When it comes to competitive sailing, the 18-year-old Venetia Satow is a late bloomer, having taken up the sport three years ago, when her family moved full time during the pandemic from England to Sag Harbor, where previously they had spent only summers.
In that brief period she’s apparently become one of the Breakwater Yacht Club’s top sailors, if not its best one.
“I never wanted to sail,” the hazel-eyed redhead said with a smile during a conversation at the club the other day. “My parents tried to get to me to go the sailing camp here before Covid hit, but I said no. And then, after that, in 2022, some of my friends who were instructors here, Ava Kenny, Ciona Kenny, and Alex Makoid, invited me, and I changed my mind. . . . It was a bit scary at first, but by the end of the week it was my favorite place ever.”
“What do I love about sailing? I love being in nature and connecting with the wind and the waves, and also the new technology of boats. Being able to predict what the wind is going to do is really exciting. It can be so unknown. . . .”
Asked who had taught her, Satow said, “Sean Elliott, the club’s sailing director, definitely, Derrick Galen, one of the founding members — I’ve raced JY-15s with him. . . . Bud Rodgers, who was the commodore a couple of years ago, is amazing. He’s got 20 sailboats at his house in North Haven and lets everyone borrow them on Friday nights to race out of his backyard. He’s been so generous with his boats and his time. Really, everyone at the whole club has been so welcoming.”
She had learned, she said, “mostly on one-person boats, so it wasn’t so much a ‘Here, Venetia, take the helm’ as it was being shoved off. But in the most caring way! That trial-by-fire moment you’re talking about was kind of like that.”
“I definitely like small-boat sailing where you’re on your own,” she said. “I like it because everything in a race comes down to me — there’s a nice feeling of responsibility. Yes, as you say, there’s a little bit of luck, but it’s more skill.”
Asked how she was doing in her races, Satow said, “I’m not winning them all, but things are going well at the local and regional level. On the national level it’s more difficult. The sailors I’m racing against have been sailing since they were 5, whereas I didn’t begin until I was 15. But I’m progressing. Last year was my first on the national circuit of racing. This summer, in August, I’m going to compete at the Canadian youth championships in Kingston, Ontario. It’s a big race that I’m pointing toward, but I’m not so much competing this summer as I am trying to train for next year. I’ve just graduated from high school, most of which I did online, and I want to take next year off just to sail, I hope at the SailCoach Academy in Malta. There are a lot of sailors in that program who are campaigning for the Olympics. I’ll be trailing behind them, but it will be great to learn from them. . . . But first I’ll have to get a job!”
Satow, who was to have competed in the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club’s three-day Laser regatta, a world-championship qualifier, last weekend in Oyster Bay, trains five days a week at the Shelter Island Yacht Club with Nathan Jensen and Luca Webb, collegiate sailors — Jensen at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and Webb at the University of Miami. Her prime mentor, with whom she is in contact online, is Anna Tunnicliffe Tobias, a 2008 Olympic gold medalist.
Would she like to sail one day in the Olympics? “If I get good enough by the end of college, I would love to campaign for them.”
The Covid pandemic, she said, had changed her life. “It brought me to Sag Harbor, it made it acceptable for me to study online — I’d never thought about online schooling before — and I’ve made friends here through sailing. . . .”
Neither her mother, Suzanne, nor her father, Robert, sails, Satow said, acknowledging that any pressure she felt was “completely self-driven. I can stop whenever I want, but I would never stop.” And while her parents are not sailors, they’ve been “hugely supportive,” driving her to regattas. They’ll be relieved, she said, when she gets her driver’s license in two weeks. “I’ll be relieved too.”
As for college, “I’d like to go somewhere in the Northeast, to a college with a good sailing team . . . in Rhode Island, Massachusetts. . . .”
In parting, Satow was asked if she’d met Cole Brauer, an East Hampton native who became the first American female to sail solo around the world recently in the Global Solo Challenge. “Oh, yes. She’s amazing. I met her last year, at a sailing event in Bristol, Rhode Island. She was so inspirational. . . . Definitely she’s an international hero.”
And would she like to sail singlehandedly around the world someday too? The interviewee smiled: “To sail around the world, but not singlehandedly, would suffice.”
