Sustainability & Block Island Race Week: Do your part

As Block Island Race week begins, The Storm Trysail Club and Sailors for the Sea would like to remind the competitors of the effort to achieve a gold status for sustainability.

One of the goals is to eliminate single-use plastic water bottles. To help facilitate this effort, The Storm Trysail Club and Race Week's sustainability partner, DeepWater Wind, are providing all competitors with reusable water bottles.

By bringing a couple one-gallon jugs on board, these water bottles can be refilled during the day as needed. To further help this effort, there will be filtered water filling stations located at each marina. Please consider adopting this plan and eliminate the single-use water bottle. Refill your larger water jugs at the provided filling stations and refill the provided water bottles as needed.

Block Island Race week is also a paperless regatta. There will be no printed sailing instructions distributed. All competitors should have the sailing instructions on a tablet or otherwise accessible. The sailing instructions will be available on www.yachtscoring.com.

For any non-racers visiting the island who are looking for a land based activity during the day, The Nature Conservancy will be on hand to provide some fun and educational programs. Some of the programs planned: A bird banding demonstration, a beach clean up, horseshoe crab survey, and an ebb tide exploration.

The Nature Conservancy will have a table in the tent starting Sunday night. Please stop by their table for more information. You can also contact binature@tnc.org for more information or to check on updates for program locations.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

THE STORM TRYSAIL CLUB STORY

To fully appreciate The Storm Trysail Club, one must understand the circumstances surrounding the very moment the club was conceived, and the fact that the circumstances involved a bottle of rum.

By RON WEISS

It was during the 1936 Bermuda Race that a group of sailors set off on the schooner Salee. The ’36 race was bad, one of the worst in the history of the event. Many boats withdrew, but others elected to challenge themselves and tough it out.

During that horribly rough storm, one sailor on another boat was ejected from his windward bunk , smashed face-first into the leeward bunk, spat out his freshly dislodged teeth, got his foulies on, and at 4 a.m., took his turn at the helm. (We hasten to add that the Club, in a continuing effort to reduce the frequency of such incidents, is very much focused on off shore safety.) As the storm built in intensity, Salee’s mainsail blew out, and the crew was forced to set the storm trysail — a small, triangular and heavily constructed sail generally used in only the direst of conditions.

That winter, as the crew of Salee gathered around a bottle of rum (and possibly more than one) and talked about their shared memories of the race, this hardy group was inspired to form a new club — The Storm Trysail Club — open only to those sailors who had proved capable of handling themselves off shore in the worst weather imaginable. Dues were initially set at a bottle of rum a year.

From these rough and tumble (literally) beginnings, The Storm Trysail Club has grown to almost 1,000 members. Each member, from the first to the latest, has been selected for their experience off shore, their willingness to share their experience and knowledge with others, to be a good shipmate and a tough competitor, as well as being someone who knows how to have fun.

In short, we are fierce on the starting line, and friendly on the beer line.

The Storm Trysail Club provides leadership in the sailing world through our well-regarded Safety at Sea and Jr. Safety at Sea seminars, race management of some of the most prestigious and well- attended racing events in the world, and our efforts to increase participation in ocean racing, especially youth involvement.

Members of The Storm Trysail Club are deeply engaged in the upper echelons of sailboat racing all around the globe, in virtually every aspect of the sport. Those who are selected for membership know that STC is not about amenities and facilities, but is instead focused on nothing more than the health and growth of off shore sailing. A member of STC is widely regarded as not just an experienced deepwater sailor, but also as generous and willing to share their experience in giving back to the sport that provides them so much in return.

For eight decades, The Storm Trysail Club has been, and will continue to be, at the bleeding edge (sometimes literally, in the case of the aforementioned ’36 Bermuda Race participant) of development in organizing new events, rating rules, yacht design, and safety standards and best practices, while continuing the tradition of camaraderie, fellowship and fun started by the crew of the Salee.

If you share our love for ocean racing, a passion made even stronger by racing with and against people you respect and enjoy spending time with, and wish to introduce others to the sport, its camaraderie and its ideals, then membership in The Storm Trysail Club should be on your horizon.

Thanks to our sponsors!

BIRW would not be possible without them.