2025 Scholarship Race - Blog 1

Rockland Yacht Club Scholarship Regatta — More Than a Race

Rockland Yacht Club has hosted an annual Scholarship Regatta in August for the quite a few years, and the event’s success has grown remarkably. This blog post is the first in a short series to bring more context to why we support this incredible program.  This post will serve as an introduction to the sailing program.  The past two years Rockland Yacht Club has teamed with Sail, Power and Steam Museum http://www.sailpowersteammuseum.org/index.html to help raise funds as well to support the programs that are held there.

The Apprentice Shop in Rockland is home to the area’s high school sailing team, which draws students from Camden Hills High School, Oceanside High School, Islesboro Central High School, and local home-schooled youth. The program runs both spring and fall seasons — with the spring season kicking off on March 24th and continuing through mid-June.

While many of us still have our boats on the hard, shrink-wrapped or buttoned up for winter, these young sailors are already on the water. Our support helps remove some of the financial barriers to participation, such as registration fees and cold-weather gear.

On the day of this writing, the team was out sailing on one of the warmer, clearer days of our cooler than normal spring. But make no mistake — the water is still a chilly 40°F, and a steady breeze of 10–15 knots (with higher gusts) meant plenty of spray over the rails. You’d never know it from the way they were sailing those boats. After a warm-up sail out to Rockland Lighthouse at the end of the Breakwater and back, they raced six short courses, working hard with lots of tacks and jibs and mixing it up.

The program this year has an amazing new improvement.  Eighteen 5-6 year old 420 racing dinghies were purchased from Harvard University lead by coordination from a person at the Apprentice shop.  The kids are extremely excited about the new additions. If you aren’t aware, Club 420s are a 2 person sloop-rigged fiberglass racing dinghy.  420s are use by high school and college sailing programs throughout the United States.

This content for this post is following a Thursday night practice at the tail end of the school spring break therefore only had 3 boats on the water.   The following week’s Thursdays practice had 11 boats on the water.   You may see a group of 420s on the north end of the harbor on Monday, Thursday and Friday’s.  Several regatta’s are held on Saturday’s as well.

Planning for this years Scholarship Regatta has begun, the committee has met several times and is starting to work with existing sponsors and looking for new sponsors.  We hope these posts help inform the club on this very important program supporting future sailors and boaters. 

Future blogs will highlight some of the success stories from the program as well as some of the programs that The Sail, Power and Steam Museum supports.