Sailing Overcomes First Day Problems

Bad luck happens to everybody. But as the Crimson co-ed sailing team proved, it’s how you react to it that makes a difference.

The Harvard squad went on a tear during the second day of the Atlantic Coast Dinghy Championship, held in St. Mary’s City, Md., to make up for setbacks suffered in the regatta’s first half. The late boost earned the Crimson a third-place ranking and a final score of 228 total points, with Brown University taking home top honors with a tally of 206.

“I thought it was good on the whole, especially with what happened to us,” senior Vincent Porter said. “To get third was a good feeling after suffering some rough breaks.”

The strong Sunday effort saved Harvard from a middle-of-the-road finish after a frustrating Saturday. Manning the A-division, juniors Clay Johnson and Kristen Lynch finished dead last out of eighteen competing teams in two of the first eight races. They also ended the regatta’s first half on a disappointing note, coming in 15th in the day’s final race.

Porter and fellow senior Ruth Schlitz, sailing in the B-division, had an even greater deficit to overcome. They opened the regatta on a particularly ominous note, breaking down in the first race and receiving last place points plus one for a disputed OCS (On Course Side) infraction in the second

“The first race we were actually winning, and our jib halyard just snapped, and our jib fell down, so we had to drop out of the race, and we got a breakdown for that race,” Porter said. “And then the next race we went out and we had a bad start. It couldn’t have started out much worse.”

The OCS penalty, combined with the average score from the breakdown, left Harvard with two scores of 19 in an 18-team regatta. However, instead of writing off the entire weekend based on these early setbacks, Porter and Schlitz were able to view their rough beginning in a positive light.

“It was weird, because we were still really confident after those first two races, because we’d sailed so wel­l—we probably would have had a first and a fifth,” Porter said. “You just have to put it aside and keep focusing on sailing well and not let it get to your head, because we had 16 races to go.”

While the Crimson managed to finish the day in the top half of the rankings with a respectable seventh-place showing, the team’s performance in the second day of the event would leave seventh place a distant memory, more than making up for any bad breaks.

Leading the charge were Porter and Schlitz in the B-division, who broke into the top five in six out of their eight races and captured first place three times. They would finish the regatta with a two-day total of just 85 points, good for second place in their division.

“After our horrible streak of bad luck, [Vincent] said to me something along the lines of: ‘We’re sailing really well, but we have absolutely nothing to show for it,’” Schlitz said. “By the time we were finished with the regatta, we were quite glad that we had something to show for it.”

While Harvard was able to pull itself out of seventh place in Maryland, the story was somewhat different in Connecticut, where the Crimson women finished seventh with 260 points at the Women’s Atlantic Coast Championship held at the Coast Guard Academy

Freshman Roberta Steele and co-captain Sloan Devlin shared skippering duties in the A-division while junior Christina Dahlman crewed. They placed in the top five seven times, taking sixth place in their division.

Harvard was slightly less successful in the B-division, where senior Jessica Baker and freshman Christina Cordeiro settled into a tie for eighth with Dartmouth.

While this weekend’s ACCs were the last team regattas for Harvard this season, Johnson, Porter, and Devlin will travel to Honolulu, Hawaii next weekend for the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association Singlehanded Championships.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Rubin-Wills can be reached at drubin@fas.harvard.edu.