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RMYC's Sailing family ...

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METROSCAPE
Sunil, Sons & Co

There's definitely something about this family, though you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at them on the street. It's something else on water. First, there is 14-year-old Varun Prabhakar who won the National Championship in the Optimist category during the Laser coastal sailing event in Chennai recently. His brother Rohan, a year older, won the Radial category, four places ahead of his father Sunil, boss of an Indo-German mining firm. Roopa, his mother, finished last, but the engineer who has sailed for pleasure since she was 11 wasn't put out too much.

Sailing has been a family sport for the Prabhakars even before Varun and Rohan were born. Later, the family would spend weekends at the Royal Madras Yacht Club where the kids would go through their paces.The two look at another sailing wunderkind for inspiration, junior national champion in the Laser Full Rig category Sandeep Srikanth. He has his eyes on the Junior World Championship in Finland this July. "If Sandeep can achieve so much, so can we," says Varun. They have a younger brother, Samir. The five-year-old isn't allowed on the boats yet; he has to learn how to swim first.

-- Sarmishtha Ramesh

The Regional Regatta Oct' 2007 conducted by the TNSA.

As reported in The Hindu.

Sports Reporter

Chennai: Nivedita Verman of TNSA was the overall champion of the SDAT-TNSA Southern Regional Optimist sailing championships (under-16), which concluded at the harbour on Sunday. Nivedita and RMYC’s Zephra Currimbhoy both finished with 21 points, but the TNSA girl was declared the winner by virtue of her better finishes.

Varun Thakkar (TNSA) finished third overall, with 25 points. The fourth and fifth places went to Gerad Ambrose and Nishanth Chandrashekar respectively.

In the team championship races which took place on Saturday, Team B (TNSA), comprising Nishanth, Tanmay Shankar, Ganapathy and Nivedita won the gold.

Sailing towards a century


The Royal Madras Yacht Club is marking its 100th year with a regatta

Shalini Umachandran | TNN

Chennai: A hundred years ago, the rather large, lumbering wooden Bembridge boats sailed between Madras and Ennore. Next weekend, the Royal Madras Yacht Club (RMYC) will sail down the same route with similar but lighter fibreglass Sea Birds to mark its centenary.
   “Sailing in Madras started at the Ennore Club founded in the late 1700s,” says Captain VA Shanbhag, commodore of RMYC. “In 1911, Sir Francis Spring, founder of the Port Trust, set up the RMYC at the Chennai harbour,” he says. “It’s been over 100 years since anyone has sailed from Ennore to Chennai harbour, so we’re doing it to flag off our centenary year celebrations.” This will be followed by a regatta from May 18 to 23, which is open to the public.
   A hundred years ago, though, when the club was opened, it wasn’t really a place for everybody. “It was solely for the British back then,” says Ramesh Lulla, one of the oldest members of the club, who joined RMYC in 1962. “In the 60s, Madras was still largely a British city, especially when it came to business. So all the clubs from RMYC to the Boat Club were controlled by the British,” he says. “All the clubs had just a handful of Indian members and RMYC had only two Indian sailors,” he adds.
   RMYC was handed over to Indians in the 1970s just as the last of the British left the city. “John Deaver was the club’s last English commodore. They hand-picked a committee and everything was in perfect shape when they passed control to us,” he says. LM Krishnan was the first Indian commodore and Lulla was part of the committee. “In those early days, we did everything with a flourish though we were strapped for funds. We eased up on the club’s rather colonial traditions only in the 1970s when the membership started dropping,” he says.
RMYC was never a rich club, and they struggled to stay afloat through the 70s and 80s. “Commodore Harold Claudius, a retired Navy man, did a lot to keep us going in those old days,” says Lulla. Around 1975, the Binny Engineering Shipyard, out of which the club was functioning, closed down. “The Port Trust gave us a patch of land at Springhaven wharf. We needed Rs 2.5 lakh to build the clubhouse. It was a struggle to raise the last rupee,” he says. But they managed to inaugurate the new clubhouse in February 1987, the walls of which are covered with photographs of past commodores and winners of races.
   The city has always had a strong sailing culture, Lulla says, reminiscing about fishermen’s races and regattas. It’s a culture that endures. RMYC still has a number of student sailors. “We have a number of children from the age of five coming in to sail. We like catching them young,” laughs Navaz Currimbhoy, a committee member, stopping mid-sentence to shout out instructions to a pint-sized Arjun, who is rigging up a boat for one of the regular Sunday morning sails.
   Over the years, a number of sailors from Tamil Nadu have made it to national and international events. Rohini Rao, one of RMYC’s sailors, is now training for the 2012 Olympics. “Chennai’s waters are the best training ground,” says Deep Rekhi, captain of the boats. “We have rough winds and waves which provide perfect practice for the international circuit,” he says.
   shalini.umachandran1@timesgroup.com