14D - THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
OFFTHEHILL
MONDAY,AUG.20,2001
Sailing the hot summer days away
Sport offers relaxing, good times amidst waves
by Luke Wetzel
Kansan staff writer
Three brightly colored windsurfers and one noisy jet ski drove in circles in a cove near the Clinton Lake Marina as Charlie Rose secured a 420 sailboat onto the trailer hitch of his 1988 Toyota van.
"Yee-haw!" said Rose, Overland Park senior. "It's going to be fun today. We're going to be flying."
"I'll be the first to say I've had fun in a jet ski, but the kind of fun you have on one is limited because it's not that hard," he said. "I prefer sailing. It's clean and peaceful. Would you rather go hiking and backpacking or take an ATV or snowmobile into the mountains? It's the same kind of thing."
Rose's sailing partner for that June afternoon, Cody Walters, Onaga senior, said he was ready for his second time sailing. The other time he sailed, the mast of the four-person sailboat broke.
The conditions at Clinton didn't look any friendlier. The relentless flapping of the mainsail and the angry-looking waves suggested it would be a rocky voyage.
"It's going to be hairy, but we can swing it." Rose said.
Once Rose had set both the sails, Walters hopped in, launching the boat with his momentum. Within minutes, the 14-foot boat looked like a toy as it sailed towards the dam, a wake of foam trailing after it.
"One thing I like about sailing is that it's a challenge." Rose said. "You have to be interested in doing it. Sometimes people want to go along for the ride, but you still have to do something. There's really no free ride on a sailboat."
Jesse Anderson, Lawrence junior, has been sailing at Clinton Lake since she was 7.
"My dad dragged me out there," she said. "In high school he used to excuse me from class to go out to the lake."
Anderson grew to enjoy the sport at a summer camp in camp
Michigan.
Above: After ducking under the boom, Charlie Rose watches as Cody Walters secures the cheat in the cleat, completing a 180-degree tack.
Below: Cody Walters, foreground, Onaga senior and Charlie Rose, Overland Park senior, lean out to counterbalance Clinton Lake's treacherous waters.
Michigan "I used to hate it," she said. "It's hard to learn things from your parents. Sailing with your friends is completely different."
Since then, she has served as commodore of the KU Sailing club and competed in regattas in Texas, South Carolina, California, Rhode Island and other places. The club also held two regattas last year. The most recent was a division qualifier for nationals held in May. Large regattas can draw up to 18 four-person teams, which compete in races that go around buoys in triangular formations.
"Anything you're looking for in a sport it has," Anderson said. "You can sail to relax or get an adrenaline rush from going fast. If you want a tactical mental game, you can race."
Anderson said a common aphorism was that anybody could learn sailing in a day but that it took a lifetime to perfect.
"It takes a lot of time to trim your sails right and learn the directions of the wind," she said. "It's like playing chess. You can tell anybody how the pieces work, but as far as putting them into a cohesive whole and winning the game, it takes a while to learn. Lots of people call it chess on water."
or water.
Trimming, adjusting the angle of a sail, can be a delicate process.
Let it out too far, and it begins flapping. Bring it in too much,
and it won't catch enough wind to move the boat. Tacking, which is turning the bow into the wind to change direction, can be difficult on a windy day.
Rose and Walters found this out the hard way. In the middle of tacking downwind, the boat capsized, spilling both of them.
Walters said the strong wind threw them off balance.
Rose remained undaunted. Within minutes he was back on the water.
"Man, I love these waves," he said. "It's like, we're in Kansas. Do you believe it?"
Rose steered the boat upwind, guiding it over the waves until it skimmed across the water. A windsurfer on the periphery prompted him to bring in the sail enough to accelerate.
"Let's race this guy," Rose said
"Any time you've got two sails going in the same direction, it's a race."
Rose was victorious, but the race was short-lived. After cruising past the windsurfer, a gust of wind threw the boat off balance. With the sound and fury of 260 pounds of fiberglass slamming into the surf, the boat went belly-up.
up.
"That's what we call a death roll." Rose said. This time the boat was upside-down. Rose ducked under the water to push up the centerboard, a slab of wood which serves as a kind of fin in the middle of the boat. He then emerged to climb on top of the boat, using the board as leverage to flip the boat upright.
After cruising back into the shore, striking the sails and loading the boat, Rose and Walters retired to the parking lot to munch on Triscuits, drink beer and compare war wounds.
"The wind today is like an unruly horse," he said. "It doesn't want to take the bit."
healing process either."
"You really do get torn up in this sport," Rose said, admiring a series of bruises on his toe. "The lake water really doesn't help the
hearing process check
Rose said the club hoped to build a dock to store the team's boats right by the water. That way, members of the team wouldn't need to hitch them to a trailer and drive them all the way down to the dock.
"I think that will make the club itself more successful," he said.
Anderson said she still found sailing relaxing despite participating in races and helping run the business side of the club.
"It's my release," she said.
"Instead of going out and burning down houses, I go out sailing."
Wetzel can be reached at 864-4810 or writer@kansan.com.
THAD ALLENDER/KANSAN
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