High School Northern League Championship Sails in Redwood City
Eighteen high schools showed up for their Northern League Championship last weekend at the Port of Redwood City, where Redwood High, Marin County, got the job done over two days and 24 races.
Along with adept race management by young volunteers, Peninsula Youth Sailing Foundation provided a fleet of matched boats for rotations between two divisions. Redwood won both.
That decisive win came with a trophy, historic but repurposed for the event, plus a trip for the winners to a high school regatta in Annapolis, Maryland, in June sponsored by five foundations. Those unprecedented sweeteners turned up the heat, and Morgan Headington, Redwood’s A division skipper, said, “Win or lose, it was great to see opportunities for high school sailing growing.”
However, you will not find Headington, most of the time, sailing one of the FJ dinghies — designed 68 years ago — that are standard for high school sailing in California. FJs are tactical, not fast. Headington and crew Henry Vare are both speed-addicted to wing foiling. Headington allowed for a little crossover when he said, “FJs help me develop strategic thinking for speed and distance to a starting line. That’s valuable. But I feel a need for speed — unless I’m winning.”
Feva class North American champion Rhett Krawitt shared the skippering of Redwood’s B team with Mark Xu, but Krawitt is speed-addicted in turn to 29er skiffs. Compared to skiff speeds, the attraction of high school sailing, he said, “is being part of a team; you don’t always get that in other sailing, but it’s hard to find a balance.”
Perhaps what Krawitt really means is that it’s hard to find enough sailing time in one life.
And we ought to mention a common thread of childhoods spent in Optis.
Crew time with Krawitt and Xu was shared between Whitney Feagin (light air) and Akira Bratti (more breeze). Second place was claimed by Stevenson School, Pebble Beach, followed closely by Encinal High. For Stevenson, Max McCormick and Patrick O’Hara skippered. For Encinal, that fell to lifestyle sailors Marco Puertas and sister Emi. Emi shared the too-common observation that, “Our school doesn’t consider us as a club, even, and sailing is not regarded as a sport.”
But if you gotta sail, you gotta sail.
Even Redwood’s team is not fully embraced by the school despite a long history of success. At The Bay School in the Presidio, however, the athletic department speaks sailing, and Bay’s Caleb Everett and Anna Rauh were the second-place boat on points behind Headington and Vare.
That’s not what Everett was aiming for, but he said, “Hey, we’re a young team.”
And that’s our no-punches-pulled report on high school sailing in the Bay Area.
The kids are all right.