Sailing Places in Top 10 in Four Events Over Weekend

Having completed the team racing portion of the season a week prior, the Harvard sailing team kicked off its fleet racing schedule with top-ten finishes in each of the four events it competed in over the weekend, highlighted by a third place result in the Thompson Trophy.

THOMPSON TROPHY

With northeastern winds fluctuating between eight and 28 knots throughout the weekend on the Thames River in New London, Conn., weather conditions were highly variable to say the least, but this variance did not seem to affect the Crimson as much as its competitors.

In the Coast Guard Academy hosted event, Harvard was able to cap off its best performance of the young fleet’s racing season. With its most experienced racers competing in the tri-divisional regatta of Z420s, the Crimson accrued 358 points in its third place finish.

Besides the B-Division crew of senior skipper Marek Zaleski and senior crew Sydney Karnovsky finishing in the top four in four of its first five competitions, the results any one individual race varied widely as the crews finished anywhere from first to seventeenth with relatively equal likelihoods in all three divisions. By the end of the weekend, the A, B, and C-Divisions had amassed 142, 94, and 124 points, respectively.

Rival Yale won the competition with 294 points. Second place Roger Williams was the only other squad to best Harvard on the weekend.

PRESIDENT’S TROPHY

Racing on the Charles River Basin in a bi-divisional inter-conference event hosted by Boston University, the Crimson finished tenth in a field of 17. High winds ruled the day on both Saturday and Sunday, as breezes in the low-to-mid teens and gusts reaching the low-twenties led to quite a few downwind capsizes.

With fellow sophomores, skipper Taylor Ladd and crew Kirstin Anderson, at the helm of the FJs in the A-Division and freshman skipper Taylor Gavula and sophomore crew Ariana Gross in the B-Division, the group totaled 161 points over the weekend. While Ladd and Anderson placed in thirteenth among the A-Division crews with their 95-point performance, Gavula and Gross finished fifth in their division after accruing 66 points.

“The women’s team started out well, struggled a bit towards the end of the regatta, but finished in a decent place overall,” freshman skipper Nicholas Karnovsky said.

Even though Gavula and Gross retired after finishing their first race of the weekend, they bounced back quite well, as their result signifies. After their misstep, they won the very next event, and placed among the top five finishers in the next six afterwards. This form could not be sustained until the very end of competition; however, as they finished 15th and 11th in their final two races, respectively.

MOSBACHER, OWEN, KNAPP TROPHIES

On Cayuga Lake at the Merrill Family Sailing Center in Ithaca, N.Y., Harvard also placed tenth in a bi-divisional Cornell hosted race that fielded sixteen competitors. The Crimson posted 216 points over the weekend with 124 of those points coming from the A-Division compared to the 92 from the B-Division crew.

After very little wind prevailed earlier in the morning on both Saturday and Sunday, most of the racing was postponed to afternoon sessions. But once midday hit, the conditions fared much better as consistent gusts in the mid-teens became the norm.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges won the weekend their 100-point performance, while Fordham and Yale rounded out the top three finishers by accumulating 131 and 148 points, respectively. Fellow Ivy League competitors Princeton and Columbia both placed in the bottom three, while the two teams brought to the event by Dartmouth tied in seventh with identical 206 point marks.

OBERG TROPHY

The youngest contingent of Harvard sailors stayed in the Boston area this weekend, competing against fifteen other in-conference schools. A sixth place finish in the tri-divisional regatta resultantly followed in extremely variable conditions, as the team totaled 293 points over the weekend’s 42 aggregate events.

“Saturday, it was incredibly windy; it was pretty consistently above 20 knots,” Karnovksy said. “But on Sunday [the wind] was very light, between five and ten knots all day, and sometimes even lighter than that. So they were two very different days of sailing. The first day was very fast and tricky, the second day was slower and much more tactical.”

The B-Division led the way for the Crimson. Freshmen Karnovsky and Alejandra Resendiz placed second among their division by posting 70 points, the lowest point total of the group and just one above the first place finisher in their fleet.

“[Finishing in second by one point] was a little bit frustrating, but we were happy with the performance,” Karnovsky said. “There were a couple of mistakes that probably cost us the win, but we were happy with the experience that we got. There was no way that we could have won it easily.”

In the other fleets, the A and C-Division crews finished with 128 and 95 points, respectively.

—Staff writer Jackson M. Reynolds can be reached at jackson.reynolds@thecrimson.com