We caught the team racing this week on the Beneteau 36.7 Blueprint huddled around a tabletop at the ever-popular Island Roots café at Nanny Cay just minutes before day 1 of racing in the
53rd BVI Spring Regatta and Sailing Festival.
“We’re having a little team huddle at the moment,” skipper and instructor Rory Johnson smiles. “We’re talking tactics here and what we’ll be doing out there today.”
Johnson works with Ondeck Sailing, one of the Caribbean’s premier sailing schools. It offers sail training courses of all levels, and individuals and groups the opportunity to race in all of the Caribbean regattas. BVI Spring Regatta is always on the schedule. This week he’s got a team of five from the US on board the Beneteau 36.7 Blueprint with varying levels of sailing experience: including Misty and Mike Wilmot from Connecticut; Jeff Irving and Paige Jones from Virginia; and Kent Lowell from Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles. The group met for the first time on registration day – the first day of BVI Spring Regatta and Sailing Festival, then went on to take third in class in the Scrub Island Invitational. Not bad for a group racing together on a new boat for the first time!
The Ondeck programme is great for those sailors who don’t have their own boat or a team to travel to destination regattas. As members of the American Sailing Association, the Wilmots heard about American Sailing Vacations and the opportunity to race in the BVI.
“We didn’t know about American Sailing Vacations where they list opportunities to race in the Caribbean,” Misty explained. “We wanted to do the BVI Spring Regatta because we’ve heard so many good things about it, and it was kind of an exciting thing to do. A lot of American sailors just rave about the BVI, and we thought it was the time to try it.”
Johnson notes, “Our mission at Ondeck is to get amateur sailors on bigger boats and give them that big boat experience; we would typically have our Farr 65 Juno here but she wasn’t available this week. This group is just the right size for Blueprint and they’re doing a great job as a team.” Irving and Jones took sail training last January in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and were looking to up their game and acquire more experience.
“We had been to the BVI previously and when we saw an email come through about this regatta, we knew how cool it is here and decided to do it; that was it and here we are!” Jones smiles. “We are hoping to learn a lot about how an actual race in a regatta works, to learn how to execute some very basic things, and just increase our knowledge. We have a lot of individual skills that we want to work on, but also the collective effort as a team.”
Lowell has been cruising for many years and in recent years got interested in racing. He’s also involved with the American Sailing Association and thought it would be a great way to gain more racing experience in a fun environment.
“It’s really wonderful to have a long-term professional who is showing us how it can be done,”Lowell says. “We’ve got a couple of very highly skilled racers on board Blueprint this week but it’s still even better to have some guy who does it for a living; just the demonstration of confidence and posture, the whole presentation on the water, and the performance is really stunning.”
The Blueprint crew had a couple of mechanical issues with the boat so their Round Tortola race day performance wasn’t as stellar as they hoped. They finished sixth, but the nothing broke as Misty pointed out with a laugh.
