The student-run team is made up of passionate athletes with a love for the sport
Photo by Justin Reeves (@justinreeves__).
The future of the UVic Sailing Club is looking bright after one of their teams won the National Keelboat Match Racing Championship in late February.
The club operates out of Cadboro Bay and hosted teams from across Canada at the regatta, which took months of preparation both on and off the water.
Nathan Lemke is the co-president of the UVic sailing club. He told the Martlet that the club runs a race team, a junior varsity team (meant for novice, non-competitive sailors), and offers beginner sailing lessons. “We try to bring revenue in for the club as well as provide affordable sailing opportunities to UVic students who are looking to get into the sport,” he said.
Ethan Lowenthal, the club’s other co-president, told the Martlet that many of their club members are involved in sailing outside of the club’s competitions. “Some people on our team are Olympic hopefuls — one person is currently competing internationally,” he said.
Lowenthal said that the Canadian Intercollegiate Sailing Association approached the UVic Sailing Club and asked them to host the championship. He added that the event took just under a year to plan. The regatta had to be held in Vancouver because there aren’t enough of the same type of boat here to accommodate national competitors, Lowenthal explained.
“From [there] we got the ball rolling, and reached out to the yacht club and started preparing,” he added. The club also worked with the Royal Victoria Yacht Club to arrange practices with its keelboats.
UVic and other schools from across Canada are more accustomed to dinghy racing, so a win in the keelboating category makes the club stand out. Maya Gray, UVic sailing’s social director, explained the difference between this boat and others commonly used in the sport.
“A keelboat is typically a larger sailboat — one that if it starts to tip over, the keel is weighted and will allow the boat to just pop back up,” she told the Martlet. The other type of boats they sail are dinghies, which aren’t weighted like keelboats and don’t have the ability to counteract the force of wind in the same way.
Racing a sailboat isn’t as simple as letting the wind carry your sail, added Gray. “You can’t just go straight and sail around the course and hope you go fast — there’s a lot of strategy, and you have to go around marks that are set at points.”
Gray said that some of these points are set directly into the wind, and the crew has to carefully maneuver towards them. “You have to zigzag your way up to the top,” she explained. “So it’s not quite a set track that you go around, rather [it’s] different points that you have to get across.”
Keelboat racing has a “bigger team, much more communication going on, and more at stake,” said Sean Bazzocchi, the club’s junior varsity director. Despite the challenge, the club won both of its first two races. Bazzocchi explained that this is partly because many of the team’s competitive racers already have keelboating experience before they join the club.
Sailing is a passion for members of UVic Sailing like Gray who has been surrounded by the sport her whole life. “I grew up in a household where it was either you sail or you get left behind,” she said. Her family embarked on months-long trips and sailed the waters near Bellingham, W.A. where she’s from.
It was at high school where Gray joined a sailing team and learned how to race. “It was a big switch — not so leisurely anymore,” she said, adding that there were “a lot more little technical rules, but it unlocked a lot of new strategizing tactics.” Gray also noted that the prominence of UVic’s sailing club was a big factor in her choice to come here for university.
Bazzochi encourages anyone interested in sailing to give it a shot. Lessons are set to start up later this spring. As the director of junior varsity, he has seen students go from never having sailed before to being confident enough to try racing. “I have a few members right now that are going to their first race this week. I’m very excited for them,” he said.
Anyone in the UVic community can try lessons. To sign up or for more information, visit https://vikesrec.ca/clubs/sailing.
