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Rob Gilliland has rediscovered sailing. He and I grew up racing together out of the Cleveland Yachting Club; the highlight of each summer was when we dragged a borrowed Thistle up to the Lake Erie Islands to compete at the Inter-Lake Yachting Association’s Junior Bay Week regatta. But the pursuit of higher education took Gilliland inland, where opportunities for racing were few and far between.
The computer-vision engineer struck gold when he moved to Boston earlier this year. Through craigslist, he found a roommate, Mike Hoydis, an experienced small-boat sailor who never passes up the opportunity to race at Boston’s Community Boating or in the Marblehead Racing Association’s summer series.
Here at the Sperry Top-Sider Marblehead NOOD, Hoydis is racing aboard Fletcher Boland’s Viper 640 Business Time; he helped find Gilliland a ride aboard Chip Schwartz’s Viper 640 Timi’s Sun.
The racing is a little different this time around, says Gilliland. “It’s like riding a bike,” he says. “Or, it would be like riding a bike if I was sailing the same kind of boat. I have to learn the idiosyncrasies of the Viper, which is not really like a Laser or a Thistle or anything I’d sailed before.
“The boat’s set up a lot better [than the Thistle],” continues the 30-year-old. “There’s no centerboard trunk in your way, there’s no self-bailer cutting up your feet, and when you tack you’re not crawling through this small triangle between the centerboard and the vang. When I first sailed the Viper, they were like, ‘Pull on the gnav [inverted boom vang],’ and I was like, ‘Huh?’ The asymmetrical is a new thing for me, too. And so is current. I’m not used to sailing on the ocean.”
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Mike Hoydis (left) has helped his new roommate, Rob Gilliland, plug back into the sport of sailing.
Gilliland has enjoyed an up-close view of the ocean this weekend, since a complication with the bowsprit on Timi’s Sun has required the nimble bowman to make frequent trips to the foredeck. This is a dude who barely broke a sweat over three months on the Appalacian Trail, however, so a little seawater’s not going to deter him. “It’s been fun getting back into sailing,” he says. “You get to be out on the water and [points to the view of the Marblehead mooring field from the lawn of Corinthian YC] you get to see nice stuff. Most of the time I’m inland, dealing with traffic and computer screens. So yeah, this is pretty cool.”
Moise Solomon’s _3 Grins sits atop the 19-boat Viper 640 class with a 3-point lead over Ben Steinberg’s Mongoose. For complete results, click here. For photos by Tim Wilkes, click here.
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