A weak southerly breeze straggles across Lake Washington as the last of Seattle’s fall colors cloak the hillsides of the still-leafy Leschi neighborhood. Four local J/70s are gathered for a driving clinic, and the onboard combinations are unusual: all captains and no crewmembers. Ron Rosenberg, an Olympic-level coach and world-champion sailor, is helming a borrowed coach boat—a VHF in one hand, a Timex Ironman strapped to his wrist. “Be thoughtful about your next 35 seconds,” he advises the group as they roll rapid-fire into another starting sequence.
Absent are the sharp elbows that often define one-design starting lines. Instead, each team focuses on hitting the line on time and at pace, while extending the “grace and space” to one’s neighbors that Rosenberg outlined in his dockside briefing.
But instead of completing a race, the winner is determined by which helm gets their boat up to VMG speed first. Rosenberg issues a few gentle critiques and compliments as the boats return to the starting area. Drivers rotate, from helm to forward hand, and Rosenberg restarts the drill. Welcome to Seattle’s thriving J/Pod, where Ron’s the man with the plan: the plan to get faster together.
The J/Pod is composed of sailors of mixed ability and experience levels, racing aboard used J/70s flying secondhand sails. The group has amassed a strong regional reputation as a positive and encouraging place to advance one’s skills while having fun. Much of this rests on the foundation of mutual respect that Rosenberg has cultivated from the start and has nurtured through a shared ethos of improving one’s own skills by helping others to learn. The resulting tide of knowledge gained through Olympic-style coaching is lifting all boats, and J/Pod participants can count on Coach Ron to bring on-the-water joy and a high value per minute to each session.
Some backstory.
Spend enough time around Washington state’s saline waters, and you’ll doubtless hear about the J, K and L pods of resident orcas. While all three travel seeking salmon, the J pod tends to frequent the waters surrounding the San Juan Islands, where the Rosenbergs have long owned a home, and where they lived full time during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Given Rosenberg’s background, it’s not surprising that baking sourdough bread wasn’t on his agenda.
“This just started as a COVID project,” Rosenberg says, explaining that his international coaching gigs fell victim to travel restrictions. But finding himself on Orcas Island in a community of sailors and resourceful people presented a new and socially distanced coaching opportunity. “We had a doublehanded theme,” he says, noting that the original group was comprised of two-person “pandemic pods.”
Rosenberg’s marketing background (he’s long been the driving force behind McLube), his love for the area’s resident orcas, and the group’s chosen steeds provided the perfect moniker.
“We picked the J/70 as an inexpensive learning platform,” Rosenberg says. “You can really have some fun with it. The boat gets up and goes in the breeze.”
The J/Pod began with a handful of boats and sailors on Orcas Island, but, as word of Rosenberg’s coaching and the group’s culture spread, numbers increased as restrictions eased.
Rosenberg says that he realized that he was on to something big “when we had as many sailors coming up from Seattle to join us on Orcas Island for coaching sessions as we had sailors on Orcas.”
Pacific Northwest racing sailors, it turns out, wanted high-level coaching.
Rosenberg smartly followed this lift and eventually brought his bit to the mainland. The Seattle J/Pod, for example, was founded in early 2023, and there are subpods as far south as Hood River, Oregon, and as far north as Bellingham, Washington. Today, there are about 55 J/70s and 300-plus sailors involved with the program.
Even more impressive, group members also have a few boats strategically placed on the East Coast and in Europe that they “cheap charter” to each other to enable travel sailing.
This growth, sailors say, wouldn’t have happened without the culture that Rosenberg instilled.
“We’re all there to learn together, and we’re all there to get better, and we’re all there to have fun,” says Mike Breivik, a founding J/Pod member (his was the Pod’s second J/70). “We’re not out there to tack on each other, and we’re not out there to be aggressive against one another. I think it’s one of the foundations that has allowed the group to go from two boats to what it is today.”
While Rosenberg doesn’t have an Olympic medal, he’s personally campaigned for the Games four times, and he’s coached numerous aspiring Olympians. This background, he says, instilled many important lessons that he’s carried to the J/Pod, from fostering strong mutual respect to the concept of focusing on DTL (that’s ‘distance to leader’) to the strategy of mentally erasing all other boats from the course and always sailing one’s own boat at its target VMG.
“We play chess, not checkers,” Rosenberg says, noting that while he welcomes assertiveness, he frowns on unnecessary aggression. “We don’t tack on others to push them back; we try to outthink them, outsail them and out-boatspeed them. I train sailors to look forward and to make good decisions, rather than watching the rearview mirror and trying to hold others back.”
One big advantage of this style of sailing, Rosenberg says, is that J/Pod fleets tend to be more compressed around the buoys than other one-design fleets. “It makes it feel like we’re racing in a 40- or 50-boat fleet, rather than a 20- or 25-boat fleet,” he says, noting that this fosters friendships, community, and learning opportunities. “Everybody has more fun when they’re not being hammered on off the line. Nobody deserves to be the victim of a bad experience.”
Another critical component of the J/Pod is a commitment to avoiding boat-on-boat contact. Should contact transpire, sailors apologize for the incident, and either debrief it on the water or back at the dock, often publicly. “They always know they can count on me to help as a soft-spoken arbiter,” Rosenberg says.
“Every day that we go on the water with this group, we come back better,” Doug Hansen says. “This is probably the fastest learning curve we’ve ever seen.”
Then there’s Rosenberg’s commitment to delivering a strong return on investment for everyone’s time. J/Pod boats are often wet-sailed, their jibs hoisted and roller-furled, kites left rigged, and mainsails boom-flaked and covered, allowing sailors to go from their car to the course in under 10 minutes. Presail briefings are kept tight, and debriefs often happen via a WhatsApp group.
“He creates a wonderful, positive environment, where we’re all excited to be here and excited to share,” says Bev Multerer, a lifelong racer who has been involved with the J/Pod since 2022. “This is some of the most fun I’ve ever had sailing.”
This level of high-quality coaching isn’t free, but Rosenberg’s business model reflects the same kind of forward thinking as the culture that he’s curated.
“Typically, somebody hires me for the day as their coach, and I either sail on their boat with them or I’ll be in the coach boat—whatever they want,” Rosenberg says. “I invite everybody else because that helps everyone learn faster, including the client who pays for the day.”
J/Pod members take turns “sponsoring” these sailing days. “We try to make it a program where everybody has something to gain,” Rosenberg says. “The selfish part is that I get to coach the people who I love, doing what I love, right here at home without having to get on an airplane.”
Not that airplanes aren’t involved. The J/Pod has its East Coast and European boats, and Rosenberg travels to about a dozen regattas each year with clients, and other attending J/Pod teams are invited to join up as tuning partners.
Once back home, traveling sailors debrief their experience with Rosenberg and with the greater group, detailing what they’ve learned, further caffeinating the collective learning curve. “This inspires everybody else, and it gives them confidence that they too can travel to regattas,” Rosenberg says.
Take the 2024 J/70 Worlds, which unfurled off Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The J/Pod was represented by three teams.
When asked if he would have traveled to Spain without his J/Pod experience, Boris Luchterhand, an early member of the Orcas Island J/Pod, was succinct. “No, no chance,” he says. “We had some great races and some OK races. We learned so much, it was an incredible experience.”
While clients fund the J/Pod’s on-the-water program, Rosenberg averages 20 to 30 hours of pro bono time per week. This includes time that Rosenberg devotes to onboarding new members, explaining the group’s culture and his expectations for all participants, and helping new teams find and purchase good used boats. Then, once aboard, he helps get these teams rigged and launched.
“We buy our sails at half-price or less,” Rosenberg says. “I hand-select and sometimes purchase large numbers of used sails from some of the bigger-budget teams around the world, get them shipped here, and then hand them off to the teams who want them.”
Then there’s the WhatsApp channel, where Rosenberg frequently shares detailed notes and multimedia content with all 300-plus
J/Pod members, almost half of whom are women. This combination of real-world and virtual coaching, coupled with Rosenberg’s ability to lean on other group role models—some of whom have Olympic medals, world-championship titles and America’s Cup experience—creates a powerful learning opportunity.
“Every day that we go on the water with this group, we come back better,” says Doug Hansen, a longtime local big-boat sailor who, along with his wife, Shelagh (also an experienced big-boat sailor), bought their J/70 and joined the group in 2023. “This is probably the fastest learning curve we’ve ever seen.”
Hansen describes the J/Pod experience as “drinking from a fire hose,” and says that he’s dumbfounded by the group’s talent level and ethos of sharing wisdom. “In between races, you’ve got Olympic medalists sailing past you, commenting on your jib trim, and why they were able to pinch you off,” Hansen says, noting that Rosenberg encourages faster teams to approach fellow competitors and advise how they bested them around the buoys.
In addition to many local sailing greats—including Jonathan and Libby McKee, Carl Buchan, Keith Whittemore, Christina and Justin Wolfe, Mallory and Andrew Loe, and Dalton Bergan—the J/Pod includes many Corinthian-level sailors who are interested in translating their off-the-water achievements to increasing their speed around the buoys. “So many of these sailors are business leaders and are so successful in other areas of life,” Rosenberg says. “All I’ve done is get them on the water in a way that they can discover their passion.”
While the J/Pod is flourishing in the Pacific Northwest, Rosenberg says that the keys to success aren’t bound by any particulars of latitude, longitude, or the group’s chosen steed. “I think the concept would flourish in lots of different places,” he says. “There’s no reason it couldn’t work in any multitude of one-design classes.”
Legacy is a heavy word, but as the J/Pod nears its five-year anniversary, it’s a hard one to escape. Rosenberg—true to his humble and gregarious nature—says that this isn’t something he spends time pondering. “If I’ve ignited passion for sailing in some small way, I chalk that up as a big win,” he says. “It’s awesome that we have so many smart, thoughtful people involved, and all they were lacking was either the time or the experience to know what it feels like to go sailing in a high-performance boat, at a high level, and to really enjoy themselves with their friends.”
Throw in the concept of self-improvement through collective advancement, and he says that the J/Pod model goes from “a win-win situation to one of ‘you can’t possibly lose.’” Neither could any of the boats that were gathered for the driving clinic. Sure, one bow was consistently the first to drop and accelerate, but, by day’s end, other boats and drivers were also winning.
Grace and space, it turns out, are as critical to enabling J/Pod sailors to thrive as bountiful salmon runs are to the group’s namesake orca pods.
