It’s 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon on the banks of the Ross Barnett Reservoir. Jackson Prep students caravan into the parking lot of the Jackson Yacht Club after a long day of classes. While fellow students are at sports practice or at a club meeting, a dozen or so junior high and high school students slap on sunscreen and strap on a life jacket.
For these students, today is a combination of their sports practice and club meeting.
Two years ago, the idea was born by some Yacht Club members to start high school sailing team following the success of one in Gulfport back in 2012.
“We tried it with Jackson Prep,” Dale Currie, an avid sailer and Yacht Club member, says. “We thought we’d have a handful sign up, but we had 20.”
Mitchell Martin is one of those students, in fact he was the leading inspiration to start it all. Dale says Mitchell had been traveling down to Gulfport to compete with their team because it was the closest around.
Mitchell, a sophomore at Prep, says it’s been great to help build the program at home. He enjoys the time on water and calls it “relaxing.” He says he enjoys helping others get into the sport, working with them on the ins and outs of sailing.
“I love being a part of this,” he says, anxious to get back to the boats as the students prepare to set sail that day. The wind was blowing hard, rocking some of the one-design boats around the harbor. You could tell the experienced sailing students from the “greener ones.”
Carol Currie, Dale’s daughter and a senior at Prep, was also excited to get out on the water that day.
She says she grew up on a boat around her dad and older brother. She says at first she would just go along for the ride, but now that she’s grown older, she loves to steer and be in control.
For Carol, there’s something about being on the water that makes everything else going on in her life seem trivial, whether it’s school work or just life as a teenager. She says it’s an opportunity to put the cell phone down and not have a care in the world.
The Jackson Prep sailing team is just the beginning of what Dale and his fellow Yacht Club members hope becomes a powerhouse sailing program in the Jackson-metro area.
It’s been two years since Prep students first organized, which means they have had four seasons to date. St. Andrew’s has also started a sailing program that meets at the Yacht Club on a separate day.
Dale says they have had interest from a number of other schools, but right now they do not have the infrastructure in place.
“The others have expressed interest, but candidly, we told them ‘not yet,’” Dale explains.
That will all change after this summer.
Following the conclusion of this year’s sailing camp at the Yacht Club, the John W. McGowan Sailing Center will be built. Named after a longtime Yacht Club member, the facility will be used to “shade, store and hydrate,” as Dale puts it.
“Having done this with Prep, you start to figure out the hard way what you need,” Dale laughs. “For starters, we didn’t have these floating piers. We had to walk down those ramps in waist-deep water, which is fine when it’s 80 degrees, but not when it’s 50.”
When they first began, they had four boats. Now they have eight. Although they currently use Dale’s powerboat as the safety boat, another has been ordered.
The fundraising has all been done to date, so now they just have to get through the construction phase.
Gary Rogers, a fellow Yacht Club member, points to yellow tape in the parking lot and says to imagine that rendering right here. He says once the summer program concludes, they hope to get construction underway. The cost — between $100,000-$150,000.
“Since I can remember the club has always had a sailing camp,” Gary says. “That’s always been in place and some of our flag officers are graduates of that program. But, high school sailing is a nationwide sport like football and baseball, just not as prolific. We’re going to change that, at least here.”
