Adaptive Sailing Club Takes to Lake Harriet

Terry Hanson arrives at the small sailing hut on Lake Harriet at 5 p.m. to begin prepping the sail boats members of Minnesota Adaptive Sailing who are about to arrive by car, foot, wheelchair and power chair.

Hanson throws on his life jacket and maneuvers from the sailing hut to the docks to the sailboats in his wheelchair. “I can’t totally rig one of the boats myself. I can tell someone how to do it. Paul can rig the boat completely himself, but I’m basically working with one arm and it’s hard to lean out over the boat to try to tie something with just one hand, but between us we can get the boats rigged up on our own.”

As more people begin to arrive, the workload is split amongst them. “There’s no sense in somebody doing all the work so we spread it around,” explains Hanson. “Roxanne and Sue are in power chairs so we’ll load them down with some stuff and they’ll just go out on the dock with it. Brian is a walker, so he can stand up, so he can reach some of the stuff. So, it’s a team kind of thing.”

The Minnesota Adaptive sailing program began as a collaboration between the Lake Harriet Yacht Club and Courage Center, a Minnesota-based rehabilitation resource center, offering the opportunity to sail on Lake Harriet to all those with a passion for sailing.

In past years, Courage Center has provided supervision for the program, but this year they are phasing themselves out so the program will be run and supervised by the Lake Harriet Yacht Club and individual volunteers.

“Lake Harriet provides safety so there will be someone with one of those power boats going along the lake in case of emergency,” said Paul Van Winkel, one of the original sailors. “But we haven’t had an emergency for the last four years.”

There are about 10 consistent sailors who gather every Monday evening at the small sailing hut just east of the Lake Harriet Band Shell, but as the only program in Minneapolis to provide those with various handicaps the opportunity to enjoy recreational sailing, the group can number up to 15 sailors on any given Monday evening.

“It’s like a little vacation,” said Van Winkel. “Sometimes they have a band playing there [in the Bandshell] so you can hear the music.”

The group caters to sailors with a wide range of conditions, from paraplegia to quadriplegia to various brain injuries. The one-person boats have been remodeled to be easily operated by the sailors. As you approach the boats you can see that each component is clearly labeled and within arms reach of the central seating area.

“They’re really nice to sit in because everything is right there. The main sail, the jib sail. All the lines are right there and it’s fun too,” explained Rebecca Preston. “The rutter is right in front of you so you don’t have to reach back. They’re really easy boats.”

Preston is a new member of the adaptive sailing program. Although she has experience sailing larger boats on Lake Superior, she had been unable to sail for the six years since she was hit by a drunk driver while driving in Northeast Minneapolis.

Although many of the sailors have experience sailing, there is not a requisite to know how to sail. The sailors come from a variety of professional backgrounds from former teachers, airline pilots, lawyers, and parking lot attendants.

Sue Fink, who used to be a teacher, had only sailed a handful of times before joining the adaptive sailing program and has been taking advantage of the program for the past three years.

“Last year, my 89-year-old mother-in-law came down and she always had sailing on her wish list and there weren’t that many people so she tried it,” said Fink. “She knew how to drive a motor boat so she just kind of took off. It was pretty funny, so she used it for her Christmas card.”

Fink is also very involved in off-season sailboat maintenance. Because of the small stature of the boats, they can get damaged very easily. During the spring the group gathers in a space donated by a volunteer to sand, repaint, the make repairs to the boats.

A collective understanding between the volunteers and sailors alike is that the volunteers are not there to take the sailors for a boat ride, but are there to share their passion and enthusiasm for sailing.

“The sailors would come back grinning from ear to ear because of their success,” said Chuck Nagle, the original volunteer coordinator who has since stepped down from this position. “They were very, very confident.”

Because the boats are only built for individual sailing, during the first year of the program there was some experimentation with how the supervisor standing on the dock could communicate to the sailor on the water.

During the first year there would be a cell phone strapped to the sailor so the supervisor could talk to them from the dock. Hanson explained that it was difficult for the sailor to steer the boat and talk on a cell phone so this system has since been replaced.

“We have a walkie-talkie. We’ve got radios. One here [on the sailboat] and then one in the safety boat,” said Hanson. “We’ve had a little bit more on-dry-land training than when I first went out.”

At the end of the Monday night gathering, a few people stick around to talk about upcoming events: every third week of the month they potluck and every fourth week is racing.

“I’ll be back for racing,” Hanson says, spoken like a true sailing aficionado. “A guy can always eat. You can’t always race.”