Jay's Sailing Biography

My dad loved sailing, or more precisely, he loved the idea of sailing. He had neither the means nor inclination to spend any part of his small salary on a sailboat, so the summer I was 15, he took an old rowboat tacked a piece of canvas to a pole, which he lashed to a seat thwart, and went sailing. I refused to go along; the whole thing just looked too scary.

By twenty one, the recessive gene my dad passed on to me, switched on at the sight of a gorgeous 15-foot, English Wayfarer sitting on a trailer in a front yard in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I cashed in all of my savings and instantly became a non-sailing, sailboat owner. The boat was a beautiful integration of white fiberglass hull and varnished-mahogany deck. It whispered motion, whispered because my former fears of sailing prohibited any images of spray-filled beats to windward or screaming planes across a windswept lake.

But even my dreams of warm days with gentle breezes required I learn how to rig, launch and actually sail my boat. I found the answer to “How to Sail” on a remainder table at the original Borders book store. My next outside instruction came more than twenty years later at a racing week at J-World in Florida.

My first sail was from a dirt ramp used to launch fishing boats, across a small pond surrounded by trees, and back. The back part devolved into my first sail in a thunderstorm – it just popped up over those trees and blew me back to the ramp (on a broad reach, thank you wind gods.) Two years later I took the prospective new owners out for a sail and we ended up tacking back to land in the gusty all-hands-on-deck call of another storm.

In 1973 I bought a 22-foot, English built Westerly Cirrus. For six months I lived aboard and single-handedly cruised the Great Lakes with my dog. I repeated this pattern by buying a second Wayfarer in 1977 and replacing it with a CL-16 (a Wayfarer knockoff) and selling these to purchase a second Westerly Cirrus to cruise the New England coast.

I sold my Cirrus and bought a Westerly GK-29. I put hundreds of hours into restoring this boat and single-handing it to Maine and back many times. During this period I got my Coast Guard Six-Passenger license and took a crack at making deliveries down south; fun but not too lucrative.

I got a notion to race the GK-29 and began competing in the Monhegan Challenge short-handed race from Provincetown, MA to Penobscot Bay, ME. The race usually lasts over 36 hours and requires multiple sail changes. On my third try, in a class dominated by larger boats, I finishing second in the singlehanded-spinnaker class. By that race I had developed some pretty smooth techniques for getting my spinnaker up and drawing and back on deck, by myself, without wrapping it around the keel.

I craved more action during the sailing season and decided to train a crew for around-the-buoys, PHRF racing. In 1992 my new crew and I won our division in the New England PHRF regatta and the Mass Bay Sailing Association championships. In ’93 I trained another new crew and we won every race we entered and again won the New England’s and the Mass Bay award.

I then purchased a Melges 24, hull # 5. The design was the darling of sail makers and I quickly found it impossible to afford the cost of even dreaming of being competitive. With much sadness I sold the boat after two years and began my search for an affordable, fun boat. The answer appeared to be the new MX-Ray, a 14-foot single-hander with an asymmetrical spinnaker.

I wanted to sail my new little speed-demon up to its potential so I attended a week-long racing seminar in Florida, run by former America’s Cup skipper, John Kolius. He used Lasers as his teaching boats and I took my first twenty swims off a Laser. I enjoyed the boat but stuck with my MX-Ray for a year and then, still ignoring the call of the Laser, bought another asymmetrical boat, a Fusion-15 out of Canada.

You can tell I’m crazy, because I bought three boats that were later named boat of the year by Sailing World, but only the Melges is still being produced. When I couldn’t find local racing for my MX-Ray or Fusion-15, I turned to Ken Lagler, the coach at Tufts, for his advice. Without hesitation he said, “Get a Laser; there is great Master racing available in the area.”

Now, I own three Lasers, have raced them for five years and have clawed my way up to the middle of the pack at some regattas; the Laser doesn’t honor past glories in other boats.