The three-year-old University of Massachusetts Sailing Club is lacking a few amenities-like boats of their own, like a decent body of water on which to lay out a racing course. they are Bay Staters bereft of a Bay, sailors in search of a sea.
This in not to say that they aren't grateful to Mathias "Mick" Duda, the owner of the Ox-Bow Marina Inc. in Easthampton, a facility otherwise catering to rather large and gaudy motorboats, for his allowing them access to his docks, and to his steep little artificial beach. The arrangement was worked out by one of the club's two volunteer advisors, Marc Vandermeer, network director and sports announcer at WHMP radio in Northampton. Duda also has loaned them the outboard motor that powers the launch that has been loaned to them from their other advisor, Cynthia Barstow, a marketing consultant to the university.
The small round artificial inlet the marina sits on is a mere puddle from the perspective of these seasoned young salts, most of whom have acquired their sea legs in broad ocean bays. But it's "decent enough for a practice or to just boogy around," says club member, sophomore Kelcey Morange. And it beats the alternatives.
The student sailors once hauled their only race-worthy craft, a 30-year-old, 15-foot fiberglass "420" owned by club president, Emily Drowne, up to Lake Wyola in Shutesbury. But they found the winds on the lake too "fluky" to make the long bumpy trek worthwhile. The Connecticut River is another possible venue, but the general consensus is that it has too much current and that even at its widest, it isn't wide enough.
The Quabbin Reservoir "would be ideal" home-waters, says Drowne, a slight 20-year-old senior with a quick flashing smile who hails from Norfolk and has spent many summers sailing off Cape Cod. "But we've been told it would take an act of legislature thing for us to use it, " she says. As of mid-June, Vandermeer was investigating the possibility that the club might use Lake Arcadia in Belchertown.
Senior Jeffrey Earl, who along with junior Heather Boussey started the club, says coming to landlocked Amherst from the North Shore was a major adjustment. "I'm used to boats where you can walk on the deck," he says. The curved gunwales of Drowne's little racer are designed not for walking but for sliding: either up and out in a "hike" over the water in a stiff breeze - a thrilling part of small-boat sailing, Earl has discovered - or down into the cockpit to keep the boat balanced in a light wind.
But for all they lack in winds, waters, tackle, and trim (and money; as a registered student organization they got $500 last year,and paid dues of $20.00 each) the dozen or so active members of the club make up in spirit and determination. Using boats borrowed from their competitors, they've raced for two years in regional regattas against well established clubs as Tufts and BU and MIT and the University of Rhode Island. In May of 1996 they managed to place second in a seven-school event at the University of New Hampshire.
One distinction they believe makes them pretty unique is having mostly women as officers. Sailing has traditionally been a male-dominated sport, they all say. Even where women compete in sailing, they tend to serve as "crew" handling the jib sheets, raining and lowering the centerboard and scrambling around amidships as so much human ballast in motion, rather than as the skipper with the tiller and main sheet in hand.
Senior Suzanne Barry, who hails from Freeport, LI, will take over as president next year. Drowne, who will also be a senior, is stepping down she says, because she wants to encourage "new Blood." Jeffrey Earl, 22, a senior who, along with Heather Bousey, got the club started, will be vacating the vice president's position. Kelcey Montage, who'll be a sophomore, is stepping into those shoes.
"There would be no club if it weren't for Emily," says Bridget Bombard of South Hadley, a close friend of Drowne's since they met freshmen year. She's Drowne's chief advocate, and one of her star pupils. Bombard is one of the few club regulars who did not start sailing as a child. Drowne taught her. "I'm her novice," grins Bombard whose sandy blond hair falls in a long pony tail. Now Bombard teaches sailing at Camp Wilder, a YMCA camp located "off Parker Street" on Bass and Wilder ponds in Springfield.
As she talks, Bombard is watching Drowne secure her sailboat onto its trailer. "She's a very strong woman," she says. "I consider her my mentor."
Other club members echo similar praise of Drowne. They appreciate her assiduous attention to the seemingly dull but necessary details of keeping the organization together-the phone calls, the office work, the work to get registered as an RSO, to obtain an office (in the Student Union).
"Some people need so much organizing; they think I'm their mother," says Drowne, seated with some others on the dock at the Oxbow Marina watching the boat, with an occasional member named Craig at the tiller, come slowly to shore in a wind that has suddenly gone from brisk to almost non-existent. The sails languidly flap.
"Emily took the wind!" Craig shouts shore ward.
"See, they think she's responsible for everything," jokes Bombard. "Even the wind."
Drowne's parents didn't sail, but she learned early at the Dennis Yacht Club in East Dennis on Cape Cod (not to be confused with the somewhat more exclusive West Dennis Yacht Club), and was teaching sailing by age 13. This summer she is teaching at the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club on Martha's Vineyard.
A psychology major at the university, she supposes she took to the sport because she is "methodical." Sailing, she says, "is a total thought process."
Her mates echo her thoughts.
"There's a huge intellectual portion to sailing," say Kelcey Morange. "it's a lot about observation"-watching for wind shifts, sudden puffs, the moves of the boats you're competing against-"and analyzing what you see, and making your calculations accordingly."
Sailboat racing is intensely competitive, adds the 19-year-old sophomore who was a three-letter varsity athlete at Concord Academy, but it is a "good natured competition," she says. "There is a lot of camaraderie on the water."
Morange first learned to sail at age 12, and by 16 she teaching it, at the Girls Scouts' "Camp Favorite" on Long Pond in Brewster on the Cape.
In coming from the North Shore to landlocked Amherst, senior Jeff Earl had to make an adjustment from the oceangoing ships he grew up with, and as a youth has crewed on, to small racing boats.
"I'm used to boats where you can walk on the deck," he said, pointing, by way of contrast, to the smooth rounded sides of Drowne's little fiberglass "420." The curved gunwales' of the tidy little racer are designed not for walking but for sliding motions of the crew-either up and outward into a "hike" over the water in a stiff breeze (a thrilling part of small boat sailing, Earl has discovered), or down to the center of the cockpit to keep the boat balanced in a light wind, or when sailing "with" or "before" the wind.
Nautical terms, references to maritime history and bits of oceanography often come up as club president-elect Suzanne Barry talks about sailing, An enthusiastic aunt turned her onto the sport. Her parents never would have, even though they live in Freeport, on Long Island, NY-an historic fishing port that is home to the original "nautical mile," as Barry points out with a touch of hometown pride.
"They don't like the water," she said of her dad, a detective with the New York City bomb squad, and her mother, a public school teacher.
"I have this huge love for it," continued the environmental science major, wading in the shallow at the Oxbow beach, watching a couple of club mates tacking in a light breeze.
Sailing is integral to her education. Last summer, as part of a multidisciplinary study program based at Wood's Hole on Buzzard's Bay, she crewed for 4 weeks on a 135-foot sailing schooner called the Corwith Kramer that sailed out to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. This summer she is pursuing her hands on studies at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Florida.
Barry and the rest of the UMass sailors have big ambitions for their club. "We'd like to push it from a club to a team," says Barry. They'd like to attract more of the many experience sailors on campus, plus many students who might like to learn. "We definitely have the talent" both for racing and for teaching, says Drowne.
All they need to succeed is "more of a water area," as Drowne puts it, a small fleet, a modest boathouse, and a little more money to buy some assorted gear, including dry suits and boots and gloves. Vandermeer has suggested that there may be a strong "reservoir of support" financial and otherwise from among alumni.
They've had some conversations with their peers at some of the colleges in the area where small sailing programs also are struggling about possibly pooling resources to form a five college sailing club. As it is, the Mount Holyoke College and Amherst College clubs, smaller than the university club but a little better endowed, have loaned the university club boats from time to time.
One thing will stand these inland sailors in good stead as they tackle their considerable challenges is their ability to do a lot with a little just to keep their enterprise afloat.
Sailing, says Morange-when someone makes a crack about the tiller extension arm being attached to the tiller with duct tape-"is all about jury-rigging."
