Moraine club gets youths out on the water
MUDDY CREEK TWP — Ryan Costello looks forward to the week preceding the Moraine State Park Regatta every year.
The 15-year-old from McCandless joined the Moraine Sailing Club at just 9 years old and found the sport to be a good balance of calming and busy.
Out on the water, he has to think quickly to keep himself stable. But in the end, it’s just him and the wind.
“I’m trying to distribute weight evenly, I’m worrying about speed and where I am versus where the other boats are,” Costello said. “Just going out on the water is my favorite.”
The Moraine Sailing Club has sessions for children ages 8 through 17 and an adult component that has more than 100 active members.
This week is youth sailing week, where 45 children start by learn boating terminology and by the end the ability to maneuver through a course on a sailing vessel. The older children also learn more advanced techniques, including how to right a capsized boat.
Nico Soler, the club’s safety director and a US Sailing Association instructor, said although not many children are exposed to sailing, they can usually become fairly competent behind the rudder after just one day.
“You don’t have to paddle, it’s just you and the wind,” Soler said. “Once you get going it’s like a self-fulfilling skill.”
Mark Mann, a Moraine Sailing Club board member, said the organization has been around since 1970 and has become a mainstay at the state park, including in the annual regatta.
The club lasts one week, but many participants return year after year to take on more advanced vessels. The community sailing club is for adults who have completed the necessary training, which typically takes 20 hours, and pay for membership, which gives them access to the club’s fleet of nearly 30 vessels.
Members of the community sailing club also help officiate the youth sailing club, Mann said.
“The instructors do the regatta, they teach the basics of sailing, how to dock, where the wind is coming from,” he said. “They teach them the safety procedures and then (the youths) demonstrate.”
Youths of all ages start each day of the session at 9:30 a.m. with a briefing, which includes the wind and water conditions and what the instructors have planned for the day.
Soler said the children will be out on the water for a few hours, break for lunch around noon, and then go back out from 1 until 3:30 p.m. Seeing children at 8 or 9 years old step onto a sailboat for the first time is less precarious than one might think, according to Soler.
“Once they get in, they can see how the boat reacts, and they learn how to do it,” Soler said. “You look at the smiles on the kids’ faces and see where the wind takes them and it’s all worth it.”
The sailboats appear as colorful distant cliffs from Watts Bay at Moraine State Park. They go relatively far from land to get the best conditions for sailing.
Carol Startare, US Sailing instructor and former sail camp director, said she loves watching the young sailors veer around turns and follow their instructors around a course on the water.
“Every day there is a game,” Startare said. “They build on the day before. They learn how to race and by Thursday, they are really good sailors.”
One of the most important lessons the older age group learns is how to right a capsized boat. The sailors jump in the water, place a wooden board on a boat’s hull and then walk out on that board to flip the vessel right-side up.
“Eventually they are going to flip a boat, so you have to know how to do it,” Soler said of the flipping.
The older the boater, the bigger the vessel. So once children have been through the early boating lessons, they “graduate” to larger ones.
The larger boats also require two people to handle, which Mann said is one of the biggest tests the youths face as they go further in the program. As a result, sailors end up getting more exercise than they realize.
“I always say it’s like yoga on the water,” Mann said. “You have to bend around, pull ropes, get into positions.”
Mann said there is a waiting list for the youth sailing camp, because it is popular every year, even with people outside Butler County.
The Moraine Sailing Club has a website, where it lists the cost of each level of membership, at morainesailingclub.org.
A basic adult membership is $75, and a learn-to-sail session is $175, but also earns participants a US Sailing certification. The community sailing program is $225 per year.
Startare said the community sailing members help assemble and disassemble the boats each year and help out with rides at the regatta. They also get access to the club’s boats and can use them on days they gather at the lake.
Startare said people likely will find a lot of enjoyment that comes with sailing, like she did when she first started.
“At 14, I was crew on a fast boat and I fell in love with it,” Startare said. “We have the boats out from May 15 through October and we go out every week.”
Costello can remember the first time he took a sailboat into the open water. While it was a little scary to go out so far, he said it was easy to pick up after just one week of the camp. Costello only sails one week of the year, while at the camp, but now it’s like riding a bike.
“It was difficult at first because I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “By the end of the week I kind of knew how to handle it.”
