Sail1Design would like to welcome our newest writer, Sara Morgan Watters. Ms. Watters is a former St. Mary’s College All-American dinghy sailor, has a great deal of coaching experience, and will be reporting for Sail1Design from her new home in New Zealand. We are excited to learn more about youth and one-design sailing from Sara Morgan in the coming months, so stay tuned here for those articles, and also for an exciting youth sailing exchange program announcement coming up soon!
A lot of people talk and write about the transition from high school to college sailing, (see Grace Lucas’s From High School Newbie to College Recruit, or Lydia Whiteford’s Transitioning from High School to College Sailing)but what about life after college sailing? There are many different directions you can take including professional sailing which was just discussed in an article by Sail1Design, Steve Hunt in Paid for your Passion: From College to Pro Sailing. You could also plan an Olympics, or just sail for fun. Here I’m going to tell you about how I approached life after college sailing, in which I was able to pursue two of my passions; traveling and sailing.
It was three years ago this month that I boarded a plane for Barcelona and didn’t come back until two and a half years later. Although I hadn’t anticipated staying in Spain for so long, after graduating in 2010 from St. Mary’s College of Maryland I knew I wanted to immerse myself in a different culture, learn Spanish and if possible keep sailing.
Once I was settled in Barcelona with a place to live, a good sense of my way around the city and some jobs teaching private English classes, I started to focus on how I could get involved in sailing. Hoping to find a job coaching, with the help of my Basque (a region of Spain) roommate, I sent out a grammatically sound email about coaching opportunities to just about every club up and down the Cataluña coast, the area of Spain where Barcelona lies. Of the twenty or so clubs that I emailed, I heard back from two. Perhaps, this was because the Spanish economy was so poor that hiring (an American) just isn’t in the budget nor does the government make it easy to contract foreigners.
However, I did receive one promising response from a small club that had a strong junior sailing team based out of a club on the beach about 50 miles south of Barcelona. The club leader who happened to also be associated with the Catalan Sailing Federation, was keen on the idea of offering “Sailing in English”, as I was calling it, to their Opti race team. He was able to use my U.S. Sailing Level 1 certification to issue me their equivalent certification to be able to coach (more or less) legally. As I suppose it is the case in most places, knowing the right person makes the biggest difference and little did I know this first contact would set me on a path that I’m still on today.
The next summer, 2012 I tried again. With the help of my new “connections”, I got a one-off job teaching “sailing in English” for a small group of Opti sailors at a much bigger club 25 miles north of Barcelona. Although they let me drive a motor boat when I really wasn’t legally supposed to and I was getting paid under the table, I had my own class of Opti racers who were eager to learn English. After all, speaking English is “cool”. This week went so well they hired me for another week to coach a regular summer week of beginner Opti sailing in Spanish. I can tell you that the second week was much more challenging! A week or so later I got asked by the same club to do a classroom style 2 hour presentation on “advanced sailing in English for adult members of the club. The “Sailing in English” fever was starting to spread.
Some of the adults that came to my class had children in the club’s program. So, after my class, I can honestly say it just occurred to me, why not bring these young sailors to the English language instead of bringing them a native speaker. My idea was to create an opportunity for these racers to come to the U.S. so they could train with a local team and live with a host family and get a true cultural experience while doing what they love! To my surprise, the parents thought it was a brilliant idea and I was beginning to think so too.
That’s when I contacted Joel Labuzetta, the junior program director at Annapolis Yacht Club and proposed the idea. He was on board right away and even offered boats for the Spanish sailors during their stay. I gathered all the information, prices, regatta schedule, host family logistics etc and prepared an official information packet to distribute (with the help of my new sailing connections) to Spanish families and Clubs around Cataluña.
Fast forward to this past summer, I finally returned home and just days later so did five Catalan sailors. One sailor came for the full month of July and participated in the Opti Nationals. The other four came for about two and a half weeks. To my relief all went well. In fact, the AYC families enjoyed the experience hosting as much as the sailors did. As Tomás Ruiz de Luque, the AYC Opti Head Coach and exchange coordinator puts it, this program bridges culture through the love for sailing. Now referred to as the “Sailing Exchange Program” Tomás and I along with Magda Resano, the coordinator in Spain, are working to put together this summer’s exchange program. As the title suggests, this summer the Americans will have the opportunity to travel to Barcelona and the second half of the summer the Catalans will have the opportunity to return to Annapolis. You can check out the website to learn more www.youthsailingexchange.com or visit us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/sailingexchange.
In addition to my experiences starting this exchange program, I got out on the water myself by joining a local team who raced on a Beneteau First 40.7 on Sundays. I enjoyed the slow paced Sundays where we would arrive at the club at a decent hour of 10:30 (remember, people stay out late on weekends!), have a breakfast of authentic tortilla (Spanish omelet made of potato, onion and egg), and head out on the water to do one one-hour race. Granted the racing was competitive for that hour, it was the experience as a whole that I loved because I was learning about the culture through sailing. This group became like family to me. I’ll never forget the time we sailed from Barcelona to Menorca (an island off of Spain) in an overnight race. The regatta overlapped with a major Spanish holiday called Sant Joan, which among other celebratory efforts involves horses running through small streets so crowded with people that someone always gets their foot stepped on. With out my sailing team, I would never have experienced this tradition at the epicenter of where it is celebrated in Spain.
From my own experiences abroad as well as my efforts to create a program for others to have the abroad experience, I’ve learned that there is no better way to learn about a different culture and place than by sharing something in common, in this case, sailing. Although I didn’t really start my professional career in Spain as there often is pressure to do after college, I have grown as a person and want to make it possible for others to have an experience similar to mine. So my biggest advice to the soon to be graduate is pursue your sailing and personal ambitions in whatever direction that might be. Now is the time to try it and you never know what path you’ll find yourself on.
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