We’re only three races into the regatta, with plenty more to come at the inaugural RS Fest in Miami, but Michiel Geerling is already tallying points in his head to determine where we sit in the results. He’s got us tied for first in the five-boat RS21 fleet, and third is only one point back. “Not that the results matter,” Geerling says with a sheepish grin. “Because we’re here to have fun, right?”
Right, but it’s obvious that Geerling, whom I met only hours earlier, has real intentions of winning the regatta he’s hosting—even if that means beating customers. Racing is racing, and all is fair on Miami’s sparkling Biscayne Bay on this early spring weekend where sailors young and old and from far and wide have gathered to race under the sun and the hot-magenta banners of RS Sailing.
As the world’s biggest manufacturer of sailing dinghies, with headquarters in southern England, RS has long enjoyed a global cult following, but while they’ve been selling boats into the States for a long time, they’ve never enjoyed the full and warm embrace of the American racing scene. Thus, the inaugural RS Fest Miami—their first go at an annual family reunion of sorts. This gathering is relatively small, at 49 boats, but it’s a start.
“This is the beginning of something more—the start of a tradition,” Geerling says. “RS Sailing was born out of a desire to use the latest technology to build racing classes, to simplify life for the sailors to be racing and create these sailing communities.”
Employing a playbook of focus-on-the-fun racing and hip social events, they’ve grown a plethora of one-design classes in Europe, and Geerling’s intent is to do the same in the US: “This is what I want to build [with the Fest], and I believe we’re onto something here.”
Geerling joined RS after breaking out of his self-described “golden cage” in the international coffee trade, he tells me. The money was good, but the sailing lifestyle was not. Before adulthood landed him in his cage, he once bandied about Europe as a strapping lad from Amsterdam with a collection of RS dinghies attached to his van. Those were happy years of high-performance sailing and living, he tells me, and that’s why he now sits in the commercial director’s chair at RS. He’s far more content selling what he loves, and what he loves most is the dinghy sailing life. That’s also true of most other RS C-suite occupiers—all middle-aged dinghy-sailing fanatics.
The four-day festival, which is staged out of Miami’s Regatta Park and hosted by the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, has four of RS’s most popular racing classes: the tyke-friendly roto-molded singlehander known as the Tera; the doublehanded and RS Feva, which I’m told is the world’s largest doublehanded racing class; the all-glass-and-carbon RS Aero singlehander; and the RS21, their flagship keelboat. It’s lightweight, sporty and simple, and that’s what I’m sailing on for the RS Fest, managing the front of the boat while Geerling drives. We have a rotating cast of first-time crews, including Katherine Fry. She’s a J/70 sailor and a high-powered lawyer from London. Her husband, Alistair, a big-time doctor, is racing in the Aero division. And more importantly, their two young daughters, Trinny and Alexa, are teamed up in a Feva.
“We were trying to plan an Easter holiday and learned about this regatta,” she says. “And we thought, Why not? It’s Miami—somewhere we’ve never been to and that’s easy to get to from London—and everyone gets to sail. It’s lovely, really.”
Once, as we loiter near the starting line shared by all the fleets, she points out her husband, who’s checking in with the girls. She hastily extracts an iPhone from her PFD, snaps a picture and beams with happiness, adoring this family postcard moment. Later, when we just so happen to be near the Feva’s leeward gate mark, she spots her daughters again. They have a commanding lead and a tidy drop of the little asymmetric spinnaker, which quickly disappears in its deck sock.
“Great job, girls!” she shouts aloud with glee and a golf clap.
They’re too preoccupied with the douse to acknowledge her praise, or thinking, Geez, Mum, please. You’re embarrassing us. Still, the moment is poignant: mother, father, daughters—all out playing on the same racecourses on a warm spring day in Miami.
This is also the case for Peter Cozzolino, of Milford, Connecticut. He’s driven the family’s GMC Sierra 2500 from Connecticut with plans to race, and then take two brand-new Fevas back north and start a local movement at Milford YC. He’s paired up with nephew Evan Davies, while his son Peter is sailing with Cozzolino’s other nephew, Grayson Davies. Though he originally planned on leaving Miami with two boats, he ends up filling the empty rack in his triple-stack trailer with a charter boat to seed in Milford [Which has since grown to more than a half-dozen Fevas at Milford YC, Cozzolino says—Ed].
Cozzolino, who co-chairs Milford YC’s junior sailing program, had rented a Feva last summer for the sole purpose of keeping his son and nephew interested in sailing, but he discovered how much fun it was to be in the boat with the kids himself. “My son had sized out of the Opti, and Peter wasn’t happy being by himself in the Laser,” Cozzolino says. “When I sailed with both of them in the Feva, they loved it, and the bigger Opti kids wanted to sail it too.”
That was enough to convince him to buy two boats from RS, and the deal was he’d take delivery at RS Fest Miami. “They were the ones who suggested we come to the regatta, and I’m glad we did,” Cozzolino says. “It was the first time where I, as a parent, was able to sail in an open class with the kids.”
Granted, he was the sole 42-year-old among teens and preteens, but he plans on doing it again in Miami next year with his 9-year-old son, James. “Sailing together, parent and child, is a game-changer,” he says. “This was the kids’ first travel event, and they thought it was so cool to have the other kids, the giveaways, the games, and having the Aeros and the 21s around them. It gave them the excitement to see what’s next and to stay in the sport, which as a parent, I love.”
The unpretentious Coconut Grove Sailing Club off Bayshore Boulevard is where the sailors and families gather nightly after racing, enjoying the buffet, music and games. International flags for the regatta visiting sailors (India, Ireland, the Netherlands, Britain, etc.) line the seawall for an Olympic-esque touch, and the club’s Astroturf lawn is partially covered by neon magenta shag carpeting, white tables and chairs, pingpong tables erected from shipping pallets and plywood, and two aluminum-framed hiking benches for the RS Fest Hiking Challenge. And here, at the final awards, Geerling extends his gratitude to the sailors and promises that the RS Fest will be an ongoing thing somewhere and sometime in the near future.
He invites all in attendance to come again, and Dan Falk, the towering, white-bearded Aero sailor from Seattle, shouts, “Only if it’s Miami!” The crowd cheers in agreement, and with this show of support, planning is ostensibly underway.
