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Young sailor catches breeze to Finland
(by Tony Lange - August 10, 2012)
Young sailor catches breeze to Finland
By TONY LANGE
As many high school students spent their summers lifeguarding under the blazing sun or flipping burgers over burning grills, Stuart Wallace has kept it cool rigging his way with the wind.
The upcoming junior at Chagrin Falls High School competed in the International Lightning Classic last month as a part of the sailing Youth World Championships in Finland.
"It was all pretty amazing," said Wallace, who had never been overseas before. "The regatta, it was cool, because you get the culture of the locals, but then you also get the culture of the other countries that have people there sailing."
Wallace and his two teammates from St. Ignatius in Cleveland and Rocky River High School spent just over a week in Finland, where they raced on Tuusulanjärvi, a small lake just 20 miles from Helsinki.
The lake is about five miles long and a mile wide with an average depth of just 10 feet. The shallowness keeps the waves to a minimum, even in heavy weather, and, because it's an inland lake, the weather is very seldom heavy.
That was a switch from Wallace's customary excursions on Lake Erie.
He travels to Edgewater Yacht Club, where he sets sail just about every day during the summertime to teach youngsters sailing basics, he said.
During his free time, he practices for racing competitions.
"It's just super fun. There's a whole other social group that you get to have," Wallace said. "You get to meet so many new people and get to travel all over, and it's just awesome to go out of the country to compete in a sport. It's really special.
"It's basically an everyday thing in the summer for the whole day out on Lake Erie. So I'm out there every day either coaching or practicing. It's really time consuming, because I have to get up 45 minutes early to drive there and I get back late at night."
Besides beach parties and dinner outings, Wallace said, he and his teammates spent the majority of their time on the water with two races each day while in Finland.
"It's all pretty intense when you're there, because it's pretty competitive," he said. "We got third place, and it was pretty cool, because it's all people from different countries, but another American group won too, so it was pretty awesome to be up there on the podium with them."
The competition involved a series of races where each team sails different classes of boats.
Some different types of sailboats include various dinghies, keelboats and multihull boats like catamarans. Each type varies in size, shape and maneuverability. They all have different functions and techniques involved, Wallace said.
"It's really tough to transition from boat to boat during the regatta," he said. "It depends on what you're doing, but, for the person who drives, it's killer, because the whole thing is just different in how to sail it, what you have to do. It takes a ton of practice.
"Pretty much everything changes. You can even overlap classes with different ratings, so it gets really complicated. In Finland it was a round robin for every race. So you switch boats every race basically. You come in and change everything and go back out."
The course at the regatta is much more than a simple straightaway, he said. It involved turns and different angles for catching the wind.
"It's basically about how far in you pull your sail, depending on where the wind is coming from and if you're trying to go upwind or downwind, to put it simply," Wallace said.
This past weekend, Wallace sailed over to Put in Bay island on Lake Erie and spent the night there.
In the past he's competed in a regatta in Miami at Christmastime.
"I just have a ton of support from my family, especially when it came for plane tickets and registration for Finland," he said. "It's a ton of money, so we all had a lot of support from the people around us, so it was pretty helpful."
Asked why he didn't save money on gas by just sailing over to Finland, he laughed. "Yeah, ha, ha, I wish," he said. "It's not that far. Maybe next year."
On a more serious note, Wallace said he has an aspiration to take a long-distance sailing voyage of perhaps 100-plus miles but does not know when or how that will happen yet.
"I definitely want to sail in college, for sure, on a varsity team, if I have the opportunity," he said. "There are no scholarships for sailing, so you just have to go and try out and hope you make it."
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