I am not the most decorated sailor you will meet, and most of what follows is owed to other people: patient coaches, generous crews, and a long run of chances I am not sure I earned. Sailing has given me far more than I have given it. Think of this as the long version of thank you.
Slowly learning what the wind will and will not give, one boat at a time.
I started at seven, first in the club squadron and then in the Optimist, the little boat that teaches almost everyone. I was not a natural at it.
But I loved it, and the Opti is patient with you. Alone in a small hull, you slowly learn to notice the wind, because nothing happens until you do.
Most sailors stay in the Optimist until fourteen or fifteen. I grew early and had to move up before I was ready, which is a polite way of saying I spent a while being the slowest boat in a faster fleet.
Around the same time my family moved west, from the Lake of Two Mountains to Whistler. I was starting over in more ways than one.
In Whistler I sailed the Pirate, a cousin of the Club 420, at the Whistler Sailing Association under François Hébert, who was very good to me. Alta Lake hands you a clean, dependable breeze most mornings around ten, better than anything I had grown up with.
My boat handling came a long way. My racing did not, since there was almost no one to race against out there. I came home aware of the gap, and I have stayed aware of it since.
At fifteen I came back to Montreal and the Club 420 at the Hudson Yacht Club. After years on my own, sharing a boat was a happy shock.
I had crews who were more patient than I deserved and a coach who was better than the results we gave him. Between them they taught me that a fast boat is mostly two people listening to each other.
Then came the Laser Radial, now the ILCA 6. It is where I picked up the one piece of sailing wisdom I really trust, and it is not glamorous: you get better one small percent at a time.
The people who pulled ahead were rarely the most talented. They were the ones who prepared, who read and tinkered well past what sailing school asked, who were still rigging when the rest of us had gone home. I was not always one of them. But I learned to recognise them, and to try.
Being handed responsibilities I had not quite earned yet, and trying to be worth them.
Then I started coaching, with the Optimist race team at the Baie-D'Urfé Yacht Club. For the first time, other people's safety on the water depended on my judgment, and I am not sure I had earned that trust yet.
I am grateful they gave it to me anyway. I made my share of mistakes, kept everyone safe, and learned more in those few months than in years of sailing only for myself.
COVID-19 closed the program a month before it was due to start. I called every club in the city. Nobody was hiring, and the people already laid off came first, which was only fair.
When sailing was allowed back, I asked some of my Baie-D'Urfé families whether they would follow me, and enough of them did that I landed at the Pointe-Claire Yacht Club, coaching their race team. I was lucky in the extreme. Those kids were enormously talented, and several have since gone much further in the sport than I ever did, to national teams, a world title, even SailGP. I mostly got to stand nearby with a stopwatch. That summer I finished my CANSail 5-6 certification.
I went back to the Hudson Yacht Club to lead the program I had grown up in. It had held on through the pandemic but lost a lot of its continuity, and for two years I tried to rebuild it into the thing I remembered loving as a kid.
It grew, though I suspect a good share of that was timing and the strong team around me. What I will keep is the education in running things: budgets, hiring, ordering boats, leading people my own age, and the unglamorous work of writing it all down so the next person would not have to guess. I got plenty wrong, and I owe my mentors for catching me when I did.
After Hudson I took on the Yacht Club de Québec, partly to help restart a sailing school that had gone quiet, and partly for a selfish reason. I was in a French law program and could read the language far better than I could speak it, and I needed to be somewhere that forced the issue.
Two of us lived in a trailer by the water. I talked some of the best coaches I know into coming along, and together we slowly put the school back together: better pay for the instructors, more real sailing and less day camp, and a lot of storytelling to help the kids fall for the sport. It went better than I had any right to expect.
The part I am actually glad about is that the oldest of those sailors are coaches there now, and the school is heading into its fourth season without me.
Bigger water, the same small lessons, and a Laser I still rig for no reason at all.
In college I sailed on the offshore team out of New York, against American universities with a good deal more pedigree than we had.
It was the same lessons in a bigger, colder boat: prepare, talk to each other, fix the small things. I was the captain, which mostly meant being the one who apologised when something went wrong.
These days I help out as a learning facilitator for Sail Canada, mostly trying to be useful to coaches who are sharper than I was at their stage.
And when the wind is right I still rig my Laser and go out for no reason at all. That is the part I would keep if I had to give up the rest.
If sailing taught me anything, it is fairly small: that you improve one unglamorous percent at a time, that the people who prepare beyond what is asked tend to pull ahead, and that almost everything good in this story arrived because someone was patient with me before I had earned it. I have tried to pass a little of that along. Mostly, though, I just like being on the water.