By Wearing black tank tops reading “CSULB NEVER YIELDS,” the Cal State Long Beach Sailing team swept up the competition in the first Pan-Pacific Intercollegiate Regatta, winning all seven races held outside of Xiamen, China.
Twenty college teams, including teams from Singapore, Taiwan and China, competed in three days of races between July 15 and 17. The first day’s race was 12 nautical miles up the Chinese coast, and the second and third days each saw three 2-mile races rounding buoys.
Senior business marketing major Shane Young, president of the Cal State Long Beach Sailing Team, said he enjoyed not only his team’s victory but the experience as well.
“The experience was great,” Young said. “It was awesome to be able to live in a totally different cultural setting for nine days. It really opened our eyes to how people live on the other side of the globe.”
Eliot R. Clauss, creator of the U.S-China Yachting Association, helped organize the Pan-Pacific Intercollegiate Regatta. He said that CSULB’s sailing team did everything right leading up to the race.
“Sail boat races are won in several ways, first being boat preparation,” Clauss said. “The guys worked very hard to clean the boat so it would go smoothly through the water and tune the boat, which means adjust things on the boat so it was optimized for performance.”
All 20 teams used the same J80 model sailboats for the race, an aspect that minimizes any advantage gained from different types of equipment and better shows the skill of the racers, Clauss said.
Before leaving for China, CSULB’s Sailing Team practiced on a J80 boat. That, paired with their experience working together, aided in their victories, Clauss said.
“Sailboat racing is a lot about teamwork,” he said. “They sail more as a team than the other teams racing in China, but what was interesting is that every day the other teams get better and better, so the guys had to perform better to win.”
Clauss said that what makes an experience like this most worthwhile has nothing to do with sailing at all.
“The main benefit from an event like this is not really in respect to sailing,” he said. “It’s in respect to interest to international understanding. It introduces people to the concept of meeting people from abroad, understanding where they come from, their culture and how it works.”
