’ve worked really hard and we deserve to be here.”

Both daughters fully appreciate their dad’s logistical support. “We’re so lucky that he’s able to drive the boats,” Dana says. “Without that, we wouldn’t be able to do a fraction of the events.”

“It’s kind of fun for me,” John says, “because I’m not rushed. I drive to the venue and set up the boats, to a point. Mast up, spreaders right.” After work, Emily and Dana arrive to finish tuning their boats.

Both sisters also enjoy the “in-between” regattas, when they sail with friends. “After college sailing,” Dana says, “the number of opportunities just kind of drops. It’s been great to keep some of our crews in the loop. The Melges 15 came along at a perfect time. It’s been a really fun transition for us into more-adult sailing.”

And regattas are a great way to spend time together as a family. Emily’s boyfriend, Jimmy Muller, will crew for her at the Melges 15 Europeans in Ireland this summer, while Dana sails with John. “It’s great to see the fleet expanding,” Dana says. “From literally seeing the first eight boats to now becoming an international class. You see a lot more families in the boat—some siblings, recent college grads. It’s been cool seeing the fleet change throughout the years.”

Their competitors have definitely noticed the ­family’s consistent results. At every regatta, Emily says, “I have ­people coming up to me asking if they can measure my mainsheet bridle height. I’m happy to answer questions. But with a lot of the settings, I very much go by feel and what looks good on the water.”

“We’re both pretty ­technical people,” Dana says. “It’s easy to overthink things, so once I’m out on the water, the most important thing for me is ­keeping it simple.”

“It’s been really great to sail in a community,” Emily adds. “I have a bunch of friends from college who don’t have the opportunities to sail, or it’s just too much. Thankfully my parents do a lot of it, and I’m so, so grateful for that. It’s a lot of fun but definitely not easy.”

Two daughters, two cool boats—and one proud papa. The Melges 15 was “made for us,” John says. “We really are the brochure.”

The post Family Sailing in the Melges 15 appeared first on Sailing World.

Abie McLaughlin, age 38, had a breakout year in 2024, achieving a hat trick of North American championship wins in the J/88, Tartan 10 and S2 7.9 classes. Having quickly earned a reputation as a skilled and dedicated amateur sailor, she is now in demand as one of the best foredeck crews you’ve never heard of—until now.

McLaughlin’s low-key personality has kept her under the radar. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, she’s been sailing with Trey Sheehan’s and John Evans’ Hooligan and Airplane programs for several years, racing shoulder to shoulder with professional sailors on the TP52s, Tartan 10s, J/70s and more. She’s often one of only a few amateurs on the boat she races and, more often than not, she’s the only woman. You’ll find her on the pointy end, moving sail stacks and tackling the unsung grunt work.

Her résumé also includes a win at Charleston Race Week in the Melges 32 class and a slew of offshore races. With so many days on the water, it’s surprising to peers that McLaughlin doesn’t work in the sailing industry. Few 9-to-5 careers offer enough time off to keep up with the pro-sailing lifestyle, but her availability is key for the competitive programs that count on her contributions. 

“I max out my vacation time,” says McLaughlin, a product designer with an Ohio-based lighting company. She’s an active year-round crew with the availability to travel around the globe for events thanks to a strong relationship with her long-term employer. Average weekend warrior McLaughlin is not.

“It’s a family-owned company,” she says of her employer. “They’re boaters in Cleveland, and we’ve come to an agreement that they understand I have a passion for sailing. I want to sail as much as possible, but I also obviously need to do my job. As long as I’m doing it well, they let me be flexible. I’m extremely lucky.”

The arrangement is a successful formula for McLaughlin. She often works in the morning and takes time off in the afternoon for practice sessions or race days. It’s a ­flexibility that not all amateur sailors can secure, but while her time on the water has kept her in demand, pro sailing is not something she’s ever strongly considered. Maintaining her amateur status allows her to race in classes that have limits on professionals.

Besides, having aspirations of a professional sailing career is not what got her into sailing. “I was dating a guy who brought me onto a beer can race Sunday afternoon at the local yacht club,” she says. “I didn’t even know there were sailboats on Lake Erie, I was that naive. It was a big-breeze day, on an Express 37, and I fell in love with it immediately.”

After three years of beer can racing and “not really having a role,” McLaughlin wanted more. She joined the women’s learn-to-race program at Cleveland’s Edgewater YC and found herself on a J/22, learning the ropes with more responsibilities. 

“When you are 33 percent of the team, you learn really quick,” she says. 

After a summer in the women’s program, the “opportunities just started rolling in,” with invitations to race in other fleets. Tall and thin, McLaughlin understands that her stature made her more desirable for teams looking to fill a certain role, helping her hitch a ride in the fast lane to high-performance racing.

“I think I was the right size,” she says, “so I probably got opportunities quicker than I should have, to be honest.”

But McLaughlin also started gaining a reputation for her work ethic and fierce sense of competition, a holdover from her days growing up as a competitive skier. “My mom’s been a ski instructor for 30 years, and my dad was a ski race coach, so I was technically a very good skier,” she says. “That’s my first passion in life, ski racing.”

Skiing shaped a discipline that has crossed over to her passion for sailing. Both sports also offer the same truth: “The time you put into it is what you get out of it,” she says.

The days when McLaughlin’s size and availability were a ticket to opportunity are behind her. Now, it’s her foredeck prowess and the impressive string of triumphs taking the spotlight. Her win at the J/88 North American Championship was with skipper Lindsay Duda on Sin Duda!. The regatta, hosted by Macatawa Bay YC, was a master class in how to win a championship: Start fast and stay ahead. With McLaughlin on the bow, Sin Duda! won the first two races and had points to spare by the last day, taking pressure off the team to close out the regatta.

“Wrapping up with one race to spare was a great feeling,” McLaughlin says. “That event was really challenging. It was shifty, with varying wind conditions, and the fleet was very strong. We had a great first day, which put us in a position to have some confidence in our boatspeed, our boathandling and our crew work. We all felt that as long as we could sail clean and maintain composure, we had a shot at winning.”

One week before, also at Macatawa, was the S2 7.9 championship with skippers Dan Cheresh and Brad Boston on Extreme2. And a month before that, in Chicago, it was the Tartan 10 championship with Sheehan’s Hooligan. The three-win championship run revealed the depth of McLaughlin’s versatility. She says that the success she’s enjoyed thus far comes down to being a fluid, ­resourceful and mindful athlete.

“Core foredeck responsibilities are really similar boat to boat,” she says. “The bigger adjustments are adapting to each team and their unique nuances. You have to be easygoing. You have to have a positive attitude, and I ask a lot of questions. If you’re hopping from boat to boat and you’re on a boat for the first time, you’ll most likely be surrounded by people who know that boat a lot better than you, so learn from them. I try to be a ­chameleon adapting to each team’s dynamic.”

Being a strong team player is her value-add, she says, which is more important than ­having a specialized technical skill. Mastering soft skills, such as communication and adaptability, are her proven traits. “I sail with a lot of boat owners who prioritize personality as much as talent when they form their teams,” she says. “Gelling as a team ­elevates your performance.”

She’s taken the same ­attitude offshore on the TP52 Hooligan, adapting her mentality “from a sprint to a marathon” and determining where to add value alongside her ­more-experienced professional teammates. Overcoming imposter syndrome was the first hurdle. 

“I often think about the first day I stepped onto the TP52,” she recalls. “It was the biggest boat I had been on. The sails were heavy and the loads were big. I questioned my abilities and if I had a place on the boat. After a few practice days, I learned techniques to make my job more manageable. I noticed small jobs that I could take on, in addition to my responsibilities, which made other people’s jobs easier.”

Namely, she took on “crappy jobs like packing kites and moving the stack down below” and even making coffees. Four years later, her persistence has paid off. The Hooligan 52-footer recently won the SORC Islands in the Stream Series ­overall after a strong finish at the Nassau Cup Ocean Race in February. 

“I sail with a lot of boat owners who prioritize personality as much as talent when they form their teams. Gelling as a team elevates your performance.”

With another victory under her belt, McLaughlin looks ahead to a host of new challenges in 2025, including the J/70 Mixed-Plus World Championship in Lake Garda, Italy, later this year with Evans’ Airplane. She’s also on the hook for a few more offshore races. “I’m actually still not sure if I like offshore,” she admits. “I do it, and, at the moment, it’s terrible. You’re like, ‘Why do I do this?’ And then you finish. You get there, and you’re like, ‘Man, that was great.’”

Whether inshore or offshore, McLaughlin’s experience is ­passion-driven. It’s clear that she’ll stay at the top across classes, showcasing just how important it is to be versatile to win, as long as it’s fun. “I haven’t found [a boat] I haven’t liked,” she says. “I love hiking on that uncomfortable rail on the T-10, and I love blasting downwind on the TP52. It can be uncomfortable and still fun, slow and fun, fast and fun. I love them all.”

The post Talent and Experience On the Bow appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s a cold winter day in Boston, but it’s also the first practice session of the season for the Harvard sailing team’s twin brothers, Justin and Mitchell Callahan. They’re anxious to get on the water, but the wind is gusting to 25, whistling through the city streets. The air temperature is 36 degrees, but the Charles River is frozen, so the sailors transport nine dinghies to Boston’s frigid harbor to practice. It might be a frigid one, but it is just another day in the sailing life of these 21-year-old juniors who have been racing since their earliest days. Both have high aspirations in sailing and their careers after college, and both are off to incredible beginnings. 

Justin and Mitchell grew up sailing in Miami and Newport, Rhode Island, and have been able to sail year-round. The fraternal twins speak with an engaging smile and are genuinely enthused about racing and their future. The young men are different in stature—Justin is 5’10” and weighs 148 pounds, while Mitchell is 6’3” and weighs 180. While different in their appearances, they’re equals as students of the physical and mental aspects of competitive sailing, ­thriving in the crucible of high-level ­collegiate racing.

Justin shares his philosophy: “The hardest part about college sailing is to never get flustered because there are so many races, and you never know what is going to happen. There are no drops. Consistency is what’s so important in college sailing. That, and keeping a level head.”

Justin and his Harvard sailing crewmate, Kennedy Leehealy, won three of the final five B Division races to secure Harvard’s national championship victory this past spring. “Having great teammates is the number one thing,” Callahan says. “I’ve had the same crew throughout college. We’ve been sailing together for two and a half years, and we feel like two peas in a pod. Whether we are first or last, we feel like there’s more to do, more to gain.”

Mitchell thrives in the team environment of college sailing. “I’m a big team-sport person,” he says. “I also played lacrosse outside of sailing. I just love the team aspect. In team racing, there is always the right play. In fleet racing, it’s a little more arbitrary, where you can get a shift, you can get unlucky. In team racing, the chances of winning the race are elongated. The main goal is to try to extend the success rate of plays for as long as possible. There’s always a right thing to do, and then you have your teammates with you.”

“[Harvard coaches] Mike O’Connor and Bern Noack have been with the team for 29 years and are really helpful in practice and at regattas,” Justin says. Recently, veteran college coach Stan Schreyer joined the Harvard coaching staff. 

Justin says that he became comfortable working with coaches at a young age. “Lior Lavie has been equally influential in our sailing. We owe a lot of our success to him. He has coached me and Mitchell since we were 10 years old.”

Lavie worked with the boys when they were sailing at Immaculate LaSalle High School in Miami. In 2022, Lavie was named coach of the Cornell University Sailing Team, and previously he was a member of the Israeli Olympic sailing team (2004-11).

Mitchell had a different path in sailing than his brother, but when they’re together in a boat, they’re certainly always faster. “Right after my growth spurt, I hopped into the Laser and out of 420s. More recently, my brother and I started sailing Snipes as well, which is an absolute blast. They’re very technical boats, which we like.”

And that’s to say they won the 46-boat 2024 Snipe Junior World Championship by a whopping 13 points. 

Mitchell works hard at physical training and observes that many of his peers simply apply themselves in practice, but that’s about it. “I am very big on personal wellness and mindfulness,” he says. “I eat a very clean diet, just meat and vegetables. I exercise every day, whether that’s cardio or lifting weights in the gym. I ran a marathon last spring, and I’m currently training for another in Boston. I practice mindfulness and mediation, not only for sailing, but for life in general. It really helps me a lot. So, when I get on the racecourse, it’s just me in the boat, because sailing is about feel, and you try to get in that flow state.”

Justin, meanwhile, sees himself as a student of high-level sailing. “I’ve watched every sailing YouTube video on the planet, from the America’s Cup to Olympic medal races to top-level match racing. I look up to sailors like Tom Slingsby, Peter Burling and Dennis Conner and the heart they took to the sport, and I try to emulate that as much as possible.”

Justin and Mitchell’s parents, Paul and Alisa Callahan, have been strong supporters of their sailing development. Paul Callahan was injured at the age of 21 and has been a quadriplegic ever since. He runs the organization Sail to Prevail, with sailing operations in Newport and Miami that enable disabled sailors to get an opportunity to be on the water. Callahan has also twice competed in the Paralympics.

“Growing up with a father in a wheelchair teaches you to think about someone else first,” Justin says. “You never put yourself first. For me and Mitchell, we’ve learned that there’s no such word as ‘can’t,’ and you can always do anything you set your mind to. He was disabled at my age now, and the life he was able to put together is a testament to his mindset. He was able to work on Wall Street. He graduated from Harvard Business School, he raced in two Paralympics, and he raised a family. I couldn’t ask for a better father. There is no one else who I’d rather have on my side.”

Mitchell adds: “I attribute 99 percent of my and Justin’s success to our support system, mainly our parents, and then our coach, Lior, who is not only a talented sailing coach, but he is also one-of-a-kind with the psychology of the sport. If we win a race, he might scream at us, and if we come back after a black flag start, he’ll hug us and say: ‘OK, let’s reset. Let’s move on.’ He never lets us get too high or too low. It’s really ingrained in us, and I can hear him in my head after a good race, or a bad race.”

Mitchell and Justin are thriving at Harvard, as adept at their studies as they are with racing. “The school has so much to offer,” Mitchell says. “There are tremendous opportunities, whether academic, athletically or even socially. There’s a unique mix of people at the school from all over the world, and it’s kind of like sailing when you go to an international regatta. They offer unique perspectives.”

After college, Mitchell plans to shift to his professional advancement, a career in either private equity or consulting. “I haven’t figured it out yet, but that’s what I’ll be doing,” he says. “Hopefully, I will end up at Harvard Business School. I will keep racing, doing the Hinman Team Racing Championship and match racing, regardless of Justin. I’m definitely switching gears for my business career.”

Looking toward his own future, Justin aspires to racing at a high level. “My long-term aspirations are being in the America’s Cup, being in SailGP, being at the pinnacle of the sport, representing the United States in some capacity. I think that is a huge honor. I’m considering the LA 2028 Olympics, possibly in the 470 class, but it’s very much a thought right now. Beyond that, I would like to go to law school.”

At this writing, Harvard is ranked No. 1 in college sailing. Both Justin and Mitchell are quick to point out the large pool of great collegiate teams racing these days. Like all college sailors, they thrive on the competition and the friendships that last a lifetime. They are keen to have another successful year on the water, and when the ice does finally clear on the Charles, you can bet they’ll be straight into it.

The post Brothers At The Top appeared first on Sailing World.

Air. Fuel. Spark. Whoosh.

And just like that, J/29 class racing has been reignited on the Chesapeake Bay. It’s been ages since these late-1980s vintage one-designs have met en masse, but at this year’s Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Annapolis, seven J/29 owners were cajoled and herded from their slips by Liz Principe, the class’s new motivator-in-chief.

“There is a new energy among the owners,” Principe says. “And that’s really motivating me. It’s been at least 12 years, so we’re pretty stoked about what’s going on here.”

Principe, who hails from Cambridge, Maryland, and races on the shallow reaches of the Eastern Shore’s Choptank River, sailed as a teenager with her father, but it was passive. Only when she accepted an offer from her boss and was exposed to racing on a Tartan 10 did she realize what she’d been missing all along.

“They taught me the foredeck because I was light and athletic,” she says, “and everything about it was wonderful.”

Over eight immersive years in a sport that befits her energetic and results-driven personality, Principe relocated herself from the foredeck to the tiller when she was gifted a Catalina Capri 30. “We had some amazing wins with that boat,” she says, but last July, she purchased a masthead/outboard-model J/29, called it The Doghouse, and launched her “first real racing boat.”

This particular J/29 was discovered on the hard across the bay in Solomons, Maryland. The longer Principe longed for it, the lower the price kept dropping, until it finally hit her price point. It was in good shape, needing only the TLC common to balsa-cored boats of the late 1980s. 

“Coming out of the Capri, the boat was seriously fast and fun,” she says.

Principe and her teammates promptly became a force in the Eastern Shore PHRF scene and, “When we started winning,” she says, “more people wanted to come and crew.”

Having too many crewmembers on call was a good problem to have, she says, but soon came her epiphany: “I said, ‘We have this great boat, so let’s go do something bigger with it.’”

Bigger being one-design racing, of course.

As commodore of the Eastern Shore Sailing Association, Principe tapped connections at sailing organizations up and down the Chesapeake, and social media outreach and emails allowed her to quickly connect with other J/29 owners to propose a simple goal of restarting one-design class racing in the US.

Responses from owners were universal: “They were all like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it,’” she says.

Hands went up not only in the Chesapeake, but from surprising locations afar as well—from owners in Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, New England and elsewhere. “They all wanted to restart this J/29 class, so it’s gone from being a Chesapeake thing to a national one,” she says. “It’s baby steps, but we’re getting there.”

According to J/Boats, Rod Johnstone introduced the J/29 in 1982 as a versatile, lightweight and upwind-­capable race boat that possessed the best traits of the J/24 and the J/30. Before production ended in 1987, the final hull popped from the molds was No. 298. Principe admits she has no idea how many are still sailing and where.

With three boats traveling in from New Jersey’s Riverton YC for the Annapolis Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta, Principe has been hustling to make the experience a positive one for the fleet, sourcing free housing and organizing informal low-cost gatherings, including an evening with Annapolis’ beloved sailmaker and storyteller Wilbur “Papa” Keyworth, a J/29 champion from the class’s formative years, whose primary advice to Principe is to “make it fun.” 

“Back in the day, we had a lot of parties,” Keyworth says. The adventures he had with his J/29 Moonbeam is stuff of legends. “In the early days of the class everyone saw how much fun we were having racing in MORC. Eventually, we got a couple of one-design starts just like Liz is doing, and the class started growing from there. At one point, we had about 20 of them around here—and hosted the first North Americans in Annapolis in 1985.”

With fleets in Hampton, Virginia, and Cape May, New Jersey, Keyworth says, there was quite a bit of travel between the two locations as owners committed to sailing the big regattas of the mid-Atlantic, including Atlantic City Race Week. “At the peak of the class, we had about 15 boats in Cape May for the NAs,” Keyworth says. “One of the things that really kept the class going was the get-togethers—the cookouts and the socials—and Liz is grasping that and injecting it into the teams that will show up for this event.”

Fifteen or even 20 boats would be a pipe dream for Principe, so, for now, she’s plenty content with simply getting one-design J/29 racing off the ground again. “We will have seven on the line, and for the J/29 fleet and the first time, that’s pretty good,” she says.

While the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series may be the first one-design start in a long time, Principe says, there’s still much work to be done in reestablishing the semblance of an organized class. It’s a monumental task, but she’s not alone; her new friends from the Texas, Ohio and New England fleets are stepping up as well to advance Principe’s efforts. 

“I think what happened to the class was that the skippers got older, and the boats did too. It requires a lot of dedicated crew, which I can relate to,” Principe says. “Finding six or seven crew can be a real challenge for some owners.”

The immediate goal is getting the formal class structure back up and running again, reaching out to owners and contacts to uncover idle boats and owners and re-engaging them. “I know there are some J/29s in Essex (Connecticut) on the hard,” she says, “so eventually, I’m going to go and find those and see if we can get them back out on the water and racing. Sometimes it’s just a matter of talking to the owners and showing them that there’s something happening. That’s the sales lady in me—it just takes getting feet on the ground, finding these people, and generating excitement.”

The J/29 is considered to be an excellent PHRF boat, and that’s where many of them have landed over the past few decades, which may complicate a pure one-design resurgence, but that’s a low-priority concern for Principe. They’re willing to overlook strict class-rules compliance for now. “In this first go-around, we won’t be picky. We’re just happy to have everyone out sailing together. It’s going to be a really cool event. The other owners are so happy to have this re-engagement happening.”

The post J/29 class Devotees, Together Again appeared first on Sailing World.

A one-design class fades away when either the ­building stops or the diehards and old-timers move on. Without sustained and creative efforts to replenish members, the outcome is always inevitable. That’s not the case for the International Lightning Class, however, which is unique because of its generational continuum and the efforts of its faithful to hatch schemes that freshen the bloodlines and get new faces into the slab-sided dinghy designed in 1938 by the late and great Olin Stephens. The class’s ­perpetual youth boat-grant program, which puts a competitive loaner into the hands of a young team for a season, is successful, but its impact is granular. To shore up another generation, in 2024, the class has cast a wider net with the creation of an “Under 32” movement.

The new endeavor is aimed at recruiting wayward postcollegiate sailors—and who better to do so than the class’s young adult members with all the right connections? Build it, invite them, and they will come, they said, and thus the U32 Lightning Invitational was born.

“It was originally an ­under-30 concept, which a few other classes already have,” says Jenna Probst, a second-­generation Lightning sailor from Ontario’s Buffalo Canoe Club, which remains the cradle of North American Lightning civilization. “But we had a few friends who were already 31, and U32 just had a better ring to it.”

Probst, who professes her undying loyalty to the class, champions its international status and the high-level racing it’s known for, but it’s also the familial culture, the mentoring, the fun, and the strong youthful base that she advocates. She and a committee of her peers were tasked by a handful of the class’s “Over 32s” with launching, managing, and leading all aspects of the inaugural invitational regatta at the Canoe Club this past August. “That was the most important thing,” class president David Starck says. “We didn’t want another regatta where the seasoned adults are running the show. We were there to help, advise and ­volunteer, but that’s it.”

Probst and her U32 committee co-chair, Maya Weber, another Lightning devotee of the Canoe Club, says that the effort started in early 2024 when Starck prompted them to recruit more postcollegiate ­sailors (an age range of 21-32). “The boat-grant program is a good opportunity to get young people into the class,” Weber says, “but with this, we want to provide a taste of the class for those who don’t have a full summer to ­commit to the boat grant.”

To pull off the inaugural event in short order, they turned to their Canoe Club connections for charter boats and stuck a pin on the calendar for late August, two weeks after the class’s North American Championship in Ontario. Then they went hard at recruiting.

“We did a lot of targeted social media and marketing, and went directly to different college sailing teams,” Probst says. “We had someone at College Nationals talking about it and hanging up posters and whatnot, but the biggest thing was just word of mouth. You can have all the right marketing, but you still need to actually talk to people and be like, ‘Hey, this is an awesome event.”

The target was 20 teams, but somehow, and unexpectedly, they got to 32—a good problem to have. “I was surprised,” Weber says. “It was absolutely incredible how many people were visiting the BCC or the Lightning for the first time and came away being like, ‘Wow, this was a great experience.’ I’m just excited to see where it goes.”

The goal was to have new people experience the class, Probst says. Their postregatta analysis confirmed that 31 percent of the sailors were new to the class, and 9 percent were sailors returning after a ­hiatus of two years or more. The class gained 39 new members. Twenty-four sailors—25 percent—signed up as individuals and were paired with teams.

“We know a lot of friends who sailed in college and then don’t really know what to do next, or what class to join,” she says. “So that was kind of our target: people who are looking for a good class that’s competitive but can be affordable. With the age demographic, you can’t just say, ‘Hey, come buy a boat and join the class,’ so we wanted to set up a good progression with a super-low-cost event, with free housing and a free boat.”

To set the hook deeper, ­participants were required to become a class member in order to have borrowed-boat insurance carried by the class. “In being a member, they’re also signed up to get all of the class communications, and there are now other class regattas that offer a discount for U32 members,” Probst says. “That was good to see because it encourages a younger generation who might be a little more cash-strapped to come and sail.”

There was no lack of O32s in the volunteer army, leading clinics and handling race-committee duties. President Starck deftly tended bar at the opening social at the BCC, and other local Lightning families hosted dinners on their front lawns. The U32s, meanwhile, were tasked with match-making teams, boat owners, and housing, all while ensuring a good time on and off the water. Providing people with the opportunity to sign up as individuals or as a team allowed new friendships to be forged, and name tags at social events helped to encourage conversations.

“The fun part was easy,” Probst says, “because everyone seemed to have a second- or third-degree connection from college or junior sailing. It was so cool to see people reconnect.”  

While the U32s could control everything within their control, the one thing beyond their reach was wind. There wasn’t much of it, but they still managed to get three races on the first day, with a noncounting race back to the dock and a bucket of rum. For Weber, there was a silver lining to “not having our typical BCC conditions with 15 knots and Lake Erie rollers; it provided the perfect opportunity for those newer to the class who were just getting their feet wet to get a handle for the boat without having to deal with tricky conditions. And while we didn’t get to race on the second day, teams got the full Lightning boat part experience chatting and derigging all the borrowed boats together.”

Probst and Weber say that the point of the exercise was never about race results. It was the spearheading of a new initiative for the class, generating new friendships and interest in the class, while creating a model of sorts for this year’s hosts at Metedeconk River YC in New Jersey, in October, and beyond. For their collective efforts, the co-chairs and all involved were recognized by US Sailing with the “One Design Creativity Award” at the organization’s biannual Leadership Forum, but the next step for the class is spreading the movement to other regions in the US and other countries as well. “It seems like it was a great success and a great kind of lightning rod for the initiative moving forward,” Probst says. “We now have U32 in the US, but now we can also spread the initiative in Chile or Finland, encouraging growth and continued sailing beyond juniors. I think that’ll be a good next step.”

Innovating, evolving and growing—that’s how this legendary class continues to sail outside the pearly gates of one-design sailing.

The post Lightning Class Empowers Its Young Members to Recruit appeared first on Sailing World.

Sailing World’s most popular YouTube playlist “Listen and Learn” remains our most viewed video content on the platform. As a concept developed by Dave Reed, Sailing World’s Editor in Chief, the belief is that we often learn more though observation than being told what to do right or wrong. And what we can learn from the best is often different in the heat of race than during a practice or tuning session.

Listening to, learning from and watching great teams while they sail around the course we can better understand effective styles of communication, subtle techniques, tactics on the fly and strategy in real time from the top teams in their respective classes.

On the practice day of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in St. Petersburg in February we mic’ed up Lightning Class president, past world champion and Rolex Yachtsman of the Year David Starck, his brother Tom Starck and forward crew Becca Jordon as they won both races. The three of them hadn’t sailed before, but that didn’t seem to hold them back one bit.

Sit back, listen, learn and enjoy.

The post Listen and Learn with Lightning Class Champs appeared first on Sailing World.

A weak southerly breeze straggles across Lake Washington as the last of Seattle’s fall colors cloak the hillsides of the still-leafy Leschi neighborhood. Four local J/70s are gathered for a driving clinic, and the onboard combinations are unusual: all captains and no crewmembers. Ron Rosenberg, an Olympic-level coach and world-champion sailor, is helming a borrowed coach boat—a VHF in one hand, a Timex Ironman strapped to his wrist. “Be thoughtful about your next 35 seconds,” he advises the group as they roll ­rapid-fire into another starting sequence.

Absent are the sharp elbows that often define one-design ­starting lines. Instead, each team focuses on hitting the line on time and at pace, while extending the “grace and space” to one’s ­neighbors that Rosenberg outlined in his dockside briefing.

But instead of completing a race, the winner is determined by which helm gets their boat up to VMG speed first. Rosenberg issues a few gentle critiques and compliments as the boats return to the starting area. Drivers rotate, from helm to forward hand, and Rosenberg restarts the drill. Welcome to Seattle’s thriving J/Pod, where Ron’s the man with the plan: the plan to get faster together.

The J/Pod is composed of sailors of mixed ­ability and experience levels, racing aboard used J/70s flying secondhand sails. The group has amassed a strong regional reputation as a positive and encouraging place to advance one’s skills while having fun. Much of this rests on the foundation of mutual respect that Rosenberg has ­cultivated from the start and has nurtured through a shared ethos of improving one’s own skills by helping others to learn. The resulting tide of knowledge gained through Olympic-style coaching is lifting all boats, and J/Pod participants can count on Coach Ron to bring on-the-water joy and a high value per minute to each session.

Some backstory.

Spend enough time around Washington state’s saline waters, and you’ll doubtless hear about the J, K and L pods of resident orcas. While all three travel seeking salmon, the J pod tends to frequent the waters surrounding the San Juan Islands, where the Rosenbergs have long owned a home, and where they lived full time during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Given Rosenberg’s background, it’s not surprising that baking sourdough bread wasn’t on his agenda.

“This just started as a COVID project,” Rosenberg says, explaining that his international coaching gigs fell victim to travel restrictions. But finding himself on Orcas Island in a community of sailors and resourceful people presented a new and socially distanced coaching opportunity. “We had a doublehanded theme,” he says, noting that the original group was comprised of two-person “pandemic pods.”

Rosenberg’s marketing background (he’s long been the driving force behind McLube), his love for the area’s resident orcas, and the group’s chosen steeds provided the perfect moniker.

“We picked the J/70 as an inexpensive learning platform,” Rosenberg says. “You can really have some fun with it. The boat gets up and goes in the breeze.”

The J/Pod began with a handful of boats and sailors on Orcas Island, but, as word of Rosenberg’s coaching and the group’s culture spread, numbers increased as restrictions eased.

Rosenberg says that he realized that he was on to something big “when we had as many sailors coming up from Seattle to join us on Orcas Island for coaching sessions as we had sailors on Orcas.”  

Pacific Northwest racing sailors, it turns out, wanted high-level coaching.

Rosenberg smartly followed this lift and eventually brought his bit to the mainland. The Seattle J/Pod, for example, was founded in early 2023, and there are subpods as far south as Hood River, Oregon, and as far north as Bellingham, Washington. Today, there are about 55 J/70s and 300-plus sailors involved with the program.

Even more impressive, group members also have a few boats strategically placed on the East Coast and in Europe that they “cheap charter” to each other to enable travel sailing.

This growth, sailors say, wouldn’t have happened without the ­culture that Rosenberg instilled.

“We’re all there to learn together, and we’re all there to get better, and we’re all there to have fun,” says Mike Breivik, a founding J/Pod member (his was the Pod’s second J/70). “We’re not out there to tack on each other, and we’re not out there to be aggressive against one another. I think it’s one of the foundations that has allowed the group to go from two boats to what it is today.”

While Rosenberg doesn’t have an Olympic medal, he’s personally campaigned for the Games four times, and he’s coached numerous aspiring Olympians. This background, he says, instilled many important lessons that he’s carried to the J/Pod, from fostering strong mutual respect to the concept of focusing on DTL (that’s ‘distance to leader’) to the strategy of mentally erasing all other boats from the course and always sailing one’s own boat at its target VMG.

“We play chess, not checkers,” Rosenberg says, noting that while he welcomes assertiveness, he frowns on unnecessary aggression. “We don’t tack on others to push them back; we try to outthink them, outsail them and out-boatspeed them. I train sailors to look forward and to make good decisions, rather than watching the rearview mirror and trying to hold others back.”

One big advantage of this style of sailing, Rosenberg says, is that J/Pod fleets tend to be more compressed around the buoys than other one-design fleets. “It makes it feel like we’re racing in a 40- or 50-boat fleet, rather than a 20- or 25-boat fleet,” he says, noting that this fosters friendships, community, and learning opportunities. “Everybody has more fun when they’re not being hammered on off the line. Nobody deserves to be the victim of a bad experience.”

Another critical component of the J/Pod is a commitment to avoiding boat-on-boat contact. Should contact transpire, sailors apologize for the incident, and either debrief it on the water or back at the dock, often publicly. “They always know they can count on me to help as a soft-spoken arbiter,” Rosenberg says.

“Every day that we go on the water with this group, we come back better,” Doug Hansen says. “This is probably the fastest learning curve we’ve ever seen.”

Then there’s Rosenberg’s commitment to delivering a strong return on investment for everyone’s time. J/Pod boats are often wet-sailed, their jibs hoisted and roller-furled, kites left rigged, and mainsails boom-flaked and covered, allowing sailors to go from their car to the course in under 10 minutes. Presail briefings are kept tight, and debriefs often happen via a WhatsApp group.

“He creates a wonderful, positive environment, where we’re all excited to be here and excited to share,” says Bev Multerer, a lifelong racer who has been involved with the J/Pod since 2022. “This is some of the most fun I’ve ever had sailing.”

This level of high-quality coaching isn’t free, but Rosenberg’s business model reflects the same kind of forward thinking as the culture that he’s curated.

“Typically, somebody hires me for the day as their coach, and I either sail on their boat with them or I’ll be in the coach boat—whatever they want,” Rosenberg says. “I invite everybody else because that helps everyone learn faster, including the client who pays for the day.”

J/Pod members take turns “sponsoring” these sailing days. “We try to make it a program where everybody has something to gain,” Rosenberg says. “The selfish part is that I get to coach the people who I love, doing what I love, right here at home without having to get on an airplane.”

Not that airplanes aren’t involved. The J/Pod has its East Coast and European boats, and Rosenberg travels to about a dozen regattas each year with clients, and other attending J/Pod teams are invited to join up as tuning partners.

Once back home, traveling sailors debrief their experience with Rosenberg and with the greater group, detailing what they’ve learned, further caffeinating the collective learning curve. “This inspires everybody else, and it gives them confidence that they too can travel to regattas,” Rosenberg says.

Take the 2024 J/70 Worlds, which unfurled off Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The J/Pod was represented by three teams.

When asked if he would have traveled to Spain without his J/Pod experience, Boris Luchterhand, an early member of the Orcas Island J/Pod, was succinct. “No, no chance,” he says. “We had some great races and some OK races. We learned so much, it was an ­incredible experience.”

While clients fund the J/Pod’s on-the-water program, Rosenberg averages 20 to 30 hours of pro bono time per week. This includes time that Rosenberg devotes to onboarding new members, explaining the group’s culture and his expectations for all participants, and helping new teams find and purchase good used boats. Then, once aboard, he helps get these teams rigged and launched.

“We buy our sails at half-price or less,” Rosenberg says. “I hand-select and sometimes purchase large numbers of used sails from some of the bigger-budget teams around the world, get them shipped here, and then hand them off to the teams who want them.”

Then there’s the WhatsApp channel, where Rosenberg frequently shares detailed notes and multimedia content with all 300-plus ­
J/Pod members, almost half of whom are women. This combination of real-world and virtual coaching, coupled with Rosenberg’s ability to lean on other group role models—some of whom have Olympic medals, world-championship titles and America’s Cup experience—creates a powerful learning opportunity.

“Every day that we go on the water with this group, we come back better,” says Doug Hansen, a longtime local big-boat sailor who, along with his wife, Shelagh (also an experienced big-boat sailor), bought their J/70 and joined the group in 2023. “This is probably the fastest learning curve we’ve ever seen.”

Hansen describes the J/Pod experience as “drinking from a fire hose,” and says that he’s dumbfounded by the group’s talent level and ethos of sharing wisdom. “In between races, you’ve got Olympic medalists sailing past you, commenting on your jib trim, and why they were able to pinch you off,” Hansen says, ­noting that Rosenberg encourages faster teams to approach fellow ­competitors and advise how they bested them around the buoys.

In addition to many local sailing greats—including Jonathan and Libby McKee, Carl Buchan, Keith Whittemore, Christina and Justin Wolfe, Mallory and Andrew Loe, and Dalton Bergan—the J/Pod includes many Corinthian-level sailors who are interested in translating their off-the-water achievements to increasing their speed around the buoys. “So many of these sailors are business leaders and are so successful in other areas of life,” Rosenberg says. “All I’ve done is get them on the water in a way that they can discover their passion.”

While the J/Pod is flourishing in the Pacific Northwest, Rosenberg says that the keys to success aren’t bound by any particulars of latitude, longitude, or the group’s chosen steed. “I think the concept would flourish in lots of different places,” he says. “There’s no reason it couldn’t work in any multitude of one-design classes.”

Legacy is a heavy word, but as the J/Pod nears its five-year anniversary, it’s a hard one to escape. Rosenberg—true to his humble and gregarious nature—says that this isn’t something he spends time pondering. “If I’ve ignited passion for sailing in some small way, I chalk that up as a big win,” he says. “It’s awesome that we have so many smart, thoughtful people involved, and all they were lacking was either the time or the experience to know what it feels like to go sailing in a high-performance boat, at a high level, and to really enjoy themselves with their friends.”

Throw in the concept of self-improvement through collective advancement, and he says that the J/Pod model goes from “a ­win-win situation to one of ‘you can’t possibly lose.’” Neither could any of the boats that were gathered for the driving clinic. Sure, one bow was consistently the first to drop and accelerate, but, by day’s end, other boats and drivers were also winning.

Grace and space, it turns out, are as critical to enabling J/Pod sailors to thrive as bountiful salmon runs are to the group’s ­namesake orca pods.

The post Seattle Sailors Gather To Grow appeared first on Sailing World.