Sailing regatta in Sayville offers juniors chance for national glory in four-day race starting Wednesday

Alex Baker hasn’t been home in nearly a month — the 17-year-old from Annapolis, Maryland has been traveling up and down the East Coast competing against the best junior sailors in the country.

This week, he found himself at the Sayville Yacht Club, racing against 240 young sailors, some of them with dreams of going to the Olympics or landing a spot at a top college.

"I think it's a cool experience," he said. "I don't know any other kids who their sport, like, allows them to be on the road for this long and have this kind of experience."

Baker was competing in the C420 North American Championships, a key event on the circuit that develops the best young sailing talent in the country. The four-day regatta, which kicks off Wednesday, is the one of the largest in decades on Long Island, if not since the founding of the Sayville Yacht Club in 1901 by a first cousin of Teddy Roosevelt, said Bill Fitch, the club’s current Commodore. The club is in Blue Point, having moved decades ago.

It was a coup for the club to land the regatta, Fitch said, explaining that it was selected in part because "we have world class conditions here," including a typically steady breeze on the Great South Bay and a broad beach front for launching boats.

The regatta will also feature innovations such as robotic buoys used in the Olympics that employ GPS to be moved into the right position based on the wind, Fitch said.

Competitors, ages 12 to 22, race two to a boat in 14-foot dinghies. They are coming from as far as California, Texas, Missouri and Florida, and were pumped up in part since it was the final event of the season’s circuit that also took them to locations including Hyannis, Massachusetts, and Charleston, South Carolina, said Doug Shaw, one of the regatta’s organizers.

College coaches were on the water, too, scouting for talent to bring to schools including Harvard University, Stanford University, Boston College, Tufts University, Fordham University and the U.S. Naval Academy, said Brian Elliot, head sailing coach at Sayville Yacht Club and the Stony Brook School, a private prep school.

"Some of these kids would definitely be thinking about the Olympics for the future," he said. "Some of them probably will get recruited to college to sail at the very high end ... It's basically the best kids in the country."

Shaw said that when he went to the Summer Olympics in Paris last summer, he recognized some of the sailors since they had competed as juniors at Sayville about five years ago in a similar regatta.

But not everyone competing at Sayville is a national-level superstar, he said. For some it will be their first elite regatta, and they just want to enjoy the sport and the joy of being on the water. "They're super excited and they're going to get to sail against serious competition," he said.

Many of the aspiring Olympians sail on high school teams during the academic year and on private teams that operate when school is out, Elliot said. They travel with coaches and sometimes their parents and stay in hotels or relatives’ or friends’ homes.

Some of the sailors are home-schooled, allowing them to travel the country throughout the year for regattas, Shaw said. One sailor from Long Beach, California, JP Panebianco, 17, moved to Port Jefferson last year to sail on Stony Brook’s team, but is enrolled in the school’s online program, called Gravitas. That allows him to move to California or other states during the winter to keep sailing, Elliot said.

Panebianco and his teammate last month won the C420 National Championship in Hyannis, Massachusetts, one of the key regattas on the circuit. He said he spent three weeks sailing in Turkey for a world championship earlier this summer and was in Miami last winter to train. He estimates he sails as many as 285 days out of the year, often seven days a week. His goal is to get into a top sailing college and then the 2032 Olympics.

"I’m like really psyched that I've been given the opportunities to do this kind of thing," he said. "Obviously, sailing is not one of the easiest sports out there, but it's lots of fun."