{"id":1212,"date":"2011-09-29T17:31:35","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T21:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/?p=1212"},"modified":"2011-09-30T12:43:59","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T16:43:59","slug":"team-rafiki-featured-in-spinsheet-editors-notebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/team-rafiki-featured-in-spinsheet-editors-notebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Team Rafiki featured in SpinSheet Editor’s Notebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Molly Winans, Editor of the SpinSheet<\/a> included the following article in the October 2011 edition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last month, I witnessed a kindhearted, wild-haired sort of idea sprout, magically open doors, and manifest itself into one exceptional sailing weekend. This may be my first and last Milwaukee-New-Orleans-Chicago-Annapolis sailing story with an Oahu twist, so bear with me as I untangle the details.<\/p>\n

As co-president of the J\/30 association, Dave Erwin (New Orleans, LA) was the first to read a newsletter article about the competitive, all-girl teenage crew who sail the J\/30 Rafiki out of Milwaukee, WI. The father of two of the teens and the newsletter article\u2019s author also happens to be Nicholas Hayes, the author of Saving Sailing, a book about how families and communities can carve out time to make healthier choices, namely sailing more together (find his latest article on page 56).<\/p>\n

Erwin and his sailing buddy, Louisianan Scott Tonguis, pondered how they could get the all-girl Team Rafiki to sail with them in Annapolis for the J\/30 National Championship Regatta September 16-18. Following a Facebook inquiry, parental conference calls, requests for school days off, a borrowed boat, and a second borrowed boat for lodging, and more e-mails than any of the dozen players can count, the idea started to materialize\u2014within three weeks\u2014much to the surprise and delight of all involved.<\/p>\n

Hayes forked out frequent flyer miles. Annapolis J\/30 sailor Bonnie Schloss offered her boat Bear Away and her local knowledge as a crewmember. A friend of SpinSheet, Michael Jewell, who was leaving for a surfing vacation in Oahu, HI, offered his Eastport-based, 40-foot O\u2019Day Moon Bounce as lodging for the young sailors. Chicagoan J\/30 sailor and 160-pounder Dennis Bartley agreed to round out the crew to make weight. A dizzying number of puzzle pieces came together as if magnetically.<\/p>\n

I met Whitney and Alison Kent and Kate and Elizabeth Hayes (all between the ages of 14-18) in the marina parking lot next door on a chilly, drizzly September 15 evening, after they had woken up at 4:30 a.m., flown to Baltimore, met Erwin for the first time at the airport (with their PFDs in hand), gotten weighed in, and practiced spinnaker drills on the Bay for a couple of hours. Team Rafiki looked undaunted, yet a little travel-weary. Their eyes lit up when they saw their weekend floating home, complete with heat, a shower, and a stereo with an iPod plug-in. There were smiles all around as I gave them a mini-tour of the boat\u2019s systems and left them alone.<\/p>\n

The next day, with 18-year-old Whitney driving, Kate and Elizabeth trimming jib, and Alison working the foredeck, Team Rafiki won the first race and became the talk of the town. Forget that they had a few races they would rather delete the next day. These young sailors captured a first, a second, and a third in a seven-race national regatta and earned a fifth-place overall finish of 19 competing boats (see page 125). They had the time of their lives.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s why this story matters: Team Rafiki\u2019s skipper, Whitney, a college freshman, will turn 38 years old in 20 years. I can promise you she won\u2019t stop sailing in between now and then. She\u2019s going to pull out a can of whoop-ass and win in J\/30s and beyond. She will buy boats, organize events, and invite newcomers into sailing. I promise you that Alison, who had \u201cthe best sailing weekend of [her] life\u201d will do so, too. Genetically, Kate and Elizabeth have no choice but to sail for life and spread the gospel of sailing.<\/p>\n

Kate\u2019s note to me says, \u201cI’ve never had a sailing weekend like that before. Everyone we met was so incredibly supportive and genuinely excited to see us there. Whenever we ate (which we did a lot of), we pulled up extra tables and extra chairs for the sailors who would come visit with us. We were surrounded by a whole bundle of new friends. When I got home, the next day at school, I felt lonely. I was surrounded by hundreds of kids my own age, but it just felt empty without that constant flow of sailors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t invite young people on your boat to \u201csave sailing.\u201d Don\u2019t invite them because you want to earn brownie points into heaven as a mentor. Do it for the same reason Erwin did\u2014he thought these young sailors seemed like a breath of fresh air. He felt inspired by them. He thought the girls would be cool to hang out with on a race boat. His hunches were on the mark.<\/p>\n

Whitney, Alison, Kate, and Elizabeth call themselves Team Rafiki. Rafiki was the monkey from \u201cThe Lion King,\u201d whose name means \u201cfriend\u201d in Swahili. Why not give a young person a chance to steer your boat because he or she seems like a neat person you would like to befriend? It worked for Erwin and Tonguis. I had dinner with the motley Milwaukee-New-Orleans-Chicago-Annapolis crew. I know this much to be true: after one unbelievable weekend sailing together on a borrowed J\/30, they will always be friends.<\/p>\n

by Molly Winans<\/p>\n

from the October 2011 edition of SpinSheet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Molly Winans, Editor of the SpinSheet included the following article in the October 2011 edition.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Last month, I witnessed a kindhearted, wild-haired sort of idea sprout, magically open doors, and manifest itself into one exceptional sailing weekend. This may be my first and last Milwaukee-New-Orleans-Chicago-Annapolis sailing story with an Oahu twist, so bear with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3,8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-news","category-event","category-list","category-regatta","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1212"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1216,"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212\/revisions\/1216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j30.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}