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The Great Race

Rhode Island lays claim to some of the best young laser sailors in the country, but in a nail-biting competition between the national champ and a gifted challenger, who will win?

Photography by Meghan Sepe

(page 1 of 3)

On the back of his left hand, Luke Lawrence had written a message to himself in smudged black ink: “Cash Check Bank of America.” The check was for $3,000, money that Luke earned last summer for ten days of work in Scotland, where he taught Team USA’s youth sailing team the finer points of sailboat racing.

Besides the three grand, Luke pocketed another $500 in tips, “because,” he says, “I did such a good job with the kids, opened their eyes to a whole new level of sailing.”

Luke, a confident nineteen-year-old with a superhero’s muscled good looks, arrived for his freshman year at Roger Williams University in September, carrying a fat scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his stellar career as the best single-handed high school sailboat racer in the nation.

Cy Thompson, a collegiate All-American in sailing and a veteran member of the Roger Williams sailing team, was not overly impressed with the new recruit. “He’s a good kid, but his cockiness,” Cy said of Luke — and then he left the 
sentence unfinished.
 
Cy began the school year as the defending national champion in collegiate laser class sailing, in which solo sailors skipper small, fast boats around a course like chariot racers on water. In fact, one of the reasons that Luke Lawrence chose to enroll at Roger Williams was because Cy Thompson was there. Almost as soon as he dropped his bags in his dorm room, Luke called Cy to see if he wanted to go laser sailing; he didn’t. But the new kid kept pestering.

“In between classes he’s calling me and asking: `Do you want to go laser sailing?’ I’m like: ‘Dude, relax,’ ” Cy recalls while sitting in an Adirondack chair on a hill overlooking the Roger Williams docks. “Call me about something else, but don’t call me to go laser sailing. We’ll practice at practice.”

Luke confirms the exchange. “It was kind of annoying that he really didn’t want to practice that much,” Luke says. “It’s cool that we’re both on the same team — but I wanted to push him, and I wanted him to push me.”

And therein lies the difference between Luke Lawrence and Cy Thompson. Both are championship caliber sailors, but Luke, a flaxen-haired Floridian brimming with energy, likes to push and be pushed.

Cy, a laidback islander from St. Thomas who admits to having “a problem with authority” won’t stand to be pushed by anyone, let alone a naïve freshman.

Luke is like a golden retriever with a boundless, obsessive energy for sailing.

Cy is more cat-like in appearance and demeanor: his hair is cropped, he’s leaner, quieter, prefers to be left alone — but in his own diffident way he’s at least as competitive, smoldering to win.

These two Roger Williams students are teammates when it comes to team sailing. But laser boats are solo boats and only one man can be national champion. Last fall, Cy intended to defend his title; Luke intended to take it away.

Before either sailor could worry about winning the national championship in Corpus Christi, Texas, he first needed to qualify for that final regatta. As fate had it, the Northeast Qualifiers would be held in mid-October at Roger Williams University, which has acres and acres of prime waterfront property on Mount Hope Bay. Nearly two-dozen laser sailors from New Haven to Hanover would converge at the Bristol campus for the national qualifiers; only four would survive the cut.

Hundreds of universities throughout North America fund sailboat racing teams, but Rhode Island, long a sailing Mecca, is particularly good at collegiate sail racing. At one point last fall, Rhode Island boasted three of the top eleven ranked teams on the continent: Roger Williams, Brown and Salve Regina. Roger Williams ranked as high as number two, Brown, three, Salve, eleven. The University of Rhode Island ranked twentieth. 

“Being a sailor in Newport is like being an actor in Hollywood,” says Amanda Callahan, the Roger Williams coach and herself a world-class sailor. She says this as she heads toward the docks at Sail Newport, ground-up quahog shells crunching underfoot. This day she has brought her Roger Williams team to Newport for a scrimmage of sorts against Salve Regina, which owns a fleet of 420s, two-person sailing dinghies that draw their name from their length — 4.2 meters, or thirteen-feet, nine-inches long. Every collegiate team needs to know how to race and win with these boats, so Amanda has brought her team down for the practice.

As she passes from the parking lot to the boats, Amanda, a whippet-thin twenty-eight-year-old with green eyes and brown, sun-bleached hair, is greeted like a rock star — almost everybody in the boatyard on this offseason day knows who she is. Besides being a former All American sailor at Hobart and William Smith College in upstate New York, she is a member of Team Silver Panda, a six-person team of sailors that in the 2007 season won all three of the world’s major team sailing championships. She took over the Roger Williams program three years ago, wooed back east from an assistant coaching job at Stanford after Roger Williams recruiters told her they were trying to make sailing the school’s “signature sport.”

Amanda carries a bullhorn with her in her coach’s boat, on this day a borrowed Boston Whaler, but she doesn’t really need it. For a little person — she stands only five-feet, three-inches tall — she’s got a big voice.

“Addie!” she shouts to Adrienne White, a freshman woman on what is a co-ed team who’s sailing in one of the 420s in Newport Harbor. “A little more snappy with your upper torso! It should be like — uh!” Amanda grunts while demonstrating by snapping her upper body out over the gunnels of her boat. “Know what I’m saying?”

From the center console of her coach’s boat, Amanda stares through sunglasses at the fleet of sailboats circling a course between the arcing Newport Bridge and the green lawn of Fort Adams. The boats look pretty, the low sun of a fall afternoon striking their sails, illuminating the numbers stenciled on each boat in the yellow, red and green hues of billiard balls. The beauty of Newport Harbor is not lost on Amanda. “I wish I had a camera right now,” she says. “The color for pictures is unreal.” But she’s not out there for the scenery; as she steers her boat she’s like a shark looking for weak fish, and when she sees a weakness she pounces.
 
“Ryan,” she shouts to Ryan Saraiva, a freshman from Bermuda, “You’re, like, real mellow in your movements. But a 420 needs to be a lot more kinetic — I need you to actively push the boat over in the roll!”

This is not an official race, but clearly the best boat this day sports a root-beer-colored number twenty on its sail. Every time the air horn blows, signaling the start of a race, number twenty is first off the line, and no one ever reels it in. The skipper of that boat is from Salve, but Amanda knows who he is.

“That’s Patrick Clancy,” she says. “I went to high school with his sis-ter,” at Notre Dame Academy in Scituate, Massachusetts. “His brother went to Hobart and is the coach at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.”

While Patrick Clancy’s topping the field, Luke Lawrence is having a hard time plowing around the harbor as skipper of a 420. The sun’s barely perched above Beavertail, humped to the west, and a chill is settling in as Luke sails within hailing distance of Amanda’s boat.
“I’m starving,” he says. “My hands are cold. I’m not happy. Amanda,” he jokes, “do something about it.”

“Whah, whah, whah, whah.” She mimics a crying baby. She makes Luke sail a few more practice races before pulling him out of his boat into hers. “Hi Amanda,” he says as he clambers aboard. “I haven’t eaten a thing all day.”

“That’s poor preparation, Luke,” she scolds. In Amanda Callahan’s view, nothing is more sinful in sailing than poor preparation. “Failing to prepare,” she sometimes says, “is preparing to fail.”

With daylight draining from the sky the fleet is given the signal to head for the docks, where the Salve Regina team has set up a grill to share sizzling burgers and hot dogs with their guests. As they steer their boats to shore, the collegiate sailors have a rare chance to relax — the wind blows from their backs, pushing them along toward the promise of a hot supper. Amanda drives her boat up to boat number six, skippered by Cameron Pimental and crewed by another freshman, Addie White.

“Come on,” Amanda says, culling their boat from the fleet. “Let’s go practice tacks and jibes.” At the end of a long day, with darkness creeping in and supper waiting, this is the last thing Cameron and Addie want to do.

“Go pick on someone else!” Cameron yells, but he obeys, steering his boat into open water. With the wind at his back he whips the sails from starboard to port and the boat reacts violently; he and Addie pop up like gophers to perch on the high side of the heeling boat then lean out over the rails to bring it back to even keel. They do this again, and again, and again. Amanda does not like what she sees. She pulls Addie aboard her boat and jumps into the racing dinghy to demonstrate proper technique, popping from rail to rail with graceful fluidity.

“I can’t do that,” Addie mutters. “Yet.”
 
 Luke Lawrence                                     Cy Thompson                                       Amanda Callahan