t r a t s now Meet Bob and Eve German How did you get into sailing? Through our children! Sawyer and Sabina are teenagers now, but when they were about six and eight years old, they began spending a week or two every summer at Premier Sailing School in Irvington, VA. For many years they attended with the children of our friends Darryl and Jen Resio, who were already boat owners. Our family fell in love with the sailing school and a few years ago followed our friends in joining Rappahannock River Yacht Club (RRYC), a beautiful old club in Irvington on Carters Creek. We enrolled in an adult Basic Keelboat course at Premier Sailing and began looking for the right boat. Tell us about some of your sailing experiences thus far. Although Bob had built a Chesapeake Light Craft wooden sailing kayak, we had very little sailing experience, aside from the Basic Keelboat class, when we bought our 40-foot 1984 Beneteau Pegasus in the spring of 2014. We managed to talk the seller into sailing the boat with Bob from Severna Park, MD, to RRYC, and together they made a three-day voyage out of it, spending two nights at anchor. We had 17 days on the water during our first year with Pegasus, and a good number of those were racing. Our club is very racing-centered, and it always encourages members
to come out and experience the racing life. None of us are serious competitors, and our boat could use some upgrades to encourage better racing performance, but we did it for the camaraderie and for the learning opportunity. Last summer we continued racing and did a few overnight cruises. Bob served as fleet captain for Junior Sailing at RRYC, and he’ll continue in 2016. Our daughter Sabina began her first summer job as a sailing instructor at Premier and was named 2015 Junior Sailor of the Year at RRYC. We had a wonderful time July Fourth weekend docked at Urbanna with great friends, enjoying music, drinks, and fireworks from the boat. We culminated the season with a First in Fleet at the 2015 Turkey Shoot Hospice Regatta. Did you have any preconceived notions about sailing that proved true or untrue? It’s not as expensive as we thought it would be. We’ve just made modest investments so far and have had many great experiences. Of course we have an older boat, and there are many things still on the list to upgrade. If someone were interested in learning to sail, what would you tell them? Call Arabella Denvir at Premier Sailing! And that in our limited experience, and from what all the most experienced sailors we know say, the Chesapeake
Bay has some of the best sailing in the world. If you’re in the market to buy a boat, it really helps to look at a bunch of boats before making an offer. Figure out how much you can afford and look in that general range. But if you find one that seems slightly out of your range, don’t worry. Make an offer you can afford. You might just get lucky. We wanted a big boat that would accommodate our family’s height and our kids’ friends for sleepovers and parties. Originally we limited our search to a a center cockpit because that’s what our friends had and what we were accustomed to. But after broadening our search, we ended up with an aft cockpit boat, which we love. Did you encounter any obstacles or barriers when you began sailing? Only imaginary barriers. We thought that club membership and boat ownership would be far more expensive and prohibitive than it ended up being. Turns out it was very easy to make it happen, and we ended up with a large second family of great friends at RRYC, and Irvington as our second hometown. There are always people at the club who will take time to help with a project or teach you something you don’t already know. #
Check out our new sailor guide and past articles at StartSailingNow.com 28 February 2016 spinsheet.com