Blind sailing team steering to grab gold
Toronto IT worker headed to Chicago to compete against 14 other teams in world championships David Brown hopes to sail to gold in the 2015 Blind World & International Championship at the Chicago yacht club, but for the IT worker from Toronto, the waters haven’t always been so calm.
Next week, from Sept. 10 to 13, his crew of four — including another blind sailor and two sighted volunteers — will compete at the competition against 14 other blind and visually impaired teams.
Brown, who works at IBM with the help of adaptive software that does speech synthesis, lost his vision in high school in an accident.
“It’s not a positive part of my life, for the most part,” says Brown. “The point is having lost my eyesight, I’m out there competing at a high level.”
In fact, he says with a chuckle, a lot of blind sailors are just as good as, if not better than, sighted sailors.
“A lot of the blind sailors can feel changes in the wind quickly and respond to them as quickly as someone who can see because you can’t see the wind — it’s a feel thing,” he says. “That’s why sailing is a good sport for the blind.”
Usually a sighted volunteer, a skipper, will rig the boat before visually impaired sailors arrive. After everyone is on board, the volunteer will steer the boat into open water.
The sails go up, the engine is shut off and the helm is turned over to a blind sailor.
On a cottage trip shortly after he lost his sight, a friend encouraged Brown to try windsurfing — a hobby he enjoyed through high school and university.
Sailing opportunities for people with disabilities would come around, but not frequently enough, he says.
In 2001, Brown co-founded the Blind Sailing Association of Canada, which now has about 100 members. More than 30 of them are blind, the rest are sighted volunteers.
At the championship next week, Brown is teaming up with another blind sailor, Brian Arthur, from Toronto and two sighted volunteers from Chicago.
“I’m steering the boat — also known as helming — and the other blind guy is trimming the main sail,” he says. Of the two sighted crew members, one manages the headsail while the other provides oral instructions.
“If (the volunteer) tells me I’ve passed the upwind mark, then I know to turn around and go back downwind.”
Competitors are grouped by level of blindness — Blind 1, which stands for total blindness or detection of light, or Blind 2 and Blind 3, which represent various degrees of visual impairment.
Brown’s vision would be considered Blind 1.
“I think on the form it says it’s the inability to count fingers at any distance.”
Competitors will race using two types of sailboats, each with identical setups and features. The competition will run just like a standard regatta — no changes are made to the layouts of the boats or the rules of the race.
Brown says he didn’t initially understand the appeal of sailing — a sport where you travel at a maximum of 20 miles an hour.
“But when the boat is tipping over to the side when it gets hit with a gust or something, and you’re holding on so you don’t fall out, it’s exciting,” he says.
He compares sailing to riding a bike — the difference between riding a bike and driving a car at 20 miles an hour is “you’re exposed to the wind and the elements,” he says.
Brown is cautiously optimistic about his team winning a medal in Chicago. “There’s other countries that have more resources and funds and systems in place, so it’s not realistic that we’d win this,” he says.
For now, he’s happy competing and looks forward to perhaps hosting a regatta in Canada next year.
He says unless there’s a major technological breakthrough in the near future, sailing is the closest he’ll ever get to driving a car.
“Under controlled circumstances with some guidance, I’m in control of the vessel.”