J/World performance sailing coming to Xiamen

by Guy Nowell, Sail-World Asia on 11 Nov 2008 Set to open in the next 30-60 days, Asia’s first J/World sailing school. There are J/World performance sailing schools in San Diego, San Francisco, Newport, Annapolis and Stockholm, and soon there will be one in Wu Yuan Bay, Xiamen, China, the place that the President of J/Boats Asia, Jeff Brown, sees as “the future of sailing in China”.

To date, there have been two approaches to seeding sailing and yachting as a sport in China – the ‘Olympic’ route, funded by government and reserved for identified talent at a rarefied and elite level (and therefore not accessible to most people), and the ‘top down’ version where a (very) small number of wealthy individuals have acquired Grand Prix racing boats and then enlisted the assistance of private individuals from outside China to help train them and their crews.

There are very few active sailing clubs – in other parts of the world the usual venue for teaching sailing – so sailing China has been in a ‘chicken and egg’ situation. And that’s where J-World comes into the picture. “Provide the boats, the facilities, and the training courses, and you will get people who want to learn to sail,” says Brown. “We have already sent young Chinese sailors to San Diego for training as instructors. The local government in Xiamen has been extremely supportive of our efforts (and Xiamen’s Vice-Mayor Pan has even learned to sail!).”

The boats to be used for training are J/80s, a 26’ ISAF-registered international sportsboat class of over 700 worldwide. Ten new boats have been built already at J/Boats Asia’s new facility near Xiamen, and were “beta-tested” at an inaugural J/Boats Invitational Regatta last weekend (http://www.sail-world.com/Asia/What-a-difference-a-%27J-makes!-J-BoatsInvitational/50707).

And the infrastructure is up and running, too. What was once the Xiamen pre-Olympic Sailing Centre has been gutted and refurbished into a quality facility with classrooms, changing rooms, administrative offices, and a lounge/social area.

J/80s have proved to be a highly effective training boat at the other J-World schools around the world. They are relatively simple and forgiving to sail, but offer exciting performance to keep students on the edge of their seats. Tuition in J/80s produces an almost immediate improvement in performance, making for a very positive experience for the student.

Jeff Brown is very positive about the immediate future of sailing in China, and the prospects for J'Boats Asia and J/World Xiamen in particular. “We like to think that this is just the beginning. Once we have some J-World accredited sailors on our books, and we have a few more J/80s in the water, we’d like to hold a J/80 Worlds in Xiamen – we’d build more boats for that, for charter, and then you can see the growth of a class alongside the growth of sailing in general.”

Until now, recreational and leisure boat building in China has been almost entirely for the export market, but J/Boats Asia aims to change that, introducing new sailors first to the sport through the performance sailing school, and then to boat ownership through the highly accessible ‘entry-level’ J/80s. Brown points out, “Ironically, the development of sailing in China has been hindered until now by an absence of regulations recognizing private leisure boats as ‘register-able’ vessels at all. We are advised that that is about to change – in January 2009 – and we expect the new regulations to have a significant impact on the concept of boat ownership in China. We will not be trying to attract people away from other leisure pursuits - what we aim to be teaching is not merely sailing, but the concept of leisure itself. China has had her nose to the grindstone for a long time now, and it’s time to have some fun!” (This vividly reminds Sail-World Asia of Shawn Weng, Chinese solo circumnavigator, who arrived in Hong Kong in 2004 – “what do these people do on their day off?” he asked. “Go to shopping malls and spend money? They need to get out more…”)