Sailing Fails to Qualify For Nationals With Eighth Place Fowle Finish

A Fowle weekend was in order for the Harvard sailing team as it finished off the team-racing portion of the season.

Although the Crimson was able to sport top-ten finishes in each of its two team racing events, the squad’s bid to qualify for APS College Sailing Team Race National Championship proved unfruitful as the four potential spots were claimed by Brown, Boston College, Dartmouth, and Yale.

FOWLE TROPHY (NEW ENGLAND TEAM RACE CHAMPIONSHIP)

Salling in FJs on the Thames River in New London, Conn., Harvard attempted to claim a bid for Team Racing Nationals in May with a top-four finish at the New England Team Race Championship hosted by the Coast Guard Academy.

The Crimson contingent of seniors, Andrew Mollerus, Sydney Karnovsky, and Marek Zaleski, juniors, Julia Lord and co-captain Nomin-Erdene Jagdagdorj, and sophomore co-captain Nick Sertl was unable accomplish the feat. The group’s 5-6 record on the weekend was only good enough for eighth out of the twelve schools vying for the championship berth.

“The goal of the season coming into the regatta was to qualify for nationals and we didn’t do that, so overall it was definitely a disappointment,” Sertl said.

The conditions were relatively tame, as a weak southerly breeze pervaded throughout the weekend. As a result, not all of the desired racing was able to get done during the championship.

“[The weather] was generally pretty erratic,” Sertl said. “Because the wind was lacking for a lot of the time, there was only time to do the one round robin of all twelve teams, which meant that a couple of silly losses meant a lot and made it so that we didn’t break into the top four.”

Rival Yale proved victorious with its only loss on the weekend coming to Dartmouth. Boston College, Brown, and Dartmouth rounded out the top four qualifying places. Although tied with Connecticut College, URI, and Coast Guard in overall record, Harvard was only able to best the event hosts in their individual matchups.

EMILY WICK

Competing against 17 other inter-conference schools in an all women’s multi-divisional regatta hosted by Connecticut College, the Crimson sailed to a 13th place result. Led by sophomore skipper Taylor Ladd and sophomore crew Kirstin Anderson in the A-Division, the group finished with 175 total points over the sixteen combined races between the two divisions.

“We sailed pretty well in some tough and inconsistent conditions,” Ladd said. “They were two difficult days of sailing, but we learned a lot over the course of the weekend.”

Ladd and Anderson finished ninth amongst their divisional crews with a final score of 75. Their results in races varied widely throughout the weekend, placing as high as third and as low as sixteenth in any individual event.

After starting strong with a second place finish in their second race of the day, fellow rookies, skipper Taylor Gavula and crew Lena Episalla did not place higher than tenth in any of the other B-Division contests. The duo tallied 100 points over the weekend to finish in seventeenth in the division.

Brown took home the gold with its own 83-point performance after placing first in the A-Division and second in the B-Division to Stanford.

MYSTIC LAKE TEAM RACE

On the Mystic Lakes in a nearby Boston suburb, a group of six freshmen —skippers Nicholas Karnovsky, Andrew Puopolo, and Jackson Wagner, and crew Alejandra Resndiz, Christion Gosioco, and Robert Anderson—competed in Larks in an entirely in-conference team race regatta.

Highly variable, shifty winds were the norm throughout the weekend with highs in the mid-teens and lows at one knot. In the conditions, the rookies mustered an eighth place finish out of the 11 schools in contention with a 3-7 overall record. The group was unable to best any of the schools above them on the leaderboard, but finished undefeated against those below.

Fellow Ivy League competitors, Brown and Dartmouth finished in second and third place, respectively. Tufts, the hosts of the event, was able to claim victory with an 11-1 overall record after beating Brown, 2-0, in the best of three sail-off between the two schools after it closed regulation with identical.

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