Sailors Rusty in Season Opener

Before the start of the third race on Saturday at the Brown Team Racing Invitational in Providence, R. I., a wicked puff of wind blew over two of the Harvard co-ed sailing team’s boats straight into a bank of mud.

Luckily, the Crimson had time to right its ships before the start of the race, and though the team sailed the rest of the day with mud caked on its boats, it finished day one in first place.

But on the second day, the Harvard sailors struggled to a 2-3 mark, finishing the weekend second to Tufts. And it became clear that, though the mud could be cleaned off, after a three-month hiatus and barely two practices, the nation’s No. 1 team still showed quite a bit of rust.

The Crimson was sailing without captain and three-time all-American Cardwell Potts, as well as employing two relative neophytes to team racing, freshman Clay Johnson and sophomore Genny Tulloch.

“Not all of them were as rusty as us,” senior Vincent Porter said.

“It was a good experience, it showed us what we need to work on, we definitely have our work cut out for us,” he added.

According to Johnson, the majority of the other teams had been practicing for two to three weeks on open water.

“We had only one or two practices, the Charles was still frozen, so we were sailing on 50 feet of water,” Johnson said.

“I’m not all that surprised [with the result],” Harvard coach Mike O’Connor said. “We look at an event like this one as a learning process.”

After a blustery day of sailing on Saturday with wind speeds above 15 knots, prohibitively light breezes cancelled the second of two round-robins on Sunday, leaving Tufts with a cumulative record of 12-3 to the Crimson’s 10-5.

But the score was tighter than it appeared.

“They were all really close,” Porter said. “The three races we lost were all decided 100 yards from the finish line. All three losses we were winning by the last leeward mark and in the last stretch we sort of lost it. We all had some stupid fouls this weekend that were a little careless and unnecessary.”

The fall season involved mostly fleet racing—regattas which entail races of around 18 boats and two divisions, each representing one school.

Team racing is more like match play, and involves three boats from each of two schools racing each other at once. It is more rule-based, and involves more strategy—pinning, passing forward and running plays—exactly the kind of sailing that can magnify a lack of practice time.

“We really missed Cardwell Potts,” Porter said. “He’s arguably the best team racer in the country. He’s obviously a huge help.”

Potts was at a ceremony in New Orleans where his father was named Commodore of the Southern Yacht Club.

But in Potts’ absence, Johnson and Tulloch filled in admirably, especially since they had little prior experience in team racing.

“Genny and I are just trying to get into the swing of things,” Johnson said.

Tufts, ranked fifth in the nation entering the spring, rebounded after a 7-3 second-place finish on Saturday to win its final five races and finish past the Harvard boaters.

The co-eds’ next regatta is March 20-21 at the Truxton Umsted Trophy hosted by Navy. Harvard’s women’s sailing team visits Navy this coming weekend at the Women’s Intersectional.