Sailing Co-Ed Team Sinks Navy Ships

Tricky conditions threatened the Harvard co-ed sailing team’s consistency, but the obstacle was one that the squad breezed over to win the Truxtun Umstead Regatta at Navy this weekend.

With a full week of practice under its belt for the first time this spring, the No. 10 Crimson finished first in a 20-team field at the major intersectional regatta—a full-fledged return from winter mothballs and a testament to the depth of its roster.

“When you come down there and win the regatta, it demonstrates that we’re a force to be reckoned with,” sophomore Clay Johnson said.

Sailors broke from the team racing that has been the focus of the spring season with the Truxtun Umstead, a four-division fleet racing regatta. The A- and B-division sailed in two-person, full-rigged 420-class and Flying Junior dinghies, while the C- and D-divisions sailed single-handed Lasers and Laser radials.

Most fleet racing regattas feature two divisions, and the four-boat format rewards teams with a broad talent base.

“Overall, none of us won our division, but our team is much deeper than other teams,” senior Genny Tulloch said. “Even here, if they had scored it on the first two divisions, we wouldn’t have won. We have the deepest team out there.”

Harvard may not have won any of the four divisions, but its overall score edged host Navy for first place. St. Mary’s College took third.

The Crimson’s strongest finishes came from the single-handed divisions.

Johnson won one race and placed third in three more to take second behind St. Mary’s Alex Steele. Johnson posted the lowest points total of any of Harvard’s divisions, with 59.

In the D-division, freshman Kyle Kovacs won two races on his way to a fourth-place finish.

In double-handed racing, the Crimson’s A-division finished eighth. With junior captain Vince Porter at skipper and junior Ruth Schlitz crewing, the duo faced problems with consistency, combining a win in the second race and a second-place in the eighth with finishes in 14th-place or greater in the first, fourth, and seventh.

Tulloch skippered and senior Jenny Wong crewed Harvard to a sixth-place finish in the B-division. Like the A-division, Tulloch and Wong won the second race of the regatta.

Sailors contended with light winds throughout the weekend, and the breeze was so scarce on Saturday that only two races could be sailed. Eight remaining races were sailed in three to six knot breezes.

“The conditions were, overall, very difficult,” Johnson said. “The winds were really fickle and fluky, and it was hard to be consistent.”

The Crimson’s race-by-race results consequently varied radically.

“All the teams were up and down in their scores,” Tulloch said. “It was something that nobody could interpret and nobody could understand.”

The conditions were both a challenge to Harvard and a boon—however inconsistent Harvard was, its opponents were worse, as the Crimson finished out of the top 10 in fewer races than any of its competitors.

“We were able to put up a more consistent front than the rest of the teams were,” Tulloch said.

The 20 teams competing in the Truxtun Umstead comprised most of the nation’s best, but the regatta underscored the weakness of biweekly Sailing World rankings, with No. 10 Harvard and No. 20 Navy besting six of the nation’s top-10.

The results bode well for a Crimson team which is finding its sea legs after a dry season and which is eyeing long-term championship prospects.

“We’re really starting to turn it up. We’ve had three weeks of practice and everything’s starting to click,” Johnson said. “Practices are competitive and overall, we’re just getting better as it gets later in the season.”

WOMEN’S SAILING

The No. 4 women’s team did not enjoy the same success as the co-ed squad, finishing 12th in an 18-team field at the St. Mary’s Women’s Intersectional.

Harvard sailed 10 races in Flying Juniors, and like the co-ed squad, the women had to cope with light and shifty winds.

With junior captain Sloan Devlin at skipper and sophomore Christina Dahlman crewing, the A-division finished 14th.

The A-division had a difficult regatta, although its results are negatively skewed by a single disqualification.

“[Conditions were] definitely problematic, but for me, it was a more fundamental problem of not having my head in the game as I needed to,” junior captain Sloan Devlin said.

Junior Jess Baker skippered and senior Daphne Lyman crewed the team’s B-boat to a ninth-place finish in its division. Baker and Lyman finished in the top 10 five times and in the top five twice.

“Our major problem was starting,” Devlin said. “I had one good start the entire regatta, and that’s not going to cut it at a high level.”

—Staff writer Samuel C. Scott can be reached at sscott@fas.harvard.edu.