Youth of Today

Tasty sailor chick and sailing fitness consultant Jennifer
Langille took off for Alicante for the start of the VOR earlier in the
month, learning only after her arrival that the place she’d reserved for
a few weeks had given her room to someone else. She’s the eternal optimist
though, and has been re-learning those valuable couch-begging skills. Langille has been updating her information-rich
blog from Spain, and she sat down with some of the “young guns”
of Telefonica for a candid chat.

Well, if I was not the luckiest gal in Alicante yesterday, sitting down
with four of the under-thirty crew from Telefonica. I spoke with Michael
Pammenter and Antonio Cuervas, the bow and pit on Telefonica Black,
and Daryl Wislang and Pablo Arrarte, bow/trim and trim/helm from Blue.
The boys (and I say ‘boys’ loosely, because no male who takes on the
sailing of a V70 around the world is a boy in my book, even if they
are younger than me) represent the spirit and heart of driven personalities
with massive ambitions. They’ve made some seriously grown-up choices
to make it this far.

Being a massive enthusiast of college sailing and mentoring youthful
sailors towards going big, I asked the Telefonica crew how they got
to this level – the ultimate in ocean racing. All of them shared
a common theme; they all played in various dinghy classes, and they
all had their eye on the TP52 or similar cutting-edge big boats. The
one exception may be Daryl, a sailmaker, who worked on the Movistar
program during the last VOR – the highlight of his career –
until now.