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A fair wind to the islands
Sailing: The Bahamas’ national sport
In the first Miami to Nassau Race in 1934, 12 yachts were registered to compete, but due to a violent storm on the Gulf Stream, only three finished the race. Yet an event that might have died at birth survived to become one of the most enduring traditions in western hemisphere sailing. And although subsequent races were less catastrophic, the 176-mile Miami to Nassau race has always had an air of drama and derring-do about it, attracting tempestuous spirits such as Ted Turner, the maverick founder of CNN–a man dubbed “Captain Outrageous” by his contemporaries.
Legendary yachtsmen such as Turner and his fellow America’s Cup winner Dennis Connor contributed to the aura surrounding a great race, which helped turn Nassau into a sailing Mecca for more than 50 years after that first eventful running. European royalty came here to sail in regattas, and the local sporting heroes were men such as Sir Durward Knowles, who won Olympic gold sailing for the Bahamas in Melbourne (1956) and Tokyo (1964).
Bahamian sloop racing
Even the captains of ungainly local fishing sloops caught racing fever, after local enthusiasts such as Bobby Symonette joined forces with some rich American yachtsmen to create the Family Island Regatta, which has been held every April at George Town, Exuma, since 1954. Until then the traditional sloops had hardly changed in two centuries. They were little more than cumbersome floating creels with a well in the bow so that a catch could be kept alive on the way back to harbour.
Racing changed all that. They lost the well and became slimmer–and much more expensive. A modern top-flight racing sloop may cost more than $100,000 to build. The mast grew from a typical 32 ft up to 64 ft, and the crews got bigger, largely because crew members had to crawl far out over the side of the boat on planks to counterbalance the force of the wind in the giant sails and stop the sloop from tipping over.
The spectacle of these tilting, great-canvassed vessels with their scurrying crews is a thrilling one even from the shore, and since the very beginning a sloop-racing regatta has been as much a social occasion as a sailing competition. Although the Family Island Regatta, at George Town, Exuma is still the most prestigious, with five days of races, parties, eating, drinking, on-shore competitions and music, there are now up to 17 other government-sponsored regattas across the islands every year, beginning with “All for One” in Nassau in January and ending with the North Eleuthera Regatta in Harbour Island in October.
Official national sport
Before the first Family Island Regatta, the native sailboat, and the considerable skills needed to pilot it, were in danger of becoming extinct. In 1993 sloop sailing officially became the national sport. It is ironic that even as the sloop regattas went from strength to strength, the more conventional competitive sailing scene in The Bahamas began to lose its lustre.
In 1988 the Miami to Nassau Race was discontinued, and although The Bahamas went on to produce great sailors there were fewer international successes and fewer international regattas coming here.
In the last decade, though, it has begun to seem like the champagne days of Bahamian sailing are returning–borne in on a boat that even its admirers describe as “more or less a bathtub.” The revival was perhaps kicked off in 1998 when the Nassau Yacht Club created Nassau Yacht Week–three days of round-the-buoy races off Montagu foreshore, to the east of the city.
It was so successful over the next four years that it provided the impetus to revive the Miami to Nassau race in 2003 and integrate the two events into a showpiece: The Miami to Nassau Race Week.
Building sailing skills
But most keen observers of Bahamian sailing credit its renaissance to the youth programme pioneered five years ago by the Bahamas Sailing Association (BSA), with the assistance of the Nassau Yacht Club.
“I’d raised $40,000,” recalls BSA president John Lawrence, “and our first purchase was 20 Optimists.” This is the ugly, slow, but safe and infinitely forgiving “bathtub boat” that has since introduced more than 400 young Bahamians to the joys of sailing.
“The whole idea is to get as many kids sailing as possible,” says Lawrence, “but we’re geared specially to underprivileged kids, who normally wouldn’t get the chance. In 2008 we also started working with selected schools, as an extension of their PE classes.” Word of the programme soon spread to the other islands. “Five years ago there were 10 Optis in the country,” says Lawrence. “Now there are fleets in Freeport, Abaco, Long Island, Eleuthera.”
Not even the Optimist’s greatest fans would call it a performance dinghy, however, and keen young sailors tire of it by their mid-teens. “So then there’s the challenge of keeping them interested,” says Paul Hutton-Ashkenny, commodore of the Nassau Yacht Club from 2005-2006. “That’s why we want to provide them with more challenging yachts like Sunfish and Lasers. And also we want to show them what’s possible by bringing top-class events here to inspire them and give them something to aspire to. So we’ve become more aggressive about hosting international competitions in recent years. Now we aim to have at least one big international regatta a year in our waters.”
In addition to the Miami to Nassau Race Week, 2010 sees the 49er and 29er world championships in Grand Bahama and the Western Hemisphere Star Class Championship in Nassau. The 49ers and 29ers are two-person skiffs–shallow-draft, flat-bottom boats that require keen coordination to stop them from capsizing. Hutton-Ashkenny describes the Star–a more venerable two-man vessel that was Sir Durward Knowles’s favourite–as “one of the ‘rock ’n roll’ classes–the kind of boats that everyone wants to sail.”
Crewing yachts such as these is some way off for the graduates of the BSA’s youth programme, but last year brought a more accessible class to Nassau when the Sunfish World and International Junior Championships were held in the waters off Montagu. The Sunfish is the next step up after the Opti. It’s an agile, responsive and deceptively simple one-man boat with a sail design–the lateen rig–that has been around since biblical times.
Christopher Sands, finishing in 8th place out of 25, headed up a strong contingent of Bahamians in the junior event, many of whom went on to compete in the 72-boat World Championship against contestants representing 12 other countries. In the main event Sands finished a creditable 27th, but the top-placed Bahamian, in 13th, was three-times world champion Donnie Martinborough, who took the third of his titles the last time that the championship came to Nassau, in 1988.
The winner–the USA’s David Loring, who claimed his third title–believes that, at the age of 37, he is already “near the end of my truly competitive career. When it blows like it did here, it’s too much of a physical trial.”
Three sailing generations
Stiff winds didn’t stop Pedro Wassitsch–at 78 the oldest man in the competition–from turning up at the head of three generations of his family. Pedro represented Austria– his grandfather skippered a submarine in the Austrian navy during the First World War–but son Peter-Bruce Wassitsch and grandson Michael Holowesko sailed under the Bahamian flag.
Sailing has been the lifeblood of these islands for hundreds of years, ever since they were settled by the first Lucayan natives. The Wassitsch clan is a living example of how the love of sailing flows through the blood of Bahamians to this day.
In Holowesko, Sands and about 400 others who have passed through the BSA programme, a new generation of Bahamians is learning the discipline and the thrill of racing about in sailboats.
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WBN10 - Feature_Sailing
A fair wind to the islands
Sailing: The Bahamas’ national sport
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