Sailing on the Charles-- MIT Sailing

Luke Boelitz started sailing when he was eight years old, which, he says, is not unusual for kids who grow up on the Cape.
When he talks about sailing, he talks with his hands. The explanations come in explosions: one sentence right after the other.
I didn’t expect anything but to stand on the deck and watch the kids from MIT day camp hop into the sail boats when I walked into the MIT boathouse one hot, sticky Tuesday afternoon. But after Luke pushed off all the boats out to the open river, he turned around and asked me, “Wanna go sailing?”
Yes, yes I did.
I put on a hunter green life-jacket, tried to gracefully step into the boat, failed, and instead stumbled my way into the vessel. Luke and another MIT sailing employee, Andrew, nimbly joined me.
Once we got situated and out onto the river, with a light wind at our backs and Andrew steering the tiller, Luke started telling me his story.
“I started sailing in Falmouth at the Falmouth Yacht Club which is actually run by the Head of Harvard sailing. I stopped going to Falmouth and started working at the Courageous Sailing Center in Charlestown. It’s free sailing for kids from the city of Boston. They’re not super competitive but they definitely teach kids how to sail, and I was the racing coach there last year. But I decided I didn’t want a coaching job this year because I needed to be able to go and do my own regattas, and so here I am.”
The longer we were out on the water, the stronger the wind got. I subconsciously tried to melt into the side of the boat to keep from being dumped out as the boat tipped and rocked. To keep my mind off of the inevitable drenching and my heart from racing, I asked Luke how he would describe learning how to sail.
“I mean, it’s pretty complex,” he said. “To really understand it and be able to do it takes a lot of time, I think. At MIT we teach people to sail really fast, but they don’t exactly get what’s going on. Learning to steer is most important, and learning the points of sail. You need to know what your relationship to the wind is to make the boat go correctly.”
What I learned in my crash course, one hour sailing lesson is to duck when you hear, “I’m gonna tack.” Luke chuckled at me when I slouched into the bottom of the boat to keep from getting my head whacked by the boom, a bar extending from the mass to hold the sail upright. According to Luke, the kind of boat we were in is called a tech dinghy, which is quite small and forces you to get cozy with your comrades in a hurry. It made it that much more difficult to move around the boat when it tipped or when Andrew tacked.
By the time we got back to the deck, my legs were rubbery and I could feel the adrenaline pumping. But for Luke, it was just another day on the job, another day in the sun, and another day on the water.

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