Former National Champion Eyes Olympics At 41
In most sports, athletes reach their peak in their late 20s and mid-30s, and it’s all downhill from there. That’s not the case for US Sailing Olympic hopeful Lauren Wilson, who at 41 and with two children, is vying to make the 2028 L.A. Olympic Games in the ILCA 6 class.
Nearly two decades since she stopped competing at the highest level in the ILCA 6, she has come back with a bang. After her first full season in 19 years, Wilson is the seventh-ranked ILCA 6 sailor in the country. While she still has ground to make up in order to claim the United States’ lone ILCA 6 berth, Wilson’s experience and wisdom can be an advantage for her.
“I’ve raced as a teenager. I’ve raced in my 20s,” Wilson says, via the Second Wind Racing press release. “But racing in my 40s is different. I don’t panic after a bad start. I reset faster. Experience and motherhood [have] become an advantage.”
Wilson first came onto the scene with the US Sailing team as a junior national champion in the early 2000s. Two decades later, she has a full slate of elite regattas to sail this year, highlighted by Palma de Mallorca, Almere, Kiel, and right where the 2028 Games will be sailed in Los Angeles.
“There’s this narrative that elite sport has an expiration date,” Wilson says, in the press release, “but strength, resilience and ambition don’t disappear at 40. If anything, they deepen.… Sometimes the second wind is stronger than the first.”
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Susie Wosser Trophy on Display at Sequoia Yacht Club
Last week, Latitude 38 delivered the Susie Wosser Trophy to Petra Gilmore, who, together with her husband Rick, was announced as the 2025 award recipient last December.
Latitude 38 awards the Wosser Trophies annually with the aim of recognizing participation in sailing and getting more people out on the water.
As summarized in our December 12 ‘Lectronic Latitude on the winners of the three different Wosser trophies, “The Susie Wosser Trophy recognizes the incredibly important responsibility of taking new people sailing. One of the most effective ways to get newcomers into our sport (because not everyone is born into a sailing family) is to just take them out sailing. The Susie Wosser Trophy is awarded to the boat owner(s) taking the greatest number of people out racing in any given year.”
Rick and Petra Gilmore took a whopping total of 65 crew members out sailing in 2025, but we only recently got the opportunity to deliver the trophy to Petra, at Sequoia Yacht Club.
Petra was excited to receive the trophy, and put it on display at Sequoia Yacht Club.
“Rick and I feel so honored and fortunate to win this year’s Susie Wosser Trophy for bringing the most people out racing,” she tells us. “We have taken people racing who have never been on a boat and others that are world-class sailors. Everyone gets a job trimming jib or main. We’ve got a ‘no rail meat policy;’ everyone participates.”
The Gilmores will be looking to defend their 2025 title in 2026, and we at Latitude 38 hope that everyone around the Bay can push them as hard as possible. The most important thing we as sailors can do for our sport is to show newcomers the wonderful world of sailing, and invite them in with open arms.
In the spirit of participation, if you’re looking for a boat to race on this season, or if you’re a boat owner looking to find new crew to take racing this season, come to the Latitude 38 Spring Crew List Party on March 5, at Golden Gate Yacht Club! You can purchase tickets here.
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Josh Kali Reports From McIntyre Mini Globe Race
Josh Kali is closing in on his dream of finishing the McIntyre Mini Globe race on his homebuilt 19-ft boat, Skookum, built over several years in Seattle. He wrote in with this report from Recife, Brazil.
In February 2025, 15 intrepid sailors set off from English Harbour, Antigua, intent on completing the first-ever McIntyre Mini Globe Race around the world. The race, a world-first solo circumnavigation featuring mostly homebuilt 5.8m (19-ft) plywood boats skippered by amateur sailors, held the promise of adventure on the high seas, unlike anything before. Brainchild of world sailor and adventurer Don McIntyre, also known for the revival of the retro Golden Globe and Ocean Globe races, the Mini Globe Race attracted an eclectic bunch of individuals from around the world.
For me, the only American skipper in the fleet, the experience has been truly amazing. I spent the better part of five years building and preparing the boat before finally departing from Oriental, North Carolina, bound for the start line in Antigua. The race has definitely had its ups and downs, as well as many pleasant surprises along the way. The most amazing part for me, as many solo sailors who have done long ocean passages can attest, has been the tranquility and solitude of the open ocean.
Finding a deeper connection with this incredible planet we inhabit by learning to live in harmony with the ever-changing sea, making friends (and sometimes enemies) with innumerable clouds, waves, and every gust of wind, has borne in me an insight into the dynamic, often capricious nature of our environment. Seemingly countless days of immaculate azure skies, breathtaking tangerine sunsets, and a blanket of nearly infinite stars, glittering on the indigo sea like a king’s ransom of diamonds, [have] helped me to understand how truly lucky we are to be here.
Following the traditional trade-wind route across the South Pacific, through the Great Barrier Reef, over the top of Australia, across the Indian Ocean, around the southern tip of the African continent, and across the South Atlantic has finally brought me to Recife, Brazil, where the fleet is preparing to sail into history by completing the final leg back to Antigua.
With stops in the Marquesas, Tahiti, Tonga, Fiji, Thursday Island, Australia, Cocos Keeling, Rodrigues, Mauritius, the South African coast, St. Helena, and now Recife, we have gotten to experience an interesting and varied cross section of cultures and lifestyles. There definitely seems to be a correlation between living somewhere that the sun shines often, and is near the sea, and a general kindness and well-being. It would be difficult to elect one place as my favorite destination, with each stop offering something unique and intrinsically valuable to the experience.
Whether it was the delicious French-inspired cuisine of Tahiti, the rustic beauty of the Tonga islands, the infectious good cheer felt in every “Bula” heard in Fiji, the kind nature of the Australians on Thursday Island, the sheer, heart-stopping beauty of remote Cocos Keeling, the feeling of stepping back in time on Rodrigues Island, the melting pot of African, Indian, and European cultures on Mauritius, the amazingly good food and accommodating peoples of South Africa, the stunningly rugged coastline of St. Helena, or the boisterous enthusiasm of the Brazilians at Carnival time, the people and places we visited never failed to leave a lasting impression.
Listen to Josh Kali before departure on our Good Jibes podcast.
Jamie Rosman: Sailing in Wisconsin, Mexico and Ports in Between
Recently we shared the story of our two newest Golden Ticket winners: Brian Natov from Davis, CA, and Jamie Rosman from Nevada. While we shared Brian’s sailing story, we were waiting to hear back from Jamie about his sailing life. We now know more about Jamie and have learned that he’s a lifelong sailor with many miles and dozens of ports under his keel.
Jamie was just a kid when he learned to sail at summer camp in northern Wisconsin. There he sailed X boats, Sunfish, Hobies and MC Scows. He moved away from sailing a little when he was in his teens to late 20s, but reconnected with the sport on San Francisco Bay. “I had a coworker who had a friend that took people out sailing on Friday evenings. He was restoring a stripped-out 40-something IOR race boat and needed a bunch of crew to sail the boat, and I got invited to go. Within about eight weeks of going out on Friday nights, my coworker and I pretty much ran the boat while the skipper took care of the wine and snacks. I realized that this was something I loved and could actually do myself, so I decided to get my own boat, which was my Sabre 34 Freedom Rider.” That was 1992. “I sailed the s**t out of that boat all over S.F. Bay and the Delta and up and down the local coast,” Jamie adds.
In May 2000, Jamie and his then girlfriend, now wife, Elaine Lutz, bought the Taswell 49 TARDIS in Puerto Vallarta. They had spent five months crewing on a friend’s boat, going from San Diego to Acapulco, then back to Puerto Vallarta. After buying TARDIS, they took her back to Alameda, where they lived aboard for six years. “My wife, Elaine Lutz, was the marina manager at Grand Marina for much of that time. In 2006 she took the manager’s job at Cabrillo Isle Marina in San Diego. The job came with an apartment above the office, so we moved off the boat.” But that wasn’t the end of their sailing. The couple sailed the boat all over Southern California from Ensenada to Santa Barbara, with numerous visits to Catalina and the Channel Islands. Then, in 2012, they cast off from San Diego and cruised on and off, splitting their time on the boat between Mexico and SoCal until 2023.
Though they never joined a yacht club, as such, the couple were honorary members of Encinal YC when Elaine was manager at Grand Marina. “I would say we were more yacht club hanger-on-ers,” Jamie says. “We had lots of friends who were active members of Encinal, Alameda, Saint Francis, Silver Gate, San Diego and Pacific Maritime Yacht Clubs and we hung out a lot at those clubs as guests.”
Jamie recalls crewing in the 2007 Baja Ha-Ha Cruisers Rally* aboard his friend Mike Scheck’s (of Scanmar International) Jeanneau 45 No Worries. “It was the year many of us slept on the beach in Santa Maria since the waves at the bar were too big even for the panga drivers to take people back out to their boats after the beach party.
“Doing the Ha-Ha was a lot of fun,” Jamie continues, “and I am glad I did it, but in my opinion, the most underrated cruising in Mexico, BY FAR, is the Pacific side of Baja. I have made 10 trips in total up and down the coast, and we always go as slow as possible, stopping in all the anchorages. On one trip down, we took two-and-a-half months to go from SD to San Jose del Cabo, exploring and hanging out. My recommendation is to go on the Ha-Ha as crew to both have fun and gain the experience for sailing Baja. Then, when it comes time to head south yourself, take your time and enjoy a slow trip down the coast, experiencing all that the Pacific side of Baja has to offer. Amongst the many fantastic experiences we have had [on] the Pacific Baja, perhaps the highlight was meeting our now lifelong friends Jose Angel Sanchez Pacheco and Melanie Lamaga, owners of Cedros Outdoor Adventures, and Victor and Carolina Aguilar, a local lobster fisherman and abalone diver and their boys on Isla Cedros.”
Jamie counts the friends they have made and the people they have met among their favorite aspects of sailing. And for being on the water, Jamie says, “I love how it slows you down, keeps you in the moment, connects you to nature, and always teaches you something new no matter how long you have been at it.” He can recount many moments that would serve as his most memorable: “(S)ailing through a megapod of dolphins, having a humpback whale swim under the boat setting off the depth alarm, and gazing at a ‘bazillion’ stars while listening to coyotes howl while at a deserted island in the Sea or Cortez.” But the most memorable was when he crewed for his friend Rodney Pimentel aboard his Leopard 49 catamaran Azure II (also of the Cal 40 Azure).
“We were crossing the Atlantic, and the wind was blowing 40+ knots. We were way overpowered and we were going WAY too fast. We needed to reef ASAP. As we let the main down, one of the full battens got stuck in the lazy jacks, preventing the sail from dropping and us from slowing the boat down. It was a potentially very dangerous situation. Without thinking I scrambled up on the bimini and with one foot on each of the 1-inch support bars attempted to free the batten while we tried to come up into the wind to raise and re-lower the sail. Even using both motors at full power it was near impossible to keep the boat into the wind. I don’t know how long I was up there but it seemed like an hour, while getting the crap beaten out of me with the flogging sail and wildly swinging boom, all the while worried that one slip and I would fall down straight through the bimini into the cockpit from about eight feet up. Did I mention it was two in the morning? Because of course it was. We eventually got it all sorted. I was buzzing on adrenaline for hours after. It was a moment I’ll never forget.”
These days Jamie and Elaine split their time between Las Vegas and TARDIS in Marina del Rey. “Due to a health issue, our long-distance cruising days are over, but we still enjoy daysails and trips out to Catalina,” Jamie adds.
Thanks, Jamie, for this excellent bio of your sailing life. We hope it inspires others to take the leap and cast off to go cruising, or even daysailing. Readers, if you’re looking to do the Ha-Ha on someone else’s boat, check out the Baja Ha-Ha here (registrations for the 2026 rally are open), and sign up for the crew list here.
You can also come to the Latitude 38 Crew List Party being held on March 5 at the Golden Gate Yacht Club. Details here.
* Read the full story of the 2007 Baja Ha-Ha beach sleepover here.
Don’t Miss the Latitude 38 Spring Crew Party
