Newport Harbor Sailing Foundation: Sailor Stories
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Emerson Betz at the Junior Women’s Doublehanded Champs (Ida Lewis)
My first day of Ida Lewis was exciting, but also exhausting. It was the windiest conditions my crew and I had ever sailed and we found it to be very challenging.
Our boat kept swamping but not flipping. A coach came over to us while everybody else was practicing and told us to flip the boat because that would help us get the water out.
From there, we tried a variety of different ways to flip but none of them worked. Eventually, the coach told us to get on his boat and he would manually flip the boat for us.
Not long after, we swamped again. Once we flipped our boat again, we finished going upwind but while we were making our way down, we began nose diving. We both tried to scoot back in the boat, but we were too late. It was already flipping. Once we got the boat up, we slowly sailed in while being very exhausted from the long day we had.
The next couple of days we received useful feedback from coaches on our sail trim, trap technique, when to set our kite etc. We also observed and learned from others about trapping and easing and trimming and tried to remember so we can replicate.
The fourth day of Ida Lewis was our first race day. We had to wait until around 4PM to go out because there was no wind. What a big difference from the previous days!
Once we got onto the racecourse, it was actually about 8 knots so we were marginal trapping at some point. We didn’t do that well that day because we were less experienced and younger than everyone else, but we got better with each race and remained positive. We sailed until 8PM that day! We’ve never been out on the water like that that late!
On the fifth and last day of Ida Lewis, we had to be finished by 3pm so we went out around 11am and practiced for a bit. The race was postponed due to lack of wind. Finally, the race started. We didn’t have a great start so we weren’t doing that well in that race, but, we did catch up to a few boats when they called the race, abandoned the regatta, and put the flag up.
Overall, Ida Lewis was a tremendous learning experience and I appreciated the opportunity to be there to learn from various coaches and sailors from around the nation.