With little wind and a lot of enthusiasm, a new Family Fun Racing program hopes to invigorate the sport of sailboat racing on the Saginaw Bay.
A lot of people are intimidated by the thought of racing, though, so the skipper of the 50-foot racing yacht Amante 2, Greg Velez, came up with an idea to get more sailors trained to compete in races.
“Our numbers are down about 20% over the last couple of years as far as racing,” says Velez, who takes a crew out every Wednesday night for the Bay City Yacht Club’s racing league and also races in several other Great Lakes yacht races.
“My hope is that we can rebuild the racing fleet back up, and who knows what we can turn it into.”
For more than five decades, the sails of the 15 to 30 boats involved in the Main and Jib racing league based at the Bay City Yacht Club can be seen about a mile offshore every Wednesday night from May through October.
As the owners and their crews age, though, the number of sailors has dwindled.
“You’ve got to constantly bring in new people, younger people, to keep the sailing classes alive and try to build the numbers and we’ve always tried to promote racing,” says Velez.
“My premise was that there’s a lot of sailors in this area that don’t race but would probably like to try it,but maybe are not sure how to get started. Maybe they’re intimidated … it could look chaotic or dangerous.”
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Photo courtesy of the SBCSAThe Saginaw Bay Community Sailing Association offers lessons, loaner boats, and boatbuilding classes to its members. (Photo courtesy of the Saginaw Bay Community Sailing Association)He hopes to dispel some of that and change people’s minds about the possibilities by re-building the racing program here, three to five boats at a time.
Racing can be physically demanding, Velez says, so he invites people onto his boat to learn how to crew. “If you don’t have a boat to go out on, come on with us. We’ll take pretty much as many as want to go.”
Terry Hart, who also helps run the Lightning Regatta races out of the Bay City Yacht Club, has been working with Velez on the Family Fun Racing program.
He says for the first five weeks of the program, the crews get together on Tuesday nights to learn basic rules of racing. For the first week, they spent an hour and a half going through a slide presentation refresher. After that, they’re out on the boats.
“Each boat is assigned a mentor who goes through the routine,” he says, with the first night being a man overboard drill.
Later, there will be trainings on how to start a race around the other boats and basic information such as learning which side is port and which is starboard, the layout of the course, and running through the pins on the course. Pins or buoys are marked in a circular pattern from A to G, with the S in the center of the circle.
“At the end of the six weeks, they now shift to Wednesday nights with all the other boats, where they'll have their own start, which will be the last start of the night. They'll be kind of on their own that way, no mentor on the boat,” he says, and from then on until the end of September, they’ll race in their own class.
There are currently four boats in the program, including two 26-foot, a 30-foot, and a 40-foot boat.
The pair hope to see the program continue to grow and each year add a few more boats and crews until the Wednesday night Main and Jib league is well crewed again.
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Ben TierneyBay City Yacht Club racers competing.Both Hart and Velez agree that getting the sails up and learning the art of racing is good for all sailors.
“If you do occasionally race your boat, it will make you a much better and more efficient sailor,” says Hart.
In a race, you’re being scored and evaluated with each race, and you want to get better, but “we always say if there’s two boats on the water, it’s a race no matter whether they are because you’re always comparing yourself.”
Velez agrees.
“If you want to sail, you buy a cruising boat, you get your cruise around and sail, but if you really want to learn how to sail and improve your level of safety and confidence, racing is like an accelerated curve to get there.”
Velez adds learning to race is fun and there are mentors who will take you through the process.
The
Saginaw Bay Community Sailing Association has lessons for youth and adults to teach the basics of rigging, tacking and jibing, steering, handling the boat in foul weather, and righting a capsized day-sail boat, among other skills.
Sailing up and down the river between Veterans Memorial and Liberty bridges is just a start to learning the art and skill of sailing, but Velez says the Family Fun Racing program will give you a more intense experience and the chance to race your own boat at the end.
Before signing up for the program, Velez and Hart say skippers need to have a crew of four or five people willing to learn alongside them. That crew can be made up of just about anyone.
Crew can be a family that wants to sail together or a group of friends, but Velez says typically they’re thinking about new racers, people who can sail their boat, and they’ve got a crew, but they know nothing about racing. There’s no perfect make-up of crew, but Velez says he’s seen husband and wife teams work really well together.
“I think that’s one of the really cool things about sailing is everybody you know that’s inclined to sail, everybody has some skills they excel in, and as long as a team works to everybody’s strengths, people can really express themselves that way.”
Velez has pulled together all kinds of people to crew Amante 2, for races such as the Bayview to Mackinaw, from Port Huron to Mackinaw, or the Trans-Superior Race, from Gross Cap Lighthouse near the mouth of the St. Mary’s River to Duluth, Minnesota.
Like so many in the sailing community, Velez recognizes that everyone can find their place within it.
“It’s an equal opportunity employer. Everybody has something to give that’s valuable and the smart teams figure out how to exploit that and use that to their advantage.”
While this year’s class has already started, Velez says he is always open to giving newcomers experience.
“Everybody's been there, and again it's not intuitive so there's a lot of things you have to figure out and let's face it, in most cases there's nobody there to teach you. That's why we're happy to offer a mentor for a couple, weeks so that you do have someone to teach you. Even once you know how to sail you have the racing element and that's a whole; it's a big step.”
Learn more about the Wednesday night yacht racing league on the
BCYC Website or on the
Facebook page.
“The more boats we can get involved, the more crew will be out there, and those folks can shift around,” Velez says.