Written in the stars

Sophie Carter was at the tiller, deep into the Atlantic Ocean night, when the electronic navigation aids she and her fellow Queen’s sailors relied upon went black.

They were far from land, their Farr 40 racing yacht tossing and pitching in the darkness midway through the prestigious and gruelling 1,200-kilometre open-ocean race from Newport, R.I., to Bermuda. For the next several hours, Ms. Carter steered as mariners have done for thousands of years – by the stars.

“There were three stars that lined up perfectly with the headstay,” recalled Ms. Carter, who will graduate this fall with a bachelor of science in life sciences. “And one that lined up perfectly with the backstay. I was actually steering by the stars. Even when the instruments came back on, I found myself using both the stars and the instruments.”

The course she set was for the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, the finishing line of the “Thrash to the Onion Patch” – the world’s oldest open-ocean race. But more importantly, it was a course Ms. Carter and the other students on the HoldFast Ocean Racing Team hope will be followed by future generations of Queen’s sailors.

Ms. Carter has sailed for as long as she can remember, beginning on her father’s boat. “Fiercely competitive,” she raced small one- and two-person dinghies and chose Queen’s because of its renowned sailing reputation.

But like many young Canadian sailors, she soon exhausted the options for competitive sailing. There’s the ultra-competitive, ultra-expensive route to the Olympics, or casual race nights with sailing hobbyists at a sailing club.

“That’s like a hockey player in the NHL minor leagues playing in a beer league with a bunch of guys over 50,” says former Olympic sailor John Curtis (Artsci’90, Law’95), president of Wind Athletes Canada, an organization that fosters amateur sailing.

“If you’re one of the top sailors in North America, sailing at a local yacht club on a keelboat owned by your uncle – it may be fun, but it just doesn’t cut it if you want to compete at an elite level,” he says. “That super-competitive outlet just doesn’t exist unless you’re on the Olympic track.”

Julian Hill is another Queen’s student who didn’t want to give up competitive sailing after university. Mr. Hill, who is entering the fourth year of a bachelor’s in life sciences, began sailing at age seven in Hong Kong, where he was born. He loved the seamanship, the tactics and physicality of racing, and the independence of sailing a dinghy alone on the sea.

“There are very few situations where you’re under 13 and you’re completely in control of everything around you,” Mr. Hill says. “It’s your boat and you’re in it, and I loved that.”

It was sailing that drew him to Kingston. “Queen’s is known in Canada as the place to go for sailing,” he says.

But while gybing and tacking on Lake Ontario was fun, Mr. Hill had his mind on a bigger prize: putting together a team of Queen’s sailors for the Newport-to-Bermuda race.

Established in 1906, the race attracts some of the best – and wealthiest – yacht racers in the world. Every two years, as many as 200 open-ocean racing yachts gather for the 636-nautical mile (1,200-kilometre) crossing.

The crew, who are all also members of the Queen’s sailing team, began mulling the idea of an entry in December. In January, the work got serious with weekly meetings. They established HoldFast Ocean Racing to separate themselves from the university and to begin planning and fundraising.

Soon they had a team put together: Mr. Hill and Ms. Carter, Clea Yates (political science), Liam Toward (life sciences), Jane Butler and Amelia Nugent (both environmental studies) and Sam Barbara (engineering). An eighth HoldFast member, philosophy major Luca Graham, was unable to make the Bermuda race.

“We were just trying to figure out, ‘How is this going to work? How are we going to get this money?’” Mr. Hill says. “We put together a sponsorship package and we just started cold-calling.

“It was just phone call after phone call. Midterms would come and go and we’d stop talking for two weeks. Then we’d go at it again. It’s like feeding a baby; you can’t stop. We had to constantly work on it. It felt like we were starting a small business.”

To prepare for the race, the group planned to train at the prestigious Oakcliff Sailing Center in Oyster Bay, N.Y. Eventually, they drummed up enough money for tuition (roughly $4,700 per person), helped in part by grants from Wind Athletes Canada and a sponsorship by the Armour Group, a Halifax real estate company.

The team spent weeks training and racing in Long Island Sound aboard one of Oakcliff’s 12.1-metre Farr 40 racing yachts. HoldFast raced Farr 40 Oakcliff Black, one of three Farr 40s Oakcliff entered in the Bermuda race.

Mr. Curtis praised the Queen’s students’ approach.

“They’ve been brilliant about it,” Mr. Curtis says. “They recognized that the best money to spend in sailing is on coaching. They were accessing the brain trust of the United States elite offshore sailors.”

On June 21, race day, the HoldFast team was ready. That morning, Farr 40 Oakcliff Black jostled with more than 150 other sailboats at the starting line in Newport, known as the sailing capital of the United States. Joining them for the race was coach and veteran Canadian keelboat racer Morgen Watson, Oakcliff staff member Siri Schantz, and another Oakcliff student, Charles Lafferty.

“It felt like Christmas Eve,” Mr. Hill says. “It was pretty crazy. There were two helicopters flying overhead and there were spectator boats in the hundreds. I’d never seen Newport Harbour like that. It was just buzzing.”

The weather on the crossing was good and the wind constant, a steady blow of 25 knots that hardly varied in direction for the entire race. The team was divided into two watches of four hours each, with Mr. Hill and Ms. Carter as “watch captains” on the tiller.

“There were times when the boat would come up on the front of the wave and then there would be no back to it. It feels like you’re falling off a cliff. The bow plummets and, if you’re steering, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.”

“We had a slight offset so when a new watch came on deck there was always one tired and one fresh,” Mr. Hill says. “The fresh watch brought new energy, but the tired watch was already warmed up. You could say, ‘Here’s what the waves are. There’s the boat we’re chasing. This is what the wind direction has been.”

With the wind direction constant, the crew never had to tack, that is, change heading to maximize their speed. But the constant strain made steering a full-body workout, Ms. Carter says. Hours spent on the tiller left her with bruises on her back and calluses on her feet from where she braced herself on a railing.

Life below decks was cramped and uncomfortable, with barely 50 square feet of living space to be shared by 10 people. The wind kept the boat constantly heeled on its side. Those not on watch tried to sleep, the rush of adrenalin colliding with the exhaustion from hours of exertion and concentration.

They ate meals of freeze-dried food heated with water boiled on a single-burner camp stove. They downed carrots and apples, handfuls of peanuts, and granola bars.

“If you don’t keep on top of things, people get unhappy pretty quickly. And if the crew isn’t happy, it’s going to make the boat go slower,” Mr. Hill says.

“Down below, it’s warm and you’re so exhausted you just fall asleep immediately,” Ms. Carter says. “Then you get woken up and go topside and there are these giant waves coming over the bow and it’s really wet and windy.

“There were times when the boat would come up on the front of the wave and then there would be no back to it. It feels like you’re falling off a cliff. The bow plummets and, if you’re steering, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.”

When they reached the Gulf Stream, the seas became chaotic as they were swept along by that warm mid-ocean current. Their coach, Morgen Watson, likened it to being in a washing machine.

“The first night in the Gulf Stream, Morgen gave us this pep talk,” Ms. Carter says. “He said, ‘Everyone is tired. This is going to be the hardest night, but if you can stay focused, be ready to wake up and be present and give everything you have, then it will pay off in the long run.’

“In the Gulf Stream, you have to stay alert. The sea state is crazy and the waves are coming in all directions. It’s windy. But I like having a million things to focus on. It made me feel more in tune with everything.”

Even as the team raced on, behind them disaster was brewing. Another boat, Alliance, struck an underwater obstruction – likely a partly submerged shipping container. Alliance began to sink and its crew abandoned ship. All 10 were rescued by another yacht.

Ahead and out of radio range, the HoldFast team pressed on, unaware.

Their more immediate concern was another Farr 40 boat named Hydromec that was just ahead of them, crewed by an experienced team from Quebec. The HoldFast team did everything they could to squeeze a bit more speed from their boat.

“We were 200 miles out and we calculated we only had to be four per cent faster to catch them,” Mr. Hill says. “That became our mantra – four per cent! Four per cent!”

After three days at sea, Ms. Carter was just coming off watch and heading below deck when she heard a ruckus from topside.

“They were screaming and shouting, ‘It’s the glow!’”

In time-honoured maritime tradition, Sam Barbara ran to the bow. “Land ho!” he cried.

HoldFast crossed the finish line three days, 10 hours, and 53 minutes after starting, just 20 minutes behind Hydromec.

They learned about the loss of Alliance when they landed.

“As soon as we got on shore I started getting texts. They were, ‘Oh my God. People sank. Are you OK?’” Ms. Carter says.

News of the near tragedy made her realize the very real dangers the team had faced in the open ocean and how significant their accomplishment had been.

And there was another surprise waiting for her. Ms. Carter’s Queen’s roommates had flown to Bermuda to greet her dockside.

“I was so exhausted. I immediately started crying.”

The HoldFast team finished 11th in their class. They were the first of the three Oakcliff boats, holding their own against crews with years of experience.

Julian Hill knows the eight friends might never race together again. But he hopes they’ve shown other young Queen’s sailors that the ocean is open to them.

“We’re trying to create a pathway for what is possible for sailors after high school,” he says.

Too often, sailing means knowing someone wealthy who’s willing to take you on as crew. HoldFast showed that you can set your own course. The average age of sailors in the Bermuda race was 56 and 95 per cent of the racers are male. The Queen’s team was a 50/50 split of men and women and, at 24, Sophie Carter was the oldest.

“It’s always the question of ‘How do I keep it up after university?’” says John Curtis. “Now I need a boat but I’m into my first job. I have to buy a new wardrobe. There are all these expenses and basically people stop sailing.

“The cool thing about what they’ve done is they’ve taken their love of competing at a high level, taken their existing skills, added some new skills, and become competitive at a world-class level.

“Success breeds success. What I’m hoping is that other young people will look at them and say, ‘Look at what they did. That’s what we should do, too.’”