Believing in the Eventual Yes: On Opportunities & Pathways in Sailing

Hello everyone! It’s Lindsay, stepping in as the guest blogger for our regular weekly update since Annie has been busy kicking butt out on the water this weekend. Annie spent the past few days racing at Charleston Race Week in the Melges 24 class. After 3 days of races, she finished 14th out of 37 in the class, and 3rd in the Corinthian (non-pro) division. Epic!

As the weather begins to warm and spring inches forward in Southeastern CT, plans for summer are rapidly solidifying. We are booking flights and housing, reading up on performance tactics and sail trim, and readying our gear bags. The mighty yacht TRADER was launched this past week and the local Hawaii team expects to take her out for a shakedown sail by the end of this week. If it seems like things are coming into focus, it’s because they are! It’s taken over five months of work for us to get to this point, and even longer for the maintenance team in Hawaii.

While November may seem early to look for what to do with the next summer, it was actually late for an endeavor as large as the Transpac Race. I identified Transpac as a race to personally target in the early fall of 2020 before contacting Team TRADER and looping in Sarah, Annie, and Megan around Thanksgiving. Reflecting on how long ago that feels made me think about pathways and how we all have found opportunities throughout our sailing careers. I hope by explaining my journey, I can show how we found our teams, and explain just one of a myriad of pathways that can lead to doing a Transpac Race by 25 years old. Organizationalist that I am, I have even highlighted the main takeaways into quick tips, in case you’re more into skimming.

After graduating college, I always wondered how to keep sailing. As a dinghy sailor, the only competitive route seemed like an Olympic campaign, but I wasn’t an elite level sailor. I decided to move back near my hometown in Connecticut for an engineering job in an area that has a lot of casual sailing and Wednesday night racing.

Sailing Pathway Tip #1: If you want sailing to be part of your life, factor sailing access into your career location!

After starting my engineering job, I picked up a coaching job with the high school sailing team, all the while wondering how to keep sailing myself. That’s when the MudRatz announced a youth Newport Bermuda campaign. “Youth” in the offshore world means under 23 years old, so I was in! As were Sarah, Annie, and Megan. All four of us are big MudRatz fans. As Megan tells it, the MudRatz started as a group of kids who just couldn’t let go of the energy and fun of the summer sailing season. A couple of opti sailors and some local coaches got together after all the yacht club summer programs had settled down to keep the momentum going in the fall, and the rest is history. Fun fact, one of those original opti sailors was Megan, and some of the original coaches were Annie and Sarah! Only 5 years from Megan’s first opti practice, the MudRatz had expanded from optis through 420s to sportboats and offshore, all with the mission of complementing the programs offered by local clubs and programs.

Sailing Pathway Tip #2: Support or seek out junior sailing programs, particularly those grounded in seamanship, safety, and teamwork experiences.

We all had our reasons for applying for the Bermuda campaign. I wanted to find a way to challenge myself in sailing after the college circuit ended. For Megan, still in high school at the time, it was about reconnecting with her team after moving away from our Connecticut homebase for a few years, following our dad’s military career. She says she applied for the Bermuda Race because she always aspired to race offshore (although she always thought it would be later in life), but also because she really wanted to get back in touch with a team that she had been involved with at the beginning and watched grow from a distance.

There was one night on that Bermuda Race, sitting on the rail of Dreamcatcher, our classic Swan 48, where I looked up at the infinite number of stars and thought, I can’t imagine not having this view in my life again. I was invested, I was in the game, and I wound up skippering the next year’s entry in the Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race, accompanied once more by Megan and Annie.

Sailing Pathway Tip #3: It’s not easy to go it alone, find friends to talk to about your goals and journey.

Objectively, the MudRatz team did really well in the Halifax race, with a second place in our class and fourth overall. It was a good result for how difficult I had found the experience: trudging through the spring maintenance schedule in the rain, coming up short on fundraising, and sitting at the nav desk during a critical error that bumped our persistent crew down from the top spot. I was left doubting if I really had a place in the offshore world, but decided to apply anyways to The Magenta Project Mentoring Program to help me decide what to make of my sailing pathway.

The Magenta Project is an organization founded by the members of the all-female Team SCA after their round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race campaign in 2014-15 with the goal of developing pathways and creating opportunities for women in performance sailing. Because women in particular respond well to mentorship, The Magenta Project developed a 9-month mentoring program for aspiring female sailors, pairing them with professionals throughout the sailing industry to help them access and achieve their sailing goals. I was paired with Vicky Ellis, who has raced around the world as a skipper with The Clipper Race, and also had a common background as an engineer. She is a fine study in leadership, organization, and overcoming challenges. She helped me examine my experiences and myself to find confidence in my successes and identify where to work on my weaknesses. Because of Vicky, as well as the support of the other mentees in my year, I felt confident that I could continue to reach higher in my offshore pursuits.

I have been lucky to stay involved with The Magenta Project as a shadow board member, learning the ins and outs of running an international charity. What has been so rewarding is seeing other women, including my teammates, benefit from this program. Annie and Sarah were accepted to the most recent round of the Mentoring Program. They both believe strongly in the mission of The Magenta Project to advance women in performance sailing. Sarah says she applied because it was a great opportunity to learn from some of the best female sailors in the world, people she has looked up to since she was little. Fittingly, she is paired with accomplished sailor Annie Lush: a match racer, Olympian, and round-the-world ocean racer. For Annie, one of the big draws was being part of a continuous line of role models. She says, “I applied because I want to be a role model for younger women in sailing. I’ve been a sailing coach for 8 years now and I’ve recently noticed an increase of girls in the program, which makes me really happy. So, I want to show those girls and all my students that they can do this kind of thing, too, regardless of age (though I definitely don’t want my young students competing in the Transpac until they’re older) or gender!”

Sailing Pathway Tip #4: Seek out role models, examine their paths and ask for their advice.

Through The Magenta Project, Annie has also found a connection to her other personal pillar: sustainability. Annie’s mentor for The Magenta Project is Damian Foxall, The Sustainability Manager for the 11th Hour Racing Team. Damian quickly noticed Annie’s dedication to environmental studies (it was her major in college!) and invited her to apply for the 11th Hour Next Gen Program. The 11th Hour Next Gen Young Professional Mentoring Program provides opportunities for young individuals to explore pathways in the marine, sports, and events industry with a focus on sustainability. Annie is working closely with Damian on all things sustainability when it comes to Transpac prep, including editing the team’s Standard Operating Procedures to include sustainable aspects. Soon she will be starting projects with some of the other 11th Hour Next Gen mentees from around the world concerning food and the environment. More on this to come!

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Overall, I think my pathway is all about proactively searching for opportunities and then converting those to skills, knowledge, and lessons learned to better both my sailing experiences and my interactions with others. I asked the others to chime in about how they view opportunities in sailing. Sarah sails on many boats across multiple classes. She thinks the key is just to say yes if you can!

“If you show up and put in the effort, chances are other teams will notice and can ask you to sail. Never hesitate to ask other sailors if they know anyone who needs a crew or to keep you in mind, if they know you're available you've got a better shot of being asked! If you have the chance to do deliveries or help with boatwork, take the chance because they might ask you to sail in the future!”

Megan makes it even more fundamental:

“The key to finding opportunities is to always be open and ready to take them. Opportunities won’t come unless you put yourself out there and are ready for the inevitable no. At some point, you will get the eventual yes.”

So that’s how we’ve gotten to the point of doing a Transpac, all at or under age 25: Keep looking for your next step, keep asking for a chance, keep working hard until you get to YES!

Sailing Pathway Tip #5: Opportunities are what you make of them. Ask for a chance and learn the skills you need to do your part to the best of your abilities. Keep trying until you get to yes.

For all those hoping for a Race Week update from Annie, don’t worry, she will return soon with a blog recap! To tide you over until then, I will take a note from her blogs: Annie signs off with a phrase she borrowed from her mom, so it’s only right to continue the tradition with some words from my dad:

“Pointy side forward, open side up, don’t forget to have fun!”

~Lindsay