Anchors are away for the JC Sailing Club.
Juniors Bryan Doherty and Matt Henderson started the sailing club this year. Henderson and Doherty have been recruiting members since then. Both boys have extensive experience with sailing and wanted to bring it to JC.
“I first started sailing when I was eight and I took a two-week camp at the Baltimore County Sailing Center. After the camp, they asked me to join the race team that spent all summer training and traveling all over the Bay and Mid-Atlantic. I’ve been doing that ever since,” Doherty said.
Doherty and Henderson are also a part of the Central League of the Mid-Atlantic Scholastic Sailing Association. They participate in sailing competitions, or regattas, throughout the year. One must be able to sail a course without breaking the rules or hitting another boat.
In certain situations, people are allowed a certain amount of room to get around the marks. The penalty for not performing efficiently is spinning the boat, either in a 360-degree or a 720-degree circle, depending on the severity of the rule broken which slows the boat down in a race.
“The hardest thing about sailing is the strategy involved, being able to see the wind, current, and course and making a decision that’s going to give you the best results in race. It takes years to perfect your tactics and they change with each boat you sail,” Doherty said. “It’s really easy to learn how to sail, but learning how to do well in a race is the hard part.”
In a high school regatta, each team has two teams of two people that make up the A fleet and B fleet. The people in A fleet will sail two races, switch with the people in the B fleet, and then the B fleet will sail two races. When the B fleet returns, the process repeats. The number of races in a regatta varies, but each fleet could potentially sail two to six races on a given day.
Doherty’s mother, Louise, supervises the club members while they sail at the Baltimore Country Sailing Center (BCSC) in Essex four days a week. As a six-year member of the Board of Advisors for the BCSC, she knows how involved students from other area schools are in the program.
“[Bryan] has friends from schools all over the bay that participate in scholastic sailing and he thinks it would be a great thing for JC,” Louise Doherty said.
Louise Doherty is all for the continuation of the Sailing Club. . “I believe Bryan has a great vision in introducing sailing to the JC community. I plan to support that vision for as long as I can,” Louise Doherty said.
Among the schools that are also involved in scholastic sailing are Severn, Calvert Hall, Annapolis High School, Spalding, and Bryn Mawr.
In order to create a club centered at JC, a moderator must be enlisted. The moderator for the Sailing Club is Spanish teacher Jane Michael. Her job requirement is to let the club use her room for meetings. Michael jokes that this privilege does not come without a price.
“I’ll do it only if they get me a team jacket with Coach Michael on it!” Michael said.
Miranda Ripken is a Sports Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.