Author: Joe Cooper

By Joe Cooper My phone dinged, with Jill’s ding tone. Three words: Janet has died. Holy expletive deleted. A veteran survivor of several flavors of cancer, this mother of three and lifer wife was finally nosed out at the boat end. Another one. I stopped for a moment, mentally adding up the people I know who have had life similarly nipped from them on the line of life. I got to ten departed souls without too much…

By Joe Cooper The CJ Buckley Regatta (you’ll find my article about this brave young man at windcheckmagazine.com/article/a_pebble_in_a_pond/) is a team race event, but not for high school teams, rather for either yacht club teams or whatever team name six high school sailors want to jig up for themselves. Grapes of Wrath and Ship Happens, for instance. But for the primo names of this year’s event (see page 19), complete with costumes, Revenge of the Sith took…

By Joe Cooper Of all the aspects of sailing that are constant across every discipline of the sport, it is the community we find ourselves in that most often becomes the standout component. The mates, the stories, the highs and the lows, the fear and the high fives, the shared experiences are the fundamental glue we all have in common in the sailing milieu. Think for a moment on what other aspects of our lives offer the…

By Joe Cooper The word “last,” or phrases including that word (i.e. “came last,” “was last,” “is last”) has, in our society today, a three-kilo bucket of negative connotations hung around its rudder. Anyone being tarred with such a sobriquet likely wants to shrink from view faster than a foiling SailGP 50 passes another in displacement mode. The psychologists amongst us might debate that this negativity is behind the “every kid gets a prize” at T-ball games…

By Joe Cooper Phew, that was some spring. Herreshoff Regatta in Maine, the last Friday Night Lights, then the State Championships, a long Sunday event at Sail Newport, with 10 races. Then the Storm Trysail Foundation’s Junior Safety at Sea Seminar on 2 June, at Sail Newport. In the middle, another Block Island Race on the J/105 Young American – my favorite mob to sail with these days. The first part of the race was sailed in…

By Joe Cooper Published in 1979, Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff chronicles the search for, training of and finally launching of, the first U.S. astronauts. One of the core themes is that among the post-World War II test pilots who “pushed the outside of the envelope” to be the first to break the sound barrier, one either had this mythical Right Stuff or, especially after “augering in,” did not. Projected onto the first seven Mercury astronauts…

Minds, sharper and more lettered than mine have, ever since we became sentient, been contemplating the Big Conundrum that dogs the human condition. What happens when it is all over? When we pass, meet our maker, go to heaven, snuff it, turn up our toes or, for the Monty Python lovers amongst us, become an ex-human. I suppose a flaw in getting older is that your contemporaries, start to, well, cease to be, become no more. I…

Ever think the world is kicking you in the shins? That life’s not fair? Feeling sorry for yourself? Go immediately to ClagettRegatta.org. Here you will learn about people doing things that will make you cringe that you ever thought you were having a bad hair day. The C. Thomas Clagett, Jr. Memorial Clinic and Regatta honors the memory of Tom Clagett, a passionate sailor who contracted meningitis in his youth. Tom was paralyzed for a while and…

It’s a great feeling, as a coach, when members of the sailing team you have, in my case, the very great honor to coach, call you up and say, “Hey Coop, can we do these regattas?” I received such a signal last fall from Payton Canavan. Payton is one of two leaders of The Prout School Sailing Team and skipper of one of two pairs who are the school’s top four sailors. As is typical of her,…