(September 17, 2006) — Lambert Lai never heard Syracuse University basketball coach Jim Boeheim's much-maligned claim that he'd rather live and work in Syracuse than Hawaii. But the Hawaiian native who has called Rochester home for a quarter of a century wouldn't argue with Boeheim.
Sailing brought Lai here and Lake Ontario and a Fairport woman convinced him this was a good place to drop anchor.
"I grew up three blocks from the beach," Lai, chairman for the J/24 North American Championship Regatta at the Rochester Yacht Club, said about his years in Honolulu. "I surfed and dived and sailed. My uncles brought me up on the water."
He sailed at the University of Hawaii, but his introduction to Mainland USA came at medical school in landlocked Albany. "I wanted to shoot myself," he says about his first winter in upstate New York.
When it came time to hunt for a residency he looked to Rochester. The now 58-year-old physician's assistant knew a Great Lake when he saw one.
Not only did he find an enjoyable place to live, work and play, he found a class of sailboat that was as welcoming as anything he'd seen on the water.
He bought a J/24 in 1993.
"The people in the class — the friendships you form" would be reason No. 1 he stands at the helm of the 24-foot-long, one-design keelboat with three sails (jib, mainsheet and spinnaker).
Megan Cucci, crewing for Jack DePeters on another of the eight Rochester Yacht Club boats entered in the J/24 North Americans (Thursday through next Sunday), agrees with Lai's sentiments. "It's one really unified group of people," the 32-year-old Irondequoit resident says about J/24 sailors.
"If you break something during a race you end up in a parking lot talking over beers and parts start showing up," Lai says. "We get each other back on the water."
Getting replacement parts from friends/rivals comes in handy because once on the water the racing can take on a NASCAR quality with speed, bumps and some dinged boats. "Love taps," Cucci calls them.
The competitive challenges of sailing the J/24 are attractive to those in the class.
"It's a very difficult boat to sail," says Mike Ingham, 42, of Brighton, who won the 2003 North Americans in Mexico and is a former national champion in the Thistle class. "It's often a steppingstone to go on to be a professional sailor."
Ingham says the difficulty comes from the jib, called a "genoa," which is "as big as the main (sail). It makes the boat almost unbalanced."
"Most of the people in the America's Cup started out in J/24s," says Ingham, who attempted to qualify for the 2000 U.S. Olympic team in the Tornado (catamaran) class. "If you can figure out how to sail a J/24 you can sail anything."
Many of the top J/24 sailors will be at the North Americans, including reigning world champion Mauricio Santa Cruz, who represented Brazil in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics in the Tornado, as well as Will Wells of Marblehead, Mass., and Mark Hillman of Annapolis, Md.
Rochester's group will be well represented by people like Ingham, sailing with a crew of Bobby Bryant (tactician), Erich Steadman (trimmer), Ernie Ferullo (mast) and Curt Barnes (foredeck); Kris Werner, who won the Great Lakes Championship last month on Lake St. Clair, Mich.; and his wife Kiki Voss Werner, who won the club's summerlong Wednesday night series last week.
Lai says the Wednesday night series is an example of J/24 sailing: "Twenty-four-foot boats on two one-mile legs — and in the North Americans they'll be six-to-eight-mile races — and they finish within feet and inches of one another."
The North Americans will provide one qualifier for this year's world championships in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, as well as serve as a Pan American Games qualifier for boats from the Americas, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Puerto Rico. (The U.S. qualifier for the Pan American Games, to be held July 13-29, 2007, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the Midwinter Championships in February in Florida.)
Three or four of the top Canadian boats also will come to Rochester from this weekend's Canadian Nationals, where Ingham took his boat for a final North American prep race.
The last time the North Americans were hosted by Rochester was in 1989.
"It's great," Lai says about having one of his class's premier championships in his town. He will be at the helm of his boat, Dr. Feelgood, with a crew consisting of David Stoller (tactician), Lynda Bryant (downwind tactician), Hill Dexter (trimmer) and John Gaudiri (bow).
"You can have a competition like this, at the highest level, at our own club on our own water and sleep at night in your own bed."
It makes Lai feel right at home.