THE LATITUDE 38 INTERVIEW
Morgan Larson
Latitude 38: Your parents, Jane and Bobbo Larson, were a part of the Santa Cruz legend, and your dad worked for Bill Lee, is that right? Morgan: Yeah. 38: So it's not hard to see how you would've gotten into sailing at a young age. Did you start out in El Toros, like the rest of the kids? ML: Jesters. We didn't really have El Toros for the most part down here. 38: Did they have a junior program at the Santa Cruz Yacht Club that you participated in? ML: Yeah, they had a pretty good one. There were a few different parents through the years, when I was pretty young; and, you know, it was just a volunteer job, and Dave Wahle, who was probably one of the more prolific Santa Cruz sailors at the time, he sort of took it on. He didn't have kids, so he had some extra time to put into it, and he really built the program. It still exists today, and there are still some pretty talented kids coming through it. 38: Do they still sail Jesters? Morgan Larson, age 3, down by the water ML: There's still Jester in Capitola. sailing going on. It's not like it used to be, when you'd get 30 or 40 of them out racing, but there was always a Boxing Day Race. Mike Holt, the 5O5 sailor, sends a message out to everybody, and that happened on the 26th, so we got to join that. It was cool. They're neat boats. You know, I was sailing the other day — it'd probably been 15 years since I'd stepped foot in one — they're tricky little boats. 38: You were sailing one in Santa Cruz Race Week in 2013. ML: That's right. I did get in one then. Good memory. 38: How did you go from being in the junior sailing program to racing and sailing competitively? ML: I think my parents love the racing, and it was just another outlet. If you grow up here, you pretty much spend all of your time in the water surfing, and all my friends were great surfers, so my folks would spend time at the yacht club, whether they were racing or for a social event or something, and I just happened to be hanging out there, so I might as well go sailing. I sort of picked it up from there. Page 74 •
Latitude 38
• February, 2018
38: When did you start sailing Moore 24s? ML: Wow. Well, my parents had #88, and prior to that I'm sure I was sailing on a few different Moore 24s. I remember Walter Olivieri — he had #5 — I crewed for him a little bit. And Lester Robertson from Tahoe had Legs, which I think was maybe #27. It's funny how all the Moore sailors go by their number. 38: Yeah, Lester still has Legs. [Legs is #29.] ML: And I think he has a second boat. He always had a second one from time to time. And Lester, Greg Dorland, the Baylis brothers… those were the guys that sailed Moore 24s, Dave Hodges, a couple different fellas. 38: Was that when you were a teenager? ML: No, not even. I was probably 10. 38: In order to support your sailing habit, did you end up going to work in the sailing industry? ML: I guess I did a little bit. I swept the floor at Larsen Sails, which isn't any relation to us; it's spelled differently. Kurt and Sue Larsen still have it here: more awnings and things now. That's where Dave Hodges worked for many years. Yeah, I swept the floors. Sometimes they let me stick numbers down. At the end I might've been sewing a little bit. 38: And then you went to Charleston for college? Was that because of their sailing program? ML: Yeah. I applied to all the good schools with great sailing programs: Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Brown, University of Washington — a lot of good schools, but I didn't get in. I didn't have the grades. I was sort of a B+ student, and it wasn't good enough for those schools. But I almost got into Stanford and that's solely just because of sailing and the pull the coach had there. When I didn't get into any schools, by the time I got the last letter, it was probably June, and it was too late to apply anywhere. Dr. Wood called me from Charleston and said, "I can still get you in if you want to go." I said, "Alright, I'm going." I only went for a year, though. Adult Jester sailors race in late afternoon sunshine in the harbor during Made in Santa Cruz Race Week in May 2013. LATITUDE / CHRIS
LARSON FAMILY
A professional sailboat racer who still sails a Moore 24 for fun, Morgan Larson's list of accomplishments is so long that we had to put them in their own box (see page 76). The 46-year-old Santa Cruz native is now living in Oregon, but Morgan's family still has a house in Capitola. We caught up with him there during the last week of December, while his wife and kids frolicked on the beach in the toasty winter sunshine.