–Noah Aldonas, Senior

Laura Rozier doing some pre-regatta meditating.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoe_b/sets/72157633309051600/with/8675648543/

The event will take place this coming Sunday, April 21, from 1-4 pm at Haymarket Pub & Brewery. Team members, alumni, friends, and local sailors will all gather to raise money for our entirely student-run organization and enjoy an afternoon of mingling, dining, and enjoying an open bar of handcrafted beer and wine.

We’ll be hosting a raffle and silent auction of such items as Evanston restaurant gift cards, a SAIL magazine package, Cubs field passes and tickets, a 3-night stay at the Bitter End Yacht Club on the British Virgin Islands, and more! You won’t want to miss it.

If you haven’t been convinced yet, consider this: the Sailing Team receives less than 10% of its funding from Northwestern. Everything else in our bank account comes from the generous support of people like you. To give you an idea of where ticket sales, raffle and silent auction profits, and donations to NUST go:

$25 = paperwork for tryouts one year
$50 = Regatta dues for an MCSA regatta
$100 = One day of coaching
$150 = One person’s flight to an intersectional regatta
$200 = Gas to a regatta at Michigan
$300 = Quarterly dues to the MCSA
$500 = Coaching at a regatta
$750 = Flights to an intersectional regatta
$1000 = Flights to Team Race Intersectional regatta

So for all these reasons and more, please consider joining us for this special occasion! If you would like to purchase tickets, visit our eventbrite page at http://nustfundraiser2013.eventbrite.com/ or contact the team at nusailing@gmail.com.

Or, if you are unable to make the event, we always appreciate gifts to the team of any amount. If you are interested in donating, please click on the following like and type “Sailing Team” in the My Designation box: https://www.give-northwestern.org/

Thanks so much! We look forward to seeing you soon.

An afternoon debrief

Ben and Aileen survive the maelstrom

How good looking is this guy?

mornings!), we still got some great sailing in. Under the careful direction of our new coach Stephanie Roble and NUST alumni Geoff Pedrick, we worked on everything from basic boat handling skills to team racing technique. Most of the drills we practiced involved quick fleet races and starting techniques.

We split each day into two sessions—one in the morning (we had to drive to the yacht club before the sun was even up!) and one in the afternoon. The captains tried to split the two sessions into A groups and B groups so that our less experienced teammates could experiment with skippering, racing, etc.

The first couple of days were windy. Really windy. Gusts up into the 30s were common and the wind only built into the afternoons. Capsizes abounded. But aside from a few incidents involving some turtling and shallow mud, everybody walked away with nothing but bruised legs and smiles. The second two days of practice were much lighter. In fact the last session essentially turned into a kinetics race. The weather slowly got warmer throughout the week until the last day when we could finally achieve what every midwestern sailor dreams of—sailing in nothing but boardshorts and a lifejacket.

Emil drives home

On the Friday before we left, we took the day off to explore Clearwater Beach where we were staying in a condo/motel complex (we referred to it as The Compound). We soaked in the beach and some grouper sandwiches before packing up and beginning the long journey back to Chicago on Saturday morning. We left with excessive amounts of sunburned skin and bruised shins but we had an amazing time. We were even sad to say goodbye to the 20-hour road trip back to Illinois—fraught with southern pleasantries, religious billboards and the ubiquitous firework superstores.

The only good part about leaving Spring Break is we get to start sailing again on Lake Michigan!

With love,

Ben

See you next year Florida!

Also Cheesies in Evanston is doing the same thing on April 13, but you have to mention NUST!

So go eat delicious food and help us make money!

-NUST out-

First of all, congratulations on your admittance to Northwestern! My name is Jacob. I’m from Washington State, and I sailed a ton around the NWISA district during high school, and loved it. I applied to college knowing I wanted to sail in college, and I chose to come to Northwestern and sail here over several schools of comparable academics and sailing programs. Here’s why.

For a sailor with previous racing experience, our team offers a lot of opportunities. NUST draws from a very diverse base of students; we mix highly talented sailors who have raced all their lives, with those who have not done much racing prior to college. This mix makes for a competitive, tight-knit team that both encourages and pushes each other to continue improving. We compete in the Midwest College Sailing Association (MCSA), and our district is a place where an experienced, passionate sailor can really shine. High school sailors that chose to come to Northwestern and join our team have the opportunity to compete and grow greatly in both our district and across the country,  as our team frequently qualifies to nationals.

Among schools with similar programs that you may be considering, one of the things that sets us apart is our location. Our campus is on the shore of Lake Michigan, and our boathouse is right on campus, which is very unusual, and very convenient. Speaking of our boathouse, we just broke ground for a brand-new boathouse to be completed soon. Plans and sketches are available here. Additionally, Chicago is called the Windy City for a reason. It’s a rare day that we don’t have enough wind to sail, and we get a wide variety of different practice conditions from light and shifty, to heavy and steady – depending on the direction.

Finally, our sailing team has a really remarkable community the like of which I’ve never seen before. Our team is competitive across the country, but we also take people who have never sailed before, and set them down a lifelong path. We live together, sail together, and spend the best years of our lives in a tight community.

If you’re interested in sailing here, please let us know by emailing our recruitment chairs Hannie and Gina (hangyeollee2015@u.northwestern.edu, ginakrupp2015@u.northwestern.edu), or nusailing@gmail.com. And if you’re attending Wildcat Days, be sure to look for us at the activities fair! We’ll be in our lifejackets looking out for you.

Fast Facts: 

Team: Around 70 sailors evenly split between men and women.

Boats: 12 420s, 8 Lasers, 3 FJs

Coach: Stephanie Roble, recent two-time All-American graduate from Old Dominion University, who led her team to qualify for the ICSA Women’s and Coed Nationals three time during her college career.

Sail fast and choose NU!

- Jacob Bruce