Matt Nelson Sailing on San Diego Bay

MBAC sailing alumni breezes into sailing lifestyle

Talking to Matthew Nelson, you would never guess that he sailed for the first time just one year ago. When I asked him his job while racing, he enthusiastically replied that he is responsible for "dousing the spinnaker by working the halyard and adjusting the outhaul, boomvang, and cunningham."

A natural follow-up question was to ask him for a description that a non-sailing shlub like myself might understand. After thinking about it for a second, he says his job is to "work together with the other people on the boat, with their varying skill sets, to the end goal of making the boat go fast."

A long stretch from where he was just 12 short months ago, when Matt sailed for the very first time after seeing that you could take sailing as a class at SDSU. He had always been interested in learning to sail so he signed up for the basic sailing class, where he learned to sail the 8 foot, single-handed (one-manned) Sabot. After that he continued on and took the Hobie Cat class, and then the beginning keelboat class, and was still hungry for more. MBAC Lead Sailing Instructor, Andrew LaPlant, suggested that Matt should create a profile on the San Diego Yacht Club's amateur crew listing at SDYC.org, and state that he was interested in becoming part of a racing crew.

Matt did, and within a couple of weeks he was sailing and racing on Hot Ruddered Bum, a J24 keelboat that races as part of the Hot Rum series of regattas on San Diego Bay.

I asked Matt if he was nervous about jumping in to race with a bunch of experienced sailors after only have been a sailor for the past 6 months. He said that his education at MBAC, and the welcoming atmosphere of the crew made it easy.

"There are people (racing) with such a great range of skills and abilities so that was nice," he answers, "however, I was pretty comfortable on the boat because a lot of what I learned in keel class at MBAC transferred over."

Since, then, Matt has been training and racing with the team twice a week. He has raced on 8 different kinds of boats, and various rigging systems. Through the connections that he established from racing, he has also begun volunteering at Challenged America, an organization dedicated to introducing adaptive sailing as a new life experience to improve health, build self-confidence, and develop new skills for persons with disabilities. Most recently he was on San Diego Bay giving sailing rides to a group of young children who were blind.

While this transformation from sailing rookie to experienced crewman in such a short period of time seems extraordinary and surprising, what surprises Matt the most is how easy it was.

"I thought it would require a lot more resources, financing, sailing schools and time to be have the skills and knowledge I have today."