A Love of Sailing
Coop: Trish, thanks for coming out.
TS: Well Coop, thanks for the invite. I am honored.
Coop: Are you a native Rhode Island, or a carpetbagger?
TS: I am a native Rhode Islander. I was born in Rhode Island and raised in North Kingstown, very close to East Greenwich and in what turned out to be bicycle riding distance to East Greenwich Yacht Club.
COOP: Ah, you likely had no chance, eh? What was your introduction to sailing?
TS: That was my mother, Joyce Sellon. She is the daughter of an amazing man, Bruce Butterworth. He was one of the first guys to transit the Atlantic underwater, in a sub, and his love of the oceans was passed down through the generations. He was a yacht broker, and my mom got her exposure to sailing and the ocean with him when he would deliver yachts to clients. And she was a rebel. She would rather have been sailing than go to school. [Coop: Having met her I can attest to this.] This love of the ocean/sailing streak was passed onto my two brothers and I when we were young. Mom was young, too. She had us at 23, strapped us into car seats, tied us to the boat and off we went. My first sailing adventure was strapped to the boat with bungees, and that’s where it all started. Every single weekend we would go sailing (or skiing).
Coop: What sort of boat?
TS: A Catalina 25.
Coop: At what age?
TS: Oh, one or two, very early. Then when were about ten, the family got a Catalina 32.
Coop: Oh, now we be in the big time. Toss the kids below, close the hatch and let ‘em have at it.
TS: Yeah, that was my, our, life. Being on the boat as a family, having and making adventures. It was great. We would play hide and seek in the cupboards, sleep on the boom. Sounds odd today maybe, but we were totally comfortable having been always (almost) on and around the boat. And that is where you realize I have a love for this. All these experiences…
Coop: Yup, sounds like me, just messing around in boats with, in my case, my dad. Every weekend almost. What do you remember as the next “waypoint” in this adventure?
TS: I think when I was about five or five and a half, you could go to sailing lessons in East Greenwich. My parents enrolled me and my brothers, Kyle (basically my twin; he is 15 minutes older), and Curtis, who is 14 months older, in sailing lessons. So, we were shipped off to learn to sail.
Coop: Was this with East Greenwich Yacht Club, or Greenwich Bay Sailing Association?
TS: This was GBSA, but run through the yacht club on club property. It still is today, but I remember it as a beautiful, wholesome small program. We had instructors then, college kids, who these many years later are now coaches in college programs and in the sailing industry. They were great and really made it fun. They had, and retain to this day, a passion for sailing. A lot of them come back for the CJ Buckley Regatta. Many were contemporaries of CJ, and in fact invented that regatta. They really instilled, reinforced this passion for sailing in me. I really enjoyed this time, on the water.
Early on they put me into an Opti because I could sail, had been around boats, was independent, and was not afraid of getting banged on the head by the boom. The prevailing view I think was, “OK, let Trish be Trish. She is going to dunk her head backwards off the boat, do cannonballs off the boat and get back aboard no problem. Just let her be.”
Coop: Nuttin’ like being yer mother’s daughter, eh?
TS: Yeah, right. Once I was established in the Opti, I was challenged. Constructively challenged and they said, “How can you beat the next person? Can you beat so and so…? In any event, I ended up getting top 4,5 consistently in Narragansett Bay Yachting Association Opti regattas, out of 200 kids. I would just miss winning the regatta by a hair.
Coop: Not quite breaking into the Gold Medal eh?
TS: Yeah (sighs). It all changed when I got into my Sunfish. That’s when everything started clicking even more. There was one instructor, who influenced me in racing, who really became a serious mentor to me and is still in the coaching game today.
Coop: Who was this?
TS: Justin Assad.
Coop: Oh, right. He’s out on the Vineyard, yes? He was the leader in the creation of the CJ Buckley Regatta, and he still comes back to be the PRO or Judge or is involved in some way every year.
TS: Right. Justin and his brother Kyle were the building blocks for the CJ Buckley Regatta. Through such tragedy came such opportunity. Justin had just gone to college. He was maybe 20, had just started team racing, and became excited about racing in general. I don’t know who he learned from, but he came back into GBSA, which was back then still a basic babysitting, kinda learn to sail, summer camp affair.
Justin came into this program, GBSA Racing, with gusto and a “I am going to challenge you and I’m going to hold you accountable, more than any other coach has challenged you, but always with kindness” mindset. This was the way he taught, and coached. I remember one day we went into the classroom, and he was bouncing, springing on his toes, that was kind of his way, and he said, “OK, today we are going to take notes.”
The group, looking dumbfounded, responded, “We are going to take notes about sailing?” He looked at us and said, “Yeah, we are taking notes. I am doing diagrams. We are going to dig into this stuff!” He was one of the first people to use diagrams. Not the little wooden model boats with magnets for the whiteboard. He discussed, “What does two boatlengths look like, and what does this really mean to you on the water? One session he said, “I am frustrated you don’t have watches. How can you tell when three minutes is up?” He said, “I want you to close your eyes and put your hand up when you think you have counted to three minutes.”
Well, I didn’t have a watch of course, and I counted really fast and put my hand up. He said, “Trish, you have no idea what three minutes is. You need to get a watch.” He had interesting ways to keep us accountable. Ways of teaching, not just standing up and basically dictating things to us. It was very immersive, and I thought, “Wow, I am learning this stuff, really well.”
Coop: Sounds like a great experience.
TS: Oh, it was, and great fun too. I loved it.
Coop: And then what? Teenager, out of Optis?
TS: Well, there were three of us, me and two brothers, all sailing at the same time, but we did not have our own boats, although there were Optis available at the GBSA. Anyway, somehow we convinced Mom to get us three Sunfish. Of course, I was frustrated I was not in a Laser. They were flat out more money, and so Mom was like, “Hey, you got yer own boat. Deal with it.” ■
Look for Part 2 of Coop’s chat with Trish in our January/February 2025 edition.
