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Episode #180: Ron Rosenberg on Learning to Sail Together

By Monica Grant | February 25, 2025

What a fun episode! This week we chat with Ron Rosenberg about learning to sail with family and friends, and his lifetime of coaching sailing. Ron has won five world titles, two 5.5 Meter Class Gold Cups, one European championship, more than 50 national titles, and and has competed in Olympic trials, been team captain and/or coached in almost every Olympics since 1984.

Tune in as Ron shares with Good Jibes host John Arndt the moments that changed the trajectory of his sailing career, why sailing is a masterclass in self-improvement, how to become a sailing coach or hire a sailing coach, his sailing success with the J/Pod fleet of J/70s in the Pacific NW and coaching concept others can replicate, and how to help people create healthy habits on the water.

 

Here’s a sample of what you’ll hear in this episode: 

  • How did Ron become a professional sailor?
  • Who are his sailing mentors?
  • What is his J/70 sailing program?
  • How do you become a sailing coach or hire a sailing coach?
  • What’s Ron’s favorite sailing venue?

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots — follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re feeling the Good Jibes!

Connect with Ron at [email protected].

Check out the episode and show notes below for much more detail.

Show Notes

  • Ron Rosenberg on Learning to Sail Together
    • [0:21] Welcome to Good Jibes with Latitude 38
    • [0:54] Connect with Ron at [email protected]
    • [2:48] What’s a story that shaped his sailing career?
    • [6:42] How did he progress to different boats?
    • [8:58] How did he become a professional sailor?
    • [11:42] Does he ever go cruising?
    • “SailGP, the world’s most exciting racing on water, returns to California this spring with back-to-back events: the Rolex Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix on March 15-16 and the Oracle San Francisco Sail Grand Prix on March 22-23. Experience two action-packed weekends as 12 national teams battle it out in high-speed, 50-foot foiling catamarans flying at over 60 mph. With national pride, personal glory, and $12.8 million in prize money on the line, the stakes have never been higher for sailing’s top athletes. Don’t miss your chance to witness this epic, close-to-shore racing set against the iconic backdrops of the Port of LA in SoCal and the Golden Gate Bridge on the Bay. Enjoy the ultimate day out by the water and get your tickets now at SailGP.com.”
    • Sailing Career & Sailing Program
    • [13:55] How did Ron get serious about sailing after college?
    • [19:52] Who are his sailing mentors?
    • [24:15] What’s his favorite boat to race?
    • [27:38] What is his J/70 sailing program?
    • [32:42] Who supports the program?
    • [36:28] Has anyone else copied Ron’s model?
    • [40:20] How does the cost structure work?
    • [45:38] Connect with Ron at [email protected]
    • [48:35] How do you become a sailing coach or hire a sailing coach?
    • [38:40] SailGP, the world’s most exciting racing on water, returns to California this spring with back-to-back events: the Rolex Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix on March 15-16 and the Oracle San Francisco Sail Grand Prix on March 22-23. Experience two action-packed weekends as 12 national teams battle it out in high-speed, 50-foot foiling catamarans flying at over 60 mph. With national pride, personal glory, and $12.8 million in prize money on the line, the stakes have never been higher for sailing’s top athletes. Don’t miss your chance to witness this epic, close-to-shore racing set against the iconic backdrops of the Port of LA in SoCal and the Golden Gate Bridge on the Bay. Enjoy the ultimate day out by the water and get your tickets now at SailGP.com
    • Short Tacks
    • [57:40] Racer or cruiser?
    • [58:05] Favorite sailboat?
    • [58:42] Longest offshore voyage?
    • [59:28] Favorite sailing venue?
    • [1:00:24] What to say to a non-sailor to get them to sail?
    • [1:01:24] Atomic Habits by James Clear, The First Rule of Mastery by Michael Gervais, Racing Rules of Sailing (RRS) by US Sailing
    • [1:03:42] What are Ron’s final thoughts?
    • [1:04:50] Connect with Ron at [email protected]
    • Make sure to follow Good Jibes with Latitude 38 on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts

 

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Ron Rosenberg  0:02  

This is an opportunity for you to forget everything about your daily life and work and stress ashore.

John Arndt  0:21  

Welcome aboard, everyone. This is John Arndt, Publisher of Latitude 38 and we’re here for another episode of Good Jibes, a podcast where we help you discover the world of sailing through the eyes the West Coast sailor. And each week, we bring guests aboard to help you learn about cruising, racing, just plain sailing. It’s all brought to you by Latitude 38 the sailing magazine for West Coast sailors since 1977 and today’s guest is sailing World Champion and coach, Ron Rosenberg. Welcome aboard, Ron!

Ron Rosenberg  0:54  

Hey, thank you, John. Really nice to be here with you today. Yeah, great to

John Arndt  0:58  

have you here as well. I’m going to start out, you know, I’ve known Ron for over 30 years, both shows and mostly with his work with Team McLube and Harken. But before getting on here, I thought, I just Google them. See what I found, nothing criminal. In fact, every entry I saw was starts out world champion sailor and coach Ron Rosenberg. And I’m like, that’s a great way to be found on Google. So that’s, that’s what I found. But I got a little more background on Ron’s sailing achievements, which are numerous. And so he’s got five world titles, so youth champs, J 20 fours, Olympic sailing, edgels and 5.5 meters, two gold cups and a European Championship, 50 national titles. I mean, that’s, that’s three quarters of the boat classes in the country, I think. But that’s a lot of in, mostly in wide variety, one design classes. He was a team captain with US Olympic sailing team in Barcelona when we won medals in nine out of 10 classes. And he’s been Olympic coach 1984 to 2016 was a founding member of young America, America’s Cup team with Kevin MAHANEY and John casteki. And he also worked with the Saint Francis America one team with Paul Cayard. And so he’s done lots of racing, lots of winning, lots of sailing, but also, really underpinning all of that is a lot of coaching and helping other people learn to sail. And that’s, you know, he’s coaching now on dragons. J, 20 fours. J, 70s. Tp, 50 twos. Man, I don’t know where you get breakfast into all of this, but, and then started this J pod in the Pacific Northwest, which has gained a lot of attention for really a unique, maybe not unique, but very well developed, thought out way to bring new people into sailing and get them engaged. And so we’ll talk about that. But after that, bio, holy smokes. I want you just pick one story to tell our audience from your sailing life that stands out or impacted you or that’s

Ron Rosenberg  2:52  

a great a great first opening question, and having prepared nothing for that question, I will tell you that I have about 50 different stories that I’d love to share with you. I’m just going to pick the one from the very beginning that is a little different version of how me and my family were introduced to sailing in a sort of non traditional way. I grew up in Southern California, in Long Beach. My father was a dentist, not a sailor. He had taken a few lessons at some point and decided that at this early point in time, I was about seven or eight years old at the time, and I have an older brother and younger brother, we were all in Little League, and we were also, every weekend was my parents playing driver and driving all three kids, three years apart, into three different parts of town for baseball practice. And so it wasn’t really togetherness. It wasn’t real. And to be honest, I thought my whole time. I thought there must be something better out there for me than baseball, especially at, you know, a hot, you know, dusty field in Southern California. So dad comes home, comes home from dinner one night and says, Hey, you know, I’ve been thinking we could go and get a little sailboat and go for a family sale together. How does everybody feel about that? We all kind of huddled around the end of the table and thought, yeah, that sounds like a pretty cool idea, Dad. Let’s give that a go. Next day, he rolls up with this dirty, beaten up Coronado, 15 day sailor, at least, looked like an innocent enough day sailor with the trapeze and everything else on it, right? Perfect for a bunch of non sailors, it was sort of like a cruising 470 if you will. Yeah. Anyhow, that weekend, we went for a sailboat ride. It took us probably a couple hours to put the thing together, to get the thing launched. Downwind was a breeze. We all thought it was great. By the way, there are five of us in this Coronado, 15 with our big life jackets around our necks at that point. And downwind was a breeze. We’re having a great time. We’re dragging our hands in the water. We go to turn back up wind to head home, and we tip over. We hadn’t learned the part about how you write a sailboat, so thankfully, some really friendly innocent bystanders came over in a powerboat, helped us up. Kind of right at us, and towed our whole mess back to shore, and we had this great adventure as a family. And that was actually how it all started. That’s amazing, great than most, than most kids grow up into sailing these days. Yeah. Pretty fun way to start, yeah.

John Arndt  5:14  

Well, I think, yeah. I think that’s, you know, sailboats, if you bring them on as big pool toys and you flip and flop around in them, you know, they get to be fun, and otherwise they seem daunting. But I also like to comment that it was alternative baseball, because I do think all these sport, any sport, teaches people nice values and lessons. But one thing about sailing is, you know, your parents aren’t separated you from a white line and no role in your you know, sport life in sailing, they can really something you can do together as a family. And I think that’s one of the great

Ron Rosenberg  5:45  

you just touched on, one of the really strong themes that is important to me today, and that is just being together, just doing something together with your family, with your friends. So that is quality time, and not time away from each other and time away from your family and friends. And that’s really been a huge driver for sailing and for developing my own passion for sailing along the way as well. I credit my folks for that big decision, but that was a pretty smart move long ago, and to this day, all five our family members are still big time sailors and love it, and we’re all passionate about it. So boy, what a trajectory shift in an early age in life.

John Arndt  6:19  

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. I mean, that’s an interesting thing for a parent to come home and just say, Hey, let kids gonna try something brand new. I mean, seems like people are brought up with some activity in their life that fills their time and and just pick up a new hobby. You got lucky there to have them just be a driver to do that. So Coronado family boat, Coronado 15, and then so you got, obviously, way more into it. What, what was the pathway to going from a Coronado 15, family sailing to competitive racing and upping your skills?

Ron Rosenberg  6:52  

I think the the breakthrough for us was just discovering that, for me, it was my first day in a Sabbath, and I vividly remember being, you know, about an eight year old kid in the junior scaling program, or get it was the day before the junior sailing program started at my home Yacht Club. Back then, Alameda Bay Yacht Club, someone had loaned us a Sabbath. We were not members. They invited us in. We got to go and do that. We enrolled my whole my whole family, brothers and all into their junior program, and I got to go out the day before the clinic started with swim test day, and go out and back day. And I got to reach out and across the bay and turn around and come back myself. Of course, a coach was nearby, you know, kind of hurting all of us guppies at that point. But that was a pretty empowering feeling, and that made a real impact on me. That’s where I realized this is we’re not playing baseball anymore. This is really exciting and fun and empowering, yeah?

John Arndt  7:50  

So that’s a lone hand on the tiller and ready to go. That sort of felt independence, yet a challenge. Yeah, it was

Ron Rosenberg  7:58  

a pretty exciting time for a young kid to be able to do that, and that was probably one of probably one of the first times right for me, but it made a really great impression on me, and I can still see that today when I take people out in the J 70 who are absolute beginners sometimes, and it’s their turn to drive, and they first get a little confused as to which way you push the tiller and which way you which way the boat turns, and how it reacts. And we talk about just doing these friendly little S turns to get a feel for it, and get the mind body connection going and that muscle memory, then they never have to ask again, which way do I turn the tiller? Right? It’s always a series of these s turns, and that’s the first big thing that I teach people when they first hop into a sailboat, usually by the end of that day, they can steer themselves around the race course in a J 70, and that makes for a pretty big, memorable day for people.

John Arndt  8:50  

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. So and So you, you’ve really made a career out of sailing, I think, is that primarily your your career path, and you went from a sabbat sailor to a very competent racer, and when did it go to maybe being a paid thing? But what did you do on the way there to high school, college, post college?

Ron Rosenberg  9:13  

Yeah, so I was in the enviable position being three years younger than my older brother and his peers at the club and their names that some of your more mature listeners might know. They were the Galison brothers, who were still out there in pre circuit today. Mike Sager Blom is another one. John shadden, an Olympic medalist. Those were the peers that I was able to try to hang on to their coattails as I was three years younger trying to keep up with them while they were out there practicing and their lasers and their Snipes and their, ultimately, their 470s I was always just a step behind and three years behind.

John Arndt  9:50  

Yeah. So, so life of playing catch up. Those are the early the early times

Ron Rosenberg  9:54  

and and on the on the family side, I can tell you that very quickly we we enjoy getting around the race. Course together, learning how to get around the race course together often in last in that Coronado 15 that was a strong fleet in Southern California at the time, but then ultimately graduated up to buying a slightly larger boat at J 24 and that was in the late 70s, J 24 so that was really fun and that, and we would race that boat to Catalina and spend the night on it and come back the next day. And, you know, it was, it was as much an RV camping program as it was a racing boat for us, yeah, and it was something we would do as a family. Probably another really smart thing i’d credit my my father with was that we’d come home from our sailing camp that day at ABYC. We’d come home and he would quiz us and say, so what did we learn today? It was pretty windy today, right, right? He just come home from being a dentist, and he wants to hear what we learned, because he himself was not a sailor either. So we’re all learning together. And so by reiterating to dad that night at dinner what we learned that day, oh, it was a heavier day. If we pull the downhaul on and we pull the out haul on a little bit of boom thing. We flatten out the sail, and we can control it better. It depowers the boat. And he would ask lots of questions. If we didn’t know the answer, we’d go back and ask the next day. And so we all sort of learned together that way, and that, I think that was one of the things that taught me early on, how much more fun it can be and how much faster you can learn when it’s a shared process, and it’s a together process, rather than going out by yourself, which a lot of people do practice hard, come back in and then go and do the same thing the next day. Yeah,

John Arndt  11:31  

yeah, huh. And you, so you went cruising on a J 24 with a family of five. We sure did. That’s another thing that’s changed in life, because I remember, I don’t know, the last time I saw a J 24 with interior cushions and other things that make it comfortable, because and that. But that’s in 1977 when they came out. The brochure was nifty, fast little boat, but also had this interior, which I don’t think people buying J 24 is today. Look at interiors for anything more than sale, storage. You

Ron Rosenberg  12:01  

know, I just sailed the most recent J 24 worlds here in Seattle a few months ago. Oh, really. Okay, I did not see a set of cushions, but I did recognize a handful of those same holes that I used to recognize from back in the early 80s. From being a kid in California, we had a pretty big fleet of them back then. So it’s really cool that that fleet has has continued to endure and reinvent itself, and it’s still a really fun, cool group of people. We saw the big fleet of them up here in Seattle. That’s

John Arndt  12:31  

cool. Yeah, do we have a nice little fleet here in San Francisco Bay too? There’s a J 24 one design fleet, and they’re active and good. And that obviously was one of the boats that transformed the world of sailing and started a lot of people on a new new pathway sale, GP, the world’s most exciting racing on the water, returns to California this spring with back to back events, the Rolex Los Angeles sail Grand Prix on March 15 and 16th, and the Oracle San Francisco sail Grand Prix on March. 22 23rd experience these two action packed weekends as 12 national teams battle it out in high speed, 50 foot foiling catamarans, flying it over 60 miles per hour with national pride, personal glory and $12.8 million in prize money on the line, the stakes have never been higher for sailings top athletes, don’t miss your chance to witness this epic close to shore racing set against the iconic backdrops of the Port of Los Angeles and SoCal and the Golden Gate Bridge on the bay. Enjoy the ultimate day out by the water and get your tickets [email protected] that’s s, a, i, L, G, p.com. Yeah, going through all that, and then into championship, sort of the post college, you started Olympic stuff, national championships or what, how did you

Ron Rosenberg  13:52  

I got started early, thanks to that older group I was trying to keep up with. It was interesting time. And, you know, there’s Malcolm Gladwell has a book The Tipping Point, and he talks about being prepared for that first opportunity and being ready for it. And when it happens, you say yes and you jump on it. So it was, it was, I believe 1980 or 81 Dave Perry came to Southern California for what I believe was the very first CISA, California National sailing Association CISA Junior clinic. And it was Dave Perry and Peter Isler and Gary Johnson and Mark Laura and all of these people who had, who had been some of the and still are actually some of them the cutting edge of our sport back then. So they were, it was this great clinic, the best in the country, by far at the time, but one of the first kind of icebreakers. And I was lucky enough to be there. I was probably the youngest kid there at age 14 or 15, and I got to sail with John shadden in the double handed boat, and Dave Perry pulls aside and he says, Hey, and that was the first real coaching outside. Of just sort of general babysitting in a youth program that I ever received. And it was pretty astounding to me as a 14 year old to feel how much better you can get in one day and how good it feels, how good the experience of self improvement feels. And that made a real impact on me as a young kid at that clinic. We were good together, mostly because my Skipper, John shadden, was already a very good sailor, a very accomplished sailor, and a few years ahead of me, so but I was crewing, he took me along. We did well together. Data said, hey, you know, you guys really should consider going to this USC champs Regatta. And I was like, Well, what’s that, and where is that? And he said, Well, the next one’s coming up in Miami in June, and it happened to be right when school’s out. And so great. How do we get in? How do we do we just register? He says, Well, it’s by resume. So you should probably show up at a couple of regattas and start building a resume and see if you can get in. We got him. We showed up there, and it was in laser twos, and Dave Perry and others. There were a handful of coaches supplied by us sailing at the time, I think was us, yru at the time, that were there to coach everybody. And following on, our CISA coaching experience just a few months prior, managed to take very good advantage care leveraging the coaching that was available and asking lots of questions to Dave and the gang who were the coaches, quickly figured out how to sail our boat a little bit better. Short story, we ended up winning that Regatta, which was a huge big deal at the time, right 15 years old, just turned 15, and here we are winning the US youth champs as a crew in the laser twos in Miami. And at the prize giving, we get these awesome medals, which is still hanging up there behind me somewhere, and and they say, Good luck at the worlds in Portugal. And I kind of looked over at John, I was like, what does that mean? He’s like, Well, we get to go to the World Championships. Now, that’s in Portugal. Cool. Where’s that and when is it? And I should probably ask my parents. So we, we embarked on this great experience. We We got Dave Perry us sailing, hired Dave Perry to coach us more in that same year, to get ready and prepare ourselves for that world championship. We got there, we were competitive, and it came down the last couple of races, but we won that world championship in Portugal, in laser twos, really. And to this day, I think I’m still one of the youngest at 15. I think I’m one of the youngest to ever win that Youth World Regatta. But it was a huge, event for me that made an everlasting impression on me, on the value of good coaching, and what can be achieved, and how quickly you can learn something if you really want to, bad enough, and we’re having fun and we’re passionate about it, and it was, you know, he, he, Dave, kept saying, you’re going to have to put in the work ahead of that championship. And I kept thinking, like, what does that mean? Because I think he’s asking us just to go sailing, and it really didn’t feel like work, right? That was the most fun thing we could do at the time in our lives, was get on the water every afternoon we could. So it’s a pretty exciting time for me, and to this day, so many of those international competitors at that very first youth champs and youth worlds in 1981 are still some of my very dear friends from all around the globe and all around the all around the US as well. So it’s really pretty fun to think over how many decades we’ve all known each other, and our paths keep crossing, because in one form or another, we’ve all stuck to some version of sailing, and that’s really been a common thread in all of our lives. And so it’s really been fun to have such a rich life in that way, and have so many dear friends. You know, when you sail with somebody, you get to know them really well. You get to know the authentic person pretty quickly. And that’s something that I stress with people who are getting into sailing now is that it’s a really fun way to get to know people. And if we just start with this little shared passion of sailing, it’s fantastic just how quickly we can bond with each other and get to know each other. And walking proof of that is just having so many wonderful friends around the world.

John Arndt  19:16  

Yeah. I mean, that’s I think one of the great things about sailing is, of course, it’s a fun activity. But the community itself, the people that it are so warm and wanting to invite more people in, I think that’s sometimes, obviously, it’s very intimidating, because there’s a lot of great racers, there’s yacht clubs, and there’s polish silver and trophies around. But but when you really talk to the sailors, like a Dave Perry, they want to help you get better as you do help others get better. But what, I guess, the all those mentors, or are there others you, you know, you get to rub elbows with some pretty cool people at a pretty young age. Anything special to get plugged into that or and who are those mentors today? Maybe, I mean, I know Dave is still working. Yeah,

Ron Rosenberg  19:57  

I will tell you I am so lucky. That I have dozens of people who have dozens of people who have coached me and who have given to me so generously, and have mentored me and continue to today. Dave is still one of those, for example, right? That’s that was going back when I was, you know, 15 in 1981 that was a long time ago. The Mike Sager Williams, the John shaddens, the gaullisten brothers. Those were just hometown people who, at a very young age, I could go and ask every dumb question too, and they would gladly stop and take the time to answer questions for me and help me. And hey, is there any way that I could go to that Regatta? Oh, sure, you can say it with me, or I’m all set. But let’s put you with this person and so, yes, fast forwarding more to today. It’s interesting because I there was a guy named Glenn Foster. You asked earlier about my start in professional sailing. The man who gave me a start in professional sailing happened to be an Olympic medalist from the 1972 games, a fellow by the name of Glenn Foster who was an East Coast guy, New York trader on the New York Stock Exchange. Glenn called me up at an interesting point in my life, after a few Olympic campaigns and after some great achievements with a handful of others that I’ll talk about in a moment. But Glenn, Glenn called me up and said, Look, we haven’t met, but I see you doing some pretty exciting things. I hear some people saying some nice things about you, and it’s been recommended that I give you a call and we go over to Europe and compete in the dragon class 1989 and he said, Have you ever sailed a dragon? I said, I’ve never actually seen a dragon at that point in my life, but we went over there and he, being you, I’m just going to guess he was probably 25 to 30 years older than I was at this time, and he he’s no longer with us, but at this time he was, he was an older gentleman with a lot of experience who had been out of sailing for a couple of decades and focused on his work. And for the time that he was out, that was my ramp up period. And I just, I was just about out of college at that time. Anyhow, we got together, we went and we it was really fun to start collaborating with Glenn foster over in Europe, in a new arena, in a new class, and just starting from zero and not having any local knowledge and not knowing how to set the boat up, and not not being fast on day one, and the very first little tune up, you’re lower and slower, and the World Championship you’re there for starts in a few days. Yeah. And you know, I’ll just tell you, I learned a lot from Glenn foster at that time in my life. He was one of the great ambassadors of our sport. Glenn was this loved guy. He had already won his Olympic medal. He had already sort of lived the life that I wanted to live, and and then went and worked in the New York Stock Exchange for 20 years. And here he is coming back to sailing, and the number of friends that he already had globally from his Olympic sailing experience and then and how quickly he showed me, how quickly, just with a little bit of open mindedness and respect how quickly you can make friends, and what a great ambassador he was. Everybody he met, he would invite to come back and sail with him. And he just had, he had this great, full life, and it was all around sailing. And I think no, at no point in time was he happier than that final decade of his life, where he was sailing at a world championship level in the classes that he wanted to at the venues he wanted to around the world, and every other night were was another dinner with another group of friends from another Olympic set or another class that he had known for 3040, 5060, years. It was incredible. A lot of these he had known since he was a kid. So I kind of learned and was exposed to, kind of, in my opinion, how to do it right, by some really respected individuals who took me under their wing and took me along for their ride. Yeah,

John Arndt  23:53  

great. That sounds ton of fun. Dragon classes, one of those unique like the cultures that surround any class. It’s such a fun, passionate group that loves their their format and their boat, and it’s great to plug into those groups. How about just for your own sailing? Is there a boat or a couple of boats that filled up most of your Olympic or championship time where you’re what were your favorite boats to race in

Ron Rosenberg  24:19  

class? You know, the the dragon is one of my favorites. The dragon I’ve sailed all the way from the late 80s with Glen foster right up to just recently, I coached the team that won two of the last three worlds in the dragon class, the Provenza team, who also has a DP 52 program, and so a Turkish team. And so the dragon class just has as a family has a special place in my heart as well, and just so many friends through that class as well. Let’s see the first Olympic campaign I did was with my older brother, Steve. That was in Flying Dutchman. That was 85 through 88 that’s not true. That was the second one, the first one I did while I was in high school, which happened to be because the. The 84 Olympics was in Long Beach, California. La, the sailing in Long Beach, right at my home Yacht Club. So we sailed the soling in that Olympic class regatta and that Olympic trials. So that was my first Olympic experience where we would get to come in and the boat docked up next to you as you come in, is buddy melgas and his sons, Harry and hands and getting to know all these people at that young age was pretty incredible. And just all the big games you know, Rod Davis and Robbie Haynes won their Olympic gold medal there. Jonathan McKee, who’s still a dear friend locally, now in Seattle, and Carl buck, and they won their Flying Dutchman medal here. And Carl’s dad won the won the gold in the star clasp that 84 games. But there was just the whole world came to my yacht club where I was sailing laser chews at the time. Okay? And we would all go out at about the same time, and we’d share the same little ramp and pull our dollies up next to each other. And I they all were just so kind to me, and they asked what I was going to work on today, and if I didn’t have a plan, they would help me come up with one. A lot of them would say, Well, come on, we’re going to do practice starts today. Why don’t you start with us in the fin class? And I would get to go and kind of sail with them and train with them. And those just aren’t opportunities that fall out of the sky. But when asked and invited, the answer is always yes. You say yes, and you lean in and you say, Mom, I’m going to be late for dinner tonight. This is important to me, and that was kind of, I think that was how I stretch my legs so quickly at such a young age, and was able to gain so much experience so quickly.

John Arndt  26:36  

Yeah, yeah. Well, obviously, you were a valued crew and and helped dial everybody else’s game up, I’m sure, at the same time, press them a little harder and make everybody better.

Ron Rosenberg  26:45  

I learned early that you better contribute. If you want to be asked back again, you better find a way to contribute. And you’re if you bring the dollies down to them every day, that’s often, sometimes that’s enough. But if they’re, everybody has their time of need, and if you can help somebody in their time of need, that counts and they remember that. Yeah, it’s really fun way to get just exposure that I otherwise wouldn’t have had.

John Arndt  27:09  

Yeah, no, that’s, I mean, Long Beach, 220, 28 it’s going to be the Olympics again. So four years we’ll have that opportunity for Bay Area and California dingy racers, dial up, tune up, and get ready for Yeah, 2028 where that’s

Ron Rosenberg  27:25  

gonna be just Yeah, it’s gonna be super exciting for sure. Yeah, you know, so many things come full circle. And that’s one of them. You know, who would have thought that in my lifetime, that the games would come right back to my hometown? It’s pretty cool to see.

John Arndt  27:37  

Yeah, that’s fantastic. So the other thing that we were talking about the other day, and I’ve read is this J 70, J pod, you’ve created a Northwest and of course, sailors everywhere I talk to or clubs groups are always looking, how do we boost participation? Get new people into sailing? One design fleets, yacht clubs, are all wrestling that. And J pod sounds like a model more people should hear about and and template for others to sort of follow. So can maybe just tell us a little bit about what you’ve done up there with J pod and J 70s.

Ron Rosenberg  28:11  

Sure. Thanks. So it’s a pretty special program. It’s unique. It’s different than anything that I had ever come across in all of my years of sailing. It started as a COVID project, right? COVID hit, and I was on Orcas Island, as were a bunch of other sailing friends. We called that home for a year and a half, while we were there and sort of in lockdown, if you will, we wanted to go sailing, so we just signed up, put out a call and said, Hey, who wants to go sailing? If we can find a safe way to do this, and maybe it’ll end up being double handed sailing. So we started off with that where it was parents and kids. We had 1j 70 at the time, and we would take turns rotating to that 1j 70. We wipe down the tiller and clean it up as best we could, and wear masks and dolls do trying to do all the stuff we thought we were supposed to do at the time, right? So we started there. And the fun thing about double handing in a J 70 is that you get to do everything. You have two very big jobs, right? Instead of it’s a four person boat, typically. And instead of dividing all the jobs by four, you divide the jobs by two. And when it gets pretty breezy. That’s a handful right? The boat has a Q, a little bit of lead on the bottom, but it’s a pretty high performance machine. So it’s a really fun way to test and challenge ourselves, and a very coachable platform. Everybody who took a ride on the J 70 and got to spend a day being coached on the J 70 had a ball and said, This is really great. Maybe we should get more of these very quickly. We had three, and then five, and then eight, and then 12 in this little, you know, corner of the USA Orcas Island and and we were buying these things up all over the place. And we were sailing 3455, days a week. And that model that began there. Much of what we learned there is what we grew into today, right? That was a couple of years ago. Now it’s 2025 now, so we’re basically four years into this, and what we have learned is that a lot of the things that we’re doing back then were some strong themes that worked really well, right? We’re very inclusive. We try really hard to make it a good experience, a strong theme is no bad experience. There’s no reason anybody should have a bad experience sailing, right? No one should ever be yelled at. Yelling doesn’t make the boat go any faster. There’s lots of research that supports that. So yeah, some of the real basics, most of all, we found it is so much more fun to go out and train and learn together, just like all those Olympians showed me in 1984 they go out in groups. They work together, and on the day, the best sailor wins, and everybody lives with it. But they train the best trained together, as opposed to by themselves. And that stuck with me. They they sail together. They play together, they have meals together, and they learn together, and they become friends together, and it becomes this great shared experience. Turns out a lot of research around when you’re having a lot more fun, you learn faster, you retain more, and you just your growth. You’re on a sharper trajectory for personal growth. All those things made this kind of a model attractive. Fast forward. Today, we have 50 5j 70s here in the Pacific Northwest. 5555 and we’re currently trying to purchase three more over the next couple of weeks, if we can. We’re growing fast. We’re not done growing. Yeah,

John Arndt  31:36  

anybody who’s listening who owns a J 70 they want to sell? Call Ron.

Ron Rosenberg  31:40  

Thank you. Yes, contact me please, because we are looking and here’s the thing, there are none available on the West Coast. We picked the J 70 initially because it wasn’t a relatively inexpensive, very durable, high performance, fun learning platform. You can go with big teams. You can go with little teams. It’s not super weight sensitive, just so many positives to the boat, and there’s enough weight on the keel that if you get out in 35 knots of breeze, you can still safely get yourself around and get yourself out of trouble. It’s turned out to be a really good platform. Not to say this model of this kind of a learning club wouldn’t work in any class. I think it could work in any class. I think more than anything, is about the people, not about the boat. Yeah.

John Arndt  32:25  

Now is, is your program, if you want to call it a program, run under the umbrella of a yacht club? Or who do you have a committee boat? Or how do you go out and organize a race day? Great question.

Ron Rosenberg  32:36  

So no, there is no formal Yacht Club. We do a lot of our racing locally through either Seattle or cyc Corinthian Yacht Club here Orcas Island runs out of orca Island Yacht Club. We have a group at Bellingham, kind of an outpost there, Bellingham Yacht Club and the Hood River group right out of Hood River. So we all kind of travel and support each other. We are one group, and we learn together. We share WhatsApp channels. So we share all our communicating, all of our the coaching videos that I put out, things like that, all of the coaching content that goes out, goes out to everybody. We have over 300 people on those coaching WhatsApp channels. And again, that’s from Orcas Island and Bellingham all the way down to Hood River. But the core group of us, the Wednesday night series here in the on Lake in Lake Washington, the saddle area, we’ll have over 30 boats on the line this summer, really. And that’s just a Wednesday night, super fun evening of racing. We use, I’ll tell you where it’s an interesting, sort of a cutting edge group. We use the vacaros race scent system. We’ve been using that for over a year. We were kind of the nationwide guinea pigs for that program. So we can now consistently run four races on a Wednesday night, instead of two or maybe three, because there are no more general recalls. Everybody’s behind the line. Everybody uses the Bucha rose unit. So it works really well. And that, of course, is, is the the race sense mode that most classes, most international classes, are adopting today. We’re seeing that happening all over because it’s just such a more efficient way to get around the race course and an easier way to run races much more fairly, and it’s a better experience, frankly. And

John Arndt  34:10  

that’s a funny word, a vacross, we know, you know, boom. Vang Cunningham, all these words, what’s a vectors?

Ron Rosenberg  34:17  

Yeah, so a vectors is a it’s a GPS unit. It was basically designed to tell you how fast you’re going, and they stood it has a very smart software package in it where you if you update the firmware, you can get it to tell you the heel angle, your heel angle. You can get it to pull boat speed from through hole fittings in addition to the GPS boat speed, so your boat speed through the water with a paddle wheel, for example. It’s a cutting edge there. There are a couple of units like this around the world today, but the vacuros team is is a really interesting, hard working group that we’ve partnered with, specifically because they had a bigger vision, which was, we want to use this speed device to. Run races, and race committee using an iPad, you no longer have to ping the line to run your races. So they the race committee controls your clock. They say, Here’s your 10 minutes starting now, and everybody’s clocks are exactly in sync, so there is no more pushing the button one second too late or two seconds too late wondering if you’re behind the line by six inches or over the line by six inches, the unit will tell you that, yeah, you know instantly when the gun goes off, whether you are behind the line by three meters or over the line, you get red flashing lights, almost like a siren, that tell you you’re over. Turn around to clear yourself, and the moment you clear the line, it turns green again, you can head back up wind. So gone are the days of the race committee trying to call 10 numbers, and you’re the 10th number, and so you’re disadvantaged because you waited the longest before

John Arndt  35:52  

they were there. Yeah, yeah, Huh. Interesting. 70

Ron Rosenberg  35:55  

worlds we’re at in Palma. There were 23 of 100 boats were over in one start. They were all back within 30 seconds and racing the race again. Wow. So that’s, that’s what the Carlos unit is. There are others like it, but that one has the race system, which is so valuable for race committees, and that’s what most seem to be adopting. So it’s worth, worth looking into if you’re running races.

John Arndt  36:18  

Yeah, yeah. What? And then has anybody else called you or copied your model or any other fleets? I mean, because it does seem like, you know, a neat thing. I think of the 505 class in California is a really strong class, and they’ve got a real ethos, I think, of sharing knowledge and raising the whole class rather than, but it’s, it does seem like any Yacht Club or sailing club or any one design fleet, a great some tweaks to or something to be done. But how do they learn that? Do you have a

Ron Rosenberg  36:47  

Yeah, so we, I share information widely, right? None of this is proprietary. I would love to see this concept grow, because I think, as we can see in this area, we went from a very randomized sort of a pH or Fe, you know, whatever’s around. We throw on the starting line, and we try to, you know, pretend we’re racing hard against each other to some of the best one design racing in the US, the ways in which we’re able to make that leap and make that leap successfully, we’re helping people create healthy habits. And here’s what I mean by that, right? We we take away any barriers of entry, so we make it super easy for people to come sailing. Right? The boats are in the water. They’re wet sailed, and the main is flaked on the boom. Jibs live with the roller. The jibs roll, live rolled up around the furler for months at a time, and the spinnaker stay rigged up for, typically, a whole season. So when you get out of work on that Wednesday afternoon and you dash for the marina, the time from when you step onto the boat to pushing off the dock is always less than 10 minutes. I pride myself on strong ROI for every minute, right? And that’s not so. We don’t we don’t have boats lined up waiting to crane in for two or three hours an afternoon. That’s not going to work. I want to make it super easy. I want to make it super fun. I want to make it attractive for people to come and sail, right? I want them as they want decide they want to learn and get better. I want them to realize that putting in the work means we get to go sailing together. It’s that same smile with the word work that I used to have when I was a kid, saying this is what practice looks like as I get to go sailing, I want to make it satisfying and rewarding, and that’s where I think we make it a full win win for anybody who gets involved in our program is, not only do you get to go sailing and live a happier, healthier lifestyle, but you also get to learn, and it’s the self improvement side of it, and learning with your friends as a community. There are just so many strong benefits to this that everybody’s really enjoying it. So it’s all of these other things that we benefit from, just by going through and making sure we kind of have the core principles Correct. That’s probably the one thing that’s most if there’s something different about our program, it’s the culture that we have. There are there are no rivalries. I don’t celebrate those who win. We celebrate those who show up, and we celebrate those who are trying to improve. That’s who gets celebrated in the debriefs on every every afternoon we come in from sailing. It’s not the winners. The winners, if anything, they get to stand in front of the group, and I get to pepper them with questions, as others do, also about what they did, where their rig settings were, and we all share. It’s all very open and transparent. We do this together, and we also understand they’re more there’s more than one way to do this. We have a couple of non negotiable rules. One of them is, everybody gets a lot of space and grace. What that really means is, Ron does not tolerate any touching of holes. Yeah. Great. We. We will go many months without both touching each other on the race course. And last summer, we had 25 boats on the line on Wednesday nights. And so it’s crowded and it’s competitive, and we have world champions and Olympic medalists out there with right alongside beginners and novice racers, everybody together. And it’s really important to me that nobody has a bad experience that

John Arndt  40:24  

sounds like a blast. Anything you do to sort of sort of keep the financial arms race in check so that people aren’t spending twice as much money as somebody else to win. How do you manage that?

Ron Rosenberg  40:36  

Great question. So one of the things that people laugh about is when I go to regattas, which I’ll go, I travel to about 10 to 15 regattas every year. When I go to these grand prix level regattas, there are some big budget teams, the whole J 70 classes behind what we are doing. They will do anything to help us. They what they do is they the big budget teams, especially, buy lots of sales for a world championship. For example, they choose the ones they want, and often they’re done with them after a couple of days or after a couple of regattas, for sure, so and in a generous way, they then deeply discount those sales and sell them to us, as you sales. I pack them up and bring them home, or we ship them home, or we ship them boats. We find a way to get them back to Seattle, and they get handed out to the fleet members here we buy very few new sales. A new suit of sales on a J 70 is over $10,000 Those are big numbers. Most of the people here have not yet. Most of the 55 boats have not bought a new sale for their boat. They consistently buy you sales. And then we make those sales last through the year, they also learn pretty quickly. It’s not about the equipment, it’s not about the boat. It’s not about the sails. It is about if you put Jonathan McKee on a J 70, or if you put the best sailors, the most seasoned, experienced sailors, on any boat, any boat at all, with any sales, they’re still going to win.

John Arndt  42:01  

So frustrating.

Ron Rosenberg  42:03  

Yeah, it’s, it is, and that’s the side of it is, egos get checked at the dock. There’s zero. We are not allowed to have any ego in any of this. It is perfectly fine to come in last place in our group. You know, we all grow up. I didn’t grow up winning races when I was a kid. I spent years of my life getting last place or following others around the race course and trying to figure out how to get closer and closer. It’s okay. You don’t have to win. You are expected to improve, and you are, if you’re a good sailor, you’re expected to help others. So all those good sailors that are out there doing the winning or having a big night or a big race here or there, they come in and they share everything often by the time we even get to the dock, they’ve spoken with three or four books. They’ve passed along the way and said, Hey, by the way, you guys, you’re over trimming your kite downwind a little bit, or when you’re on wing, you don’t want to heal the boat up a little bit more, and that’s why we were a little faster downwind. And so that’s the kind of constant role model coaching, not just for me, but from everybody on the race course and that, and there’s a lot in between. We use the time between races to ask questions and to help those that are that are that need help. So that’s what’s really different about our program, and that’s important to us. Yeah,

John Arndt  43:15  

that’s great. I mean, is that culture maybe cultivated shore side, like the after race thing. And what, how do you get people, you know, the competitive ones, to kind of keep their ego at the dock. I mean, I think I wrote a story the other day about the Boston Marathon, of course, that has 30,000 people in it, and one person wins, so there’s 29,000 losers, but they keep coming and and what is it that keeps losers coming to an event

Ron Rosenberg  43:41  

self improvement without a doubt, yeah, and the ability to be able to sail against better sailors. We encourage the best sailors in the world to come and join us. We encourage them to go out and sail their best. I want to see. I want to sail against the Tiger Woods of sailing, right? I want to I want the new. Part of the excitement for a new or novice sailor when they step into our arena is that they get to sail against Olympic medalists and world champions, and they get to learn. They get to see the huge gap in the beginning between where they are and where the really good sailors are, and their job is to try to narrow that gap. And that is part of the fun and part of the challenge. And I’ll tell you, it’s been a shockingly easy sell to share that with people when they are business leaders and they are successful in their own world, and only now have they finally come up and given sailing a try, and that’s where so many of them now are giving it a try and saying, You know what, this is even more fun than I thought it was going to be. I knew that I’d like it, and I’m just sorry I waited so long to try it, but it is my passion, and I love it, and they want more and more of it.

John Arndt  44:53  

Yeah, wow, great. I mean, it sounds great, and I know so many classes. I mean, there are great classes everywhere. More 24 The Mercury class in the California there’s a little fleet of open 5.7 O’s that we’re down south bay. And actually, we got a story on our issue that’ll be delivered tomorrow about them. But I think, yeah, I think the details of what you’re doing sound unique. And obviously, 55 boats now that’s incredible growth from starting from one and more fleets would love to see that happen locally. So, I mean, is there any place to go see a document about how this happens? Or is that,

Ron Rosenberg  45:30  

you know, some nice articles have been written. I can pass those along to you, if you have a way to post those. Or people can come to me. I’m easy to find at [email protected] anybody out there wants more information, wants to get involved, or if they’re here and they want to get involved in our program, or just learn more about it, just shoot me a note, and I’ll gladly share everything I can with you. But I think this is a concept, a model that can, that can work really well in a number of places, in a number of classes around this country. I really do think that given the right opportunity and minimizing the barriers to entry, people will come to sailing give it a try, and as long as they’re not going to have a really bad experience, they’re probably going to really enjoy themselves. And who knows, they might discover their passion, and we might be able to add to the the growth of the base of our sport. Yeah, that

John Arndt  46:18  

sounds great. No, it sounds like a ton of fun, and a great boat to do it in, and and your right size, and not too intimidating, and just, yeah, a really inviting circumstance for everybody.

Ron Rosenberg  46:29  

I was just going to say, you have a standing invitation. Next time you’re up here, you let me know. Yeah, and we’ll get you out on a boat and we’ll it’s super fun. Yeah, you know, one thing that might be helpful for people to know that I think is really key to our success is I do have a conversation with everybody. People don’t just show up buy boats and show up on the start line saying, where’s Ron? What do we do? Where do we go? They all begin with a conversation with me, and it’s just a casual conversation. It gives me a chance to get to know you and you a chance to get to know me. It also gives me an opportunity I share a couple of the articles or a video or two with you about who we are and what we’re doing and how we do things, because I would respect that it’s not for everybody. You have to be able to play nicely with others. There are individuals that struggle with that, and so it’s not for everybody, and so that’s really important. And those that can’t separate out from their ego, or have you know, they’ll say they’re too competitive, or maybe they just can’t manage themselves properly. It’s not for everybody, but it’s for almost everybody. By having that initial conversation, I can then say, okay, great. And usually I end the conversation, they’ll say, Hey, this is totally for me. I want to learn more. Where do I find a boat? I donate my time, I volunteer my time and help them find a boat. So we have a nice network across the country of all the dealers and all the pro sailors and all the coaches. They all work together and support me on our project. It’s really cool the way that our wholesaling community has come together, especially with the J 70 class. So anytime a boat comes up, people know before the boat goes for sale, they’ll usually come to me with it and say, Hey, I’m thinking about putting my about putting my boat on the market. Here are the details. Do you have any buyers? We always have 2345, people keeping an eye out for boats pass it by. We help them buy the boat. First of all, we help it get transported. If it comes from the East Coast, we make that it’s insured and bonded, and we kind of have all that ironed out. So we make it super easy to join us. We have arrangements with the Marina that we’re out of, and we it’s easy to get a slip there. We pay our bills on time. We’re good customers. It’s It’s not complicated, but those hurdles that sometimes can really keep people out of the game, especially when it comes to being cost effective. We try to really keep those down to a bare minimum, make it easy for people to come to the game and easy for people to play along and have a good experience.

John Arndt  48:46  

Yeah, great. Oh, that sounds fun, you know, just think too with your coaching. And you know, we’ve been paying more and more attention to maritime careers. I don’t know is that is coaching an industry now or a profession? And what if people want to become a coach or or hire a coach. Is there a good network, and is that a good career path, a growing availability and opportunity for younger people who want to

Ron Rosenberg  49:09  

do it? That’s a great question, I think, for the right person, yes, but it’s not for everybody. I think that there’s a people often get the wrong idea and think, Oh, well, as long as I’m out here winning races, I probably should be paid for it. And that’s probably not the right attitude, that the question is, where are you going to deliver value? And can you deliver enough value to where people will want to pay you? You know, there is no certification. There’s no formal certification. You don’t you know if you told me tomorrow that five years from now you wanted to be a professional sailor or a professional coach, I could help you, and I could mentor you, and I could help you get there. And there is no true certification that you would have to have in order to make that happen, for better or for worse, a lot I see a lot of younger pro sailors come in a. Do okay in the beginning, but struggle very quickly and struggle to grow their business or to maintain their business, and then they disappear, realizing they’re not going to be able to make enough money to support themselves or their family. So I’d say go in with your eyes wide open. It is for the right person that wants to contribute big, volunteer a lot and really give back to this community, the sailing community, it might be the right place for you. If those aren’t big boxes that you would quickly check, it is probably the wrong place for you,

John Arndt  50:31  

right? Yeah, no, it’s I. I’ve never raced at that level or attempted to get to that level. Really enjoy it a lot, but I haven’t, yeah, the coaching world, I kind of forget how active it is and what an opportunity. But there’s a lot out there, and obviously teaching youth sailing and youth sailing programs, there’s a lot of people employed helping other people learn to sail.

Ron Rosenberg  50:53  

That’s right, and I think, I believe that’s actually healthy for the sport, because I think if you were to take all the coaching, coaching or coaches away, the rate of people incoming and having good experiences would diminish rapidly. I’ve seen that through my own experience, and I think a lot of people don’t look at it with that perspective. I know a lot of coaches out there, most in fact, absolutely volunteer a ton of their time. Contribute big to the classes that they’re involved with, and the teams and and helping and they they make themselves indispensable to their team and other teams and the class around them. If you can be that kind of a person, for sure, there will be room for you in the sport as a professional. But I will tell you it is. It is not the glamor of, you know, just getting up there and hoisting a trophy. It’s, it’s really not like that at all. It’s a lot of hard work, because behind the scenes, you have to make sure your sailing, clients, your friends, your people, your teams, are well taken care of. You handle everything for them, to make it a great experience for them. That’s what a coach does. It’s got to be a great experience, and it takes a lot of effort to make a great experience, and you’ve got to deliver a lot of value. And for me, the value is I want to make sure that the end of every day that I spend with a team, they come away better sailors at the end of the day than they were at the beginning of the session. Yeah, terrific. That return on investment is important.

John Arndt  52:17  

Yeah, great. Well, I’m sure the J 70 6j pod success seems like validating of the concept and and getting people together and help each other as well as you just helping them keep their egos in check and keeping life fun on the water. So that’s, that’s,

Ron Rosenberg  52:33  

yeah, if I’d like to share one more thing, if I could, about our model that people, for whatever reason, don’t ask enough of here’s, here’s, I think one of the really big positives in our program, we go out and we train together as a group. Here’s how it works. I get in touch with someone, or someone gets in touch with me and says, I want to come out this this Saturday and Sunday, for example, I’ll be out with a team Saturday and Sunday. I sent a note out last night on WhatsApp that says, hey, I’ll be out with these teams this time frame Saturday, this time frame Sunday, they are paying for my time. It is free for anybody else. We are working on starting boat handling, and if the conditions are correct, we’re going to work on wing and wing downwind. So those are the things that that team gets to determine what we’re going to work on. They pay my coaching fee, thankfully for both days, so I get to go to get hired as a coach. I’ll be on their boat, and we’ll probably have five or six. Sometimes we have 15 other boats out at a time, but in this case, we’ll probably have five or six boats out Saturday and Sunday just to join us, and then I can simulate that Olympic level coaching process where we all line up together, and we all we can actually simulate Mark roundings and boat races. And when we line up, we line up carefully and thoughtfully. It’s not just a pack of boats sitting on each other downwind. We all line up thoughtfully. And we can actually test different things. And I’m on the radio talking with everybody hears everything that I say. So when I’m coaching, when I make a comment to Team A, B or C, everybody hears it. Everybody say, Okay, well, down when we’re going to reel our polls in and go to beast mode, and we do it, and the boats that do it take off and gain a couple lengths. And so I’ll ask both C, D and E, hey, you probably want to reel into beast mode as well. And they all give that a try also. So it’s that kind of group learning again, and that makes it very efficient and very easy and a lot more fun. Frankly, it simulates racing, and it simulates big fleet racing, so you

John Arndt  54:33  

sort of get sponsored by one boat on each of these sessions, so nobody’s, yeah, overburdened with it, and you’re kind of sharing the knowledge with everybody, but that’s

Ron Rosenberg  54:42  

correct, correct. And I’m I shoot video, and I’ll take photos, and then comments go up that night, because not everybody can make it to that session. So if somebody’s away with their family that weekend, that night, it goes up on the WhatsApp. And there are videos from the day with coaching comments and some photos talking about sale twist. And here. This this boat was the fastest, and this boat was not, because here’s the contrast. All the coaching information goes up on the WhatsApp. It’s preserved there. That’s our library, effectively, if you will, and that’s where all of our race announcements go. We have, we have a it’s not just me. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s just me. We have this great group of administrators. We call ourselves the admins, and they manage we manage the calendar for the year. We manage ourselves as a fleet, and we show up on the fleet calls for the for the US, j7, eight class. We have others that manage the transportation issues with the boats, logistics in and out of regattas. Everybody leans in and everybody contributes. And so whether it’s hiring the coach for the day, or whether it’s just showing up with your team, or if you’re a crew that’s not affiliated with any team, we have over 100 crew on our WhatsApp that any given moment it’s Hey, who’s available to crew next Wednesday, I need two crew. Direct Message me, and here you you’re usually flooded with more than a dozen here saying, pick me. I’d love to go. I can be there early. And that’s kind of how so we you don’t have to have, you don’t have to be have everything perfect and organized. We make it very easy and very fluid for people to come and enjoy themselves and have a great time learning together. Okay,

John Arndt  56:20  

sounds. Sounds good. I hope other people can pick up on this and try and use some or all of it in in their own local fleets. But sale, GP, the world’s most exciting racing on the water, returns to California this spring with back to back events, the Rolex Los Angeles sale Grand Prix on March, 15 and 16th, and the Oracle San Francisco sale Grand Prix on March. 22 23rd experience these two action packed weekends as 12 national teams battle it out in high speed, 50 foot foiling catamarans flying at over 60 miles per hour with national pride, personal glory and $12.8 million in prize money on the line, the stakes have never been higher for sailings top athletes. Don’t miss your chance to witness this epic close to shore racing set against the iconic backdrops of the Port of Los Angeles and so Cal and the Golden Gate Bridge on the bay. Enjoy the ultimate day out by the water and get your tickets [email protected] that’s s, a, i, L, G, p.com, all right. Well, I want to shift gears. I’m going to just have a few quick questions at the end. Do you do any sailing that’s not racing, any cruising, any pleasures, so to speak. Yes, I

Ron Rosenberg  57:35  

love to do that, and that’s I’m hoping I should do more that in the next couple of years. Especially, I want to do more cruising with my wife and my family, and we want to go and explore this planet. So, yes, great,

John Arndt  57:46  

great. Something more to look forward to. You’ve got a lot of time in the water, but there’s a lot of ways to sail. So do you have a favorite sailboat, the maker model, one you’d want to buy, or one you loved to race?

Ron Rosenberg  57:59  

One that I really appreciated when I was younger was the Flying Dutchman. I probably learned more in the three and a half years of sailing a Flying Dutchman than any other class or type of boat. The boat was so complex, and the boat speaks to you loudly. If you do something right, you’re rewarded by raw boat speed. If you do something wrong, you’re screamed at, and the boat parks. So that was a pretty fascinating machine. The Flying Dutchman was one of my all time favorites.

John Arndt  58:24  

Great. Wow. And I guess, Cindy, did you do a laser sailing? Was laser engineer, you

Ron Rosenberg  58:31  

know, I did a little bit of laser sailing. I was always little on the small side for laser. So I did a lot more laser two sailing and double hand. I got in a double handed boats early

John Arndt  58:39  

  1. Okay, gotcha good. How about offshore? You haven’t got a long voyage. You’ve done offshore, any offshore racing,

Ron Rosenberg  58:45  

so I can proudly tell you I have done a just over 100 mile swift race. I’m going to call that offshore in my world, that’s offshore. Yeah, it sure seemed like a long time on race, but I had a great time, and I’m going to do it again. Are

John Arndt  59:02  

you cool? So you’re primarily though, a buoy round the buoys, dinghy, small boat, racer, yeah,

Ron Rosenberg  59:07  

that’s kind of been my style. I like to go out, sail, hard, race, hard, come in, you know, have dinner with the team, be a little social, and sleep in a warm, dry bed. Kind of suits me. Yeah,

John Arndt  59:22  

sounds good. How about any favorite sailing venue you’ve raced, of course, all over the world, all kinds of venues. Would you pick one as your go back there anytime you can?

Ron Rosenberg  59:32  

Yes, and there is one. And I do go back there anytime I can. I’ll be back there in March. It is cash guy, Portugal, yeah, just north of Lisbon, and you get the rolling swell of Nazare, where the 100 foot surfing waves for sure. You get this rolling swell. And you can surf for minutes at a time in a keel boat. It is, I’ve been going there since the 80s, and it is a special, special place, if any of your listeners ever get to go racing cash. Guy, do it?

John Arndt  1:00:01  

Rabbit, okay, that sounds good. That has not come up much. I don’t think that I can recall. So that’s but I know to the Whitbread, or one of the around the world races was start and finish, not the Whitbread, but the Ocean Race. Maybe it was, or how about, I think you’re sort of describing it. But what talking to your non sailors, you’re like, that sounds cool. What do you say to them to get some most interested what? What do you say to a non sailor that captivates most of them? To say, Yeah, I want to do that. This

Ron Rosenberg  1:00:28  

is an opportunity for you to forget everything about your daily life and work and stress ashore. I’m going to take you on a short journey. We’re going to go out for a couple of hours, from the minute we push off the dock until we return to the dock, you are going to be your best self, and you are going to be relaxed and open minded. You’re going to feel it all. You’re going to be so self aware. You’re going to absorb all the energy that just the natural beauty of what we’re going to do is going to give you a little bit of a high, and you’re going to be able to perform at a very high level in a very relaxed state. And I have not yet met anybody who does not love that, you know,

John Arndt  1:01:09  

makes me want to push back my chair and go out there right now I can last question, how about a favorite sailing themed book? Just someone to read that you’ve

Ron Rosenberg  1:01:21  

the books that I am enjoying most of these days are all call them self improvement books, but the authors would cringe if they heard me say that they’re but they are those atomic habits. By James clear, they are finding mastery, by Michael Gervais, their sports psychology books. That’s what I’m enjoying most right now. Sailing themed books would be books that friends have given me on the art of sailing Dave

John Arndt  1:01:55  

Perry racing rules. Or,

Ron Rosenberg  1:01:58  

you know, I do all the racing rules stuff. I’m a huge day for the racing rules fan. I wouldn’t say that some those are my all time favorites that I do, you know. I’ll tell you if I if I can expand on that one more, just a little further. This what we do with our J pod crowd. Because I’m often asked, Well, what about how do you when do you teach people that whole book of sailing rules? Well, you don’t, and that’s part of the fun and part of the joy of what we do here. It’s important that you know, when we’re lured, especially around the start line, it’s important that you know starboard and port, and it’s important that you know room at the mark or mark room. Other than that, it’s pretty much common sense, the overtaking boat from behind has to keep clear, and everything else has a version of gray, you know, quite a bit of gray area in it, and it’s very complex, and it’s so so that’s to get to the next layer of rules that makes up 90% of the pages of the rule book is fairly convoluted and fairly complicated, and For most people, that is a huge barrier to entry. You can, you can go and race with 30 or more J 70s on the same start line, and all you have to do is respect those three or four rules and you’re going to be good. Yeah, that’s,

John Arndt  1:03:13  

that’s good reminder, because I do think, yeah, too many C lawyers. There are too many. You can dive into it way deep, but those basic rules keep most people apart happily going around, of course. So I

Ron Rosenberg  1:03:24  

feel like I know the rules really well, and I care about them and I respect them, but I do not go to regattas or championships to go battle in the protest room with somebody that is that is a great way not to enjoy your your experience. Yeah. Great.

John Arndt  1:03:38  

Well, Ron, thank you so much. This has really been great. And any questions maybe I didn’t ask, or anything else you’d like to mention to our listeners, readers,

Ron Rosenberg  1:03:47  

I think you’ve covered all the really important things, John and I just got to tell you, I love what you’re doing. I so appreciate how you with your awesome Bay Area community, I mean, one of the strongest sailing communities in the entire planet. They’re doing so much for our sport, right? That a one our foundation. There’s just so many great things happening in the Bay Area at all levels. Hats off to you guys, because you are one of those who contribute big to that community of sailors. I think you are very well appreciated. I hope you know that. But I really want people to understand that it is something that we can all contribute to, and if we all just lean in a little bit, it’s just going to make the game so much better to play.

John Arndt  1:04:27  

You know, I can hear that’s why you’re a good coach. You know, everybody feels good when they when you pat them on the back, and I do too. So thank you for that nice coaching affirm, affirming of what we do. So that’s, that’s terrific, John,

Ron Rosenberg  1:04:41  

thank you for having me

John Arndt  1:04:42  

today. Great. Well, if anybody wanted to get in touch with you, yeah, just or follow up, follow Ron. Or yeah,

Ron Rosenberg  1:04:47  

I would say [email protected] it’ll come right to me. Okay!

You can find more great guests and content at Good Jibes!

 

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