Gallery • 3 Photos

Clara Ann Bagnoli

CIRCLE UP. The boats warm up by doing the circle up drill. “[The drill] just helps with bow handling and helps us get warmed up,” Adi Narayan said.

In sailing, practice leads to progress. The sailing team is classified as a club due to it not being recognized as an MSHSL sport. Nevertheless, the team keeps a consistent practice and competition schedule the same as any other team. Three times a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, the team meets at Lake Bde Maka Ska at 4:30 p.m. for practice.

In sailing, unlike other sports, practices begin with fixing your equipment. Holes in the sail are repaired by sticking small pieces of fabric with adhesion to both sides of the sail. Larger holes will be sewn up Next is rigging: putting the sail onto the sailboat. Once their boats are set up, practice can finally begin.

First on the water is coach John Weissert and his assistant in two engine-driven fishing boats. The sailors, in teams of two per boat, follow. The coaches began placing multiple buoys in the water as the sailors got the feel of the water, then whistled for everyone to meet in the center of the lake to begin their first drill. Freshmen Adi Narayan and Leif Rush steered their boat towards the center and juniors Lorenzo Good and Finn Cairns followed in theirs.

To warm up, the sailors “circled up” which consists of the nine sailboats circling coach Weissert’s boat. To do such a tight turn they need a lot of control over the sails, and to keep it steady they sit up and down on the side of the boat.

“[The drill] just helps with bow handling and helps us get warmed up,” Narayan said.

Sometimes the boat does not cooperate with the sailor. This happened on Thursday when Cairns went too far and ended up capsized.

“When you’re training you help the boat tip a lot so that you move faster … so when we had titleted [the boat] I got stuck down there and continued to tip,” Cairns said.

Good quickly climbed up the boat to get it back in position which is called “dry capsizing” and Cairns climbed aboard. Normally there is one capsize a week, which means that the sailors are pushing themselves to find the boat’s limits.

“The more you do that the better at turning you get,” Cairns said.

For the next drill, they did “Tack and Jibe” on a whistle. To tack is to change the direction of the boat by turning the bow (front) through the wind. To jibe is another way to turn the boat but by bringing the stern (rear) of the boat through the wind.

“Practicing helps us go faster,” Rush said. “Tacking and jibing is how you lose speed a lot so if you do them well you don’t lose as much speed.”

The sailors finished by doing “scrimmages” of racing from buoy to buoy until the end of practice.

The team’s next regatta is Sept 23. at White Bear Lake.