When Logan Meyer is in a sailboat, he’s in charge of his own world.
“It’s just you and yourself, and you’re sort of your own captain,” says the 13-year-old. “You’re the boss of yourself. It’s pretty interesting.”
It’s true - no one is out there telling him to do his homework or take out the trash. He’s the one deciding which way he wants to go and how to use his wits, his weight and the wind in his sails to get him there.
Logan and his sister, 9-year-old Hartley, dodged lithely under the sails of their Optimist sailboats to catch the wind that would guide them to their marks and back one recent Sunday morning in a friendly race on Lake Maumelle.
Logan has competed in Junior Olympics regattas in Chicago and Birmingham, Ala., as well as Little Rock. Last year, he participated in the Chicago Yacht Club’s Race to Mackinac, a 333-mile yacht race from Chicago to Mackinac Island.
He trimmed and folded sails and cleaned the Beneteau 42 yacht Mirage, which was manned by eight other people. The ship took sixth in its class and 20th in its division.
The Mirage, owned by John Boyle of Aurora, Ill., is the same boat Logan’s mother raced in her first Mackinac, in 1998.
Hartley and Logan started sailing when they were 7, although they have been in and around boats for much longer. Logan’s parents, Dr.
Brian and Marcella Meyer, are longtime sailors; they took Logan out for his first race when he was 2 months old.
Most of his friends - the kids he knows from school or the soccer field - have never been on a sailboat. He tells them they really should try it and suggests they take the Junior Learn to Sail Camp conducted by the Grande Maumelle Sailing Club. He and Hartley did that as soon as they were old enough.
The week-long classes, this year June 10-14 and 17-21, are open to children age 7 and older who can swim in deep water. Participants must bring a Coast Guard-approved life jacket, but the club provides the sailboats. The cost is $160 ($120 for club members).
The class has been limited to 20 students in the past, but this year will accept 50.
“We’ve had to turn students away in previous years,” says Jim Marone, the club’s race committee chairman.
BASICS OF BOATING
Beginner sailing classes meet from9 a.m. to noon. The week opens with a swimming test and a drill designed to show students what to do if their boat should capsize. During the course, kids learn to rig and de-rig 8-foot single-sail boats, how to determine wind direction and steer their crafts, and about “points of sail” - the boat’s direction in relation to breeze - and other basic boat-handling skills.
“We start out with the boat, no sail, and we have races where they paddle the boat from one end to the other, just so they get comfortable in the boat,” says Marcella Meyer, chairman of the club’s junior sailing program.
A professional instructor is brought in to teach technical aspects of the sport.
“He teaches them where the wind is coming from, where you need to be, the different parts of the boat, and then he will go through the rigging and they will get in a boat,” Meyer says. “We usually start out with two in a boat - you don’t sail these boats with two but we start out with two because they’re more comfortable.”
Course leaders go out in a motorboat and coach the kids along, but for all intents and purposes the children make their own decisions and learn, hands-on, as they go.
“The most rewarding thing for me is that in the beginning of the week you have kids who have never been in a sailboat in their entire lives and by the end of the week they are in a boat and they are sailing it all by themselves,” Meyer says. “We will have each of those kids sail by themselves by the end of the week - and it is so much fun.”
Afternoons are dedicated to intermediate sailing instruction, for students who have gone through the beginner class and are ready to sharpen their skills. Those students learn more about weight placement, the rules of who has the right-of-way on the water and racing.
“Another thing they do as they get a little more into it is navigation - ‘lat’ and ‘long’ and all kinds of other things,” Meyer says, referring to latitude and longitude calculations that sailors learn to plot. “When Logan does long races he will have to pull up some navigational points and have to figure out where they’re going on those little boats.”
The junior racing program gives children a chance to apply their training.
Diana Plunkett, 12, won the B Fleet in the Junior Olympics Sailing regatta last summer after learning to sail just a year before that.
Her father, J Plunkett,sailed a little in college and fell in love with the sport as an adult. When he bought an Irwin Citation 30, a large cruising sailboat, 2½ years ago, Diana asked him to help her learn to sail.
“She was real interested in it from the start. She’s always been a mature child. And she takes her sailing very serious,” Plunkett says. “We did the junior sailing program last year and she kicked butt with it.”
Indeed, Diana took to sailing like a fish to water - or maybe more like a dog to a bone, given her determination to succeed.
“The first time I went out on a boat I was a little scared, but I kind of liked it, so I just kept getting out and the more times I went I just started liking it more and more and more,” she says. “I really wanted to learn how to do it.”
Her small size is her biggest challenge in the boat, her father says. “You have to be strong to pull the ropes and things like that,” he says. “She’s very strong for her size - she used to do competitive gymnastics and got in phenomenal shape doing that.”
Diana aspires to be a collegiate sailor, for the fun and adventure as well as scholarship money she might score. But she has no intention of stopping with graduation.
“It’s definitely a forever sport. You can’t really stop once you start,” she says. “I like the freedom of being on the water. I like being able to feel the way the boat wants to go and being able to know how the wind feels in the sails and how that will affect your speed, and I love the adrenaline rush of racing.”
She likes helping grownups on bigger boats even more.
“Crewing is a little more exciting,” she says. “You can get into a lot more trouble. And things can go wrong when people are thinking different things at the same time. It can be chaos. It’s interesting.”
Plunkett just bought a Thistle boat to sail with Diana this summer.
“We sail with three people on a Thistle, and she’s the third,” he says.
FANTASTIC VOYAGES
It doesn’t hurt that the view on a pretty day from a sailboat in the middle of Lake Maumelle is gorgeous, especially if the wind is just right and you’re sailing in a company of other boats with their spinnakers billowing.
“We’re the best kept secret in the world, if you ask me,” says Drew Daugherty, a longtime member of the club. “Look at this place. Not many people know we’re here and it’s just … well, look at it.”
The club, tucked in next to the Jolly Roger’s Marina west of Little Rock, has picturesque views of rolling, tree-topped hills - and for sailors who go out on Lake Maumelle, a dazzling view of Pinnacle Mountain.
The classes, too, are little-known wonders, according to Daugherty, who took the class as a boy and later taught it, and whose 16-yearold son has also been through the junior program.
“If your kids want to sail, they can learn to handle a boat at whatever level they desire,” he says. “If they just want to go out and come back, they can do that or if they want to go on a bigger boat and have fun and come back, we can do that. If they want to get into racing, if they want to go to the Virgin Islands … whatever level they want, we can give them.”
Not everyone starts sailing as a kid, obviously. For those who don’t - and maybe for those who want to keep up with their kids on the water - there is an adult learn-to-sail program as well. Beginning classes are held in classrooms on Friday nights and on keel boats over the weekend. The goal is to teach those students what they’ll need to know to crew a sailboat or sail their own, and students are encouraged to join club-sponsored races when they finish the class.
Those who don’t own a boat but have an interest in sailing or sailboat racing can apply for an associate membership, with an initiation fee of $20 a year plus $5 a month. Children whose parents are associate members can use the club’s Opti sailboats, when accompanied by an adult.
Daugherty doesn’t mince words when he describes the purpose of sailing classes.
“We do it to get more members,” he says. “We’re the opposite of exclusive. We want more people.
“Being a member is easy. The more the merrier. Honestly? I would love to teach the world to sail. There’s just nothing like it.”
ActiveStyle, Pages 29 on 05/27/2013