Sailing Posts Four Top-10 Finishes in Opening Weekend

Looking to set the tone for the young fall season with strong performances across the board, the Harvard sailing team posted four top-10 finishes in five regattas in its first weekend of action.

“We definitely have a young team this year, so we’re just looking to getting to face that good competition and do as well as we can,” sophomore skipper Nicholas Karnovsky said.

With spots in key positions having been vacated by last year’s graduating senior class, the Crimson’s youth was on display throughout the weekend. But members from all experience levels of Harvard’s squad kicked off the season with a solid effort.

“We want to maintain our level of excellence from past years,” junior crew Kevin Coakley said. “Despite losing a very talented senior class, we brought in a promising freshman class, and everyone across the board is trying to rise to the occasion and fill up some open spots that we have.”

PINE TROPHY REGATTA

Racing for a spot in the New England Match Race championship in an in-conference regatta hosted by the Coast Guard Academy, fellow juniors—co-captain skipper Nick Sertl, crew Dylan Farrell, Coakley, and crew Taylor Ladd—finished in second place in the eight-school field. Needing to claim fourth place to qualify for the championship, the Crimson was able to do just that.

The current on the Thames River in New London did not play much of a factor in the final outcome. Variable wind conditions ranging from 5-10 knots on Saturday and 10-18 knots on Sunday were more impactful, but the group fared well considering that they were racing in a relatively unfamiliar type of vessel.

“J70s are a type of boat we don’t normally sail in college,” Coakley said. “And for finishing second we qualified for the New England Match Race Championship in October. So we’re pretty happy that we did really well there.”

Yale was the ultimate victor of the contest after scoring 45 total points. Harvard and Dartmouth tallied 51 and 58 points, respectively, to round out the top three.

TONI DEUTSCH REGATTA

The Crimson also raced to a solid result in the weekend’s only all women’s regatta hosted by MIT on the Charles River, finishing in sixth out of the 13 schools at the event. The B-Division led Harvard in the event with its 59 total points and four first-place finishes in 13 possible tries.

The A-Division placed more consistently than its Crimson counterpart in its 10th-place, 103-point divisional result, helping Harvard to its 162-point tally. Brown, Yale, and Connecticut College placed in the top three spots with their 67, 69, and 77-point performances, respectively.

HARRY ANDERSON JR TROPHY

The Crimson was unable to live up to last year’s fourth-place result in this Yale hosted inter-conference, bi-divisional regatta, after finishing in 12th place in a field of 17 teams this weekend. Although the B-Division picked up steam towards the end of racing, it was not enough to make up for the hole that the squad had put itself in.

Both Harvard divisions combined for 320 points in 30 total Z420 races throughout the weekend, well behind Boston College’s winning mark of 153.

LARK INVITATIONAL

In a bi-divisional promotional regatta hosted by Tufts, the Crimson claimed its only regatta victory on the weekend. Freshman skipper Jessica Williams helped lead the charge and pulled out her first career win for Harvard in the event.

In the early goings of the regatta, it seemed as if the weather might have made for some tough racing, but it soon turned and conditions became much more satisfactory.

“[Saturday], right as we went out start racing, we got held up by [the conditions] and ended up having to wait about an hour for that to clear,” Karnovsky said. “But after that it brought in beautiful breeze for the rest of the day.”

Karnovsky’s pairing posted 63 points in the A-Division, while Williams and sophomore crew Divya Arya tallied 76 in claiming victory in the B-Division. The group’s combined 139-point mark was good enough to best second place Tufts by 40 points.

FJ INVITATIONAL

A single day home regatta on the Charles River did not help guide the Crimson to a victory in its final racing of the weekend, as this contingent of sailors posted a 66 points en-route to an eighth-place result.

Racing in only 10 total events throughout the regatta, the stakes were high as any individual event could affect the entire outcome of the race. But Harvard’s results in both the A-Division and the B-Division in consistently were the fifth-to-seventh place range.

Tufts brought home gold in the regatta, as Boston College and Northeastern finished close behind for second and third, respectively.

—Staff writer Jackson M. Reynolds can be reached at jacksonreynolds@college.harvard.edu.