Harvard Picks Up Slack To Take Fourth

A rough first-day outing, unfamiliar currents, and a bit of rust slowed the No. 2 Harvard coed sailing team early, but the Crimson turned things around en route to a fourth-place showing in the Charleston Spring Intersectional—the second consecutive week a team of Harvard sailors has notched a fourth-place finish in Charleston, S.C.

It was the first regatta of the spring season for the Crimson coed team, and a similar performance to that registered by the women in their debut last week in Charleston.

The weekend ended with host and No. 9 Charleston taking the top two spots, followed by No. 5 USC in third. The scoring was much closer at the top than in last week’s event, when Yale cruised to a 42-point win. The two Charleston squads totaled 115 and 139 points, respectively, and USC finished with 160, just 13 ahead of Harvard’s 173.

For the men, it was the first regatta in three months, and many of the women who traveled with the team were making their first appearances of the season as well. Although its performance was solid, the Crimson still struggled to shake the rust from the long wait.

“We haven’t had as much practice as other people, and we haven’t sailed in currents as strong as at Charleston,” junior skipper Clay Johnson said. “We sailed pretty well, but on Saturday, we just made some costly mistakes. Sunday we sailed better, and we didn’t make as many mistakes.”

The A division team of Johnson and crew Emily Simon totaled 81 points, which was good enough for fifth place, while the sophomore B division duo of skipper Kyle Kovacs and crew Elyse Dolbec similarly rounded out their divisional top five. According to Kovacs, the biggest problem was a lack of experience.

“I felt like we were getting the rust out of the engine a little bit,” he said. “We’ve only sailed a couple times this season. We haven’t done speed racing that much this season, so it was kind of like a gear shift into the type of boats we were sailing.”

Speed wasn’t a problem in the sixth race for either team. Both divisions won, ending the day with twin runs of top-half finishes. Johnson and Simon didn’t place lower than eighth in their final seven races, while Kovacs and Dolbec concluded each of their last four races in the top seven.

As favorably as the team sailed in the end, the first day provided for many of the growing pains.

“It was a bit like a pinball machine for us, bouncing off other boats,” Kovacs said. “But there was an improvement from the first day to the second day, and we were excited to end up as well as we did.”

Although the fourth-place finish could drop Harvard in the rankings, the Crimson has a number of regattas in more familiar waters coming up. More importantly, the time in Charleston has given the team a preview of what it will encounter when it heads back to South Carolina in late May and early June for nationals.

“It’s early in the season, and everyone sailed pretty well,” Johnson said. “It was just good to get back on the water.”

A weekend off will be followed by a trip to Providence, R.I. on March 3-4 for the Brown Team Racing Invite. It will be Harvard’s first trip to the waters of the northeast in almost four months.

For now, it’s back to the regular routine.

“We’ll just be practicing team racing until then,” Johnson said.

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.