Barbour regatta promotes live-long sailing

By Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki

September 5, 2014 at 10:00 am Detroit

Junior sailors in the 2013 Barbour Regatta stepped up from their junior dinghies into big boats.

This weekend the University of Michigan sailing team will pay tribute to a man that had a major influence in the lives of hundreds of junior sailors over the years, the late John Barbour.

And they’re going to do it in a way that Barbour would have loved — giving junior sailors a chance to race big boats in the John S. Barbour Memorial Regatta Sunday at Bayview Yacht Club.

Barbour was very interested in seeing junior sailors make sailing a lifelong sport. And his two children, Sam and Katie, both sailed at UM.

Consequently the UM sailing team decided to perpetuate his memory with the Barbour regatta.

“We had some Barbour blood in both Michigan and Bayview and we decided to do this community outreach in memory of John Barbour,” said Chris Cyr, a UM sailing team captain and chairman of the Barbour regatta.

Any owner of a boat with a valid PHRF rating can volunteer their boat. And any junior sailor from any club and volunteer to sail.

The junior sailors are then divided among the boats for a regatta with the idea of introducing the juniors to sailing as a lifelong sport.

Barbour was a lifelong sailor and a leader in the NA 40 class with his successive Veleros, in which he won overall honors in both the Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Race and the Chicago Yacht Club’s Race to Mackinac.

But in addition to being successful personally as a sailor, Barbour was also an ardent junior sailing supporter. The junior sailing center at Bayview, where he was a past commodore, is named after him.

“John Barbour was a pillar of the junior sailing community in the Detroit area for almost his entire life,” Cyr said. “He was a role model, one of the top sailors in his class, very accomplished and any time we saw him at Bayview, you’d kind of bow your head and shake his hand. “

“His presence was epic.”