GLADSTONE — After a successful season on the water, Troy Drebenstedt, the head of the Gladstone Sail School who revived the program four years ago, was pleased to share that 2024 had a great turnout and that students of all ages progressed. Plans are in the works for next year with an altered course structure.

The Gladstone Sail School had lain forgotten for years until 2021, when Drebenstedt took initiative and launched the decrepit old boats into the shallow waters of the cove near Van Cleve Park’s Bayshore Ball Field with a small class of eight students. It’s grown rapidly since then — this year, the school had over 50 students, some of whom joined mid-course, and 16 training boats.

The first additions to the fleet came from the East Coast; some were later donated; this year, a grant from the Superior Health Foundation allowed for the purchase of a handi-accessible boat called an Access Dinghy, which they found secondhand at a good deal from a sailing school in Traverse City .

The 2024 class was structured as a two-week course from 4 to 6 p.m. on weekdays. There were four instructors — Drebenstedt, Everett Cole, and Luke and Wyatt Duncson. The school hosted two guest speakers — Nick Sundstrom, who raced sailboats at a collegiate level, and Josh Anthony, who traveled internationally working for companies involved in major sailing events.

Four participants — older kids who had been enrolled in the class for the last several years — became “Junior Leadership Instructors,” a new implementation.

“We ended up doing everyone in the same class. Our youngest was six, and our oldest was 79,” Drebenstedt said, explaining that some were novices who had never sailed before, while others had intermediate skills, “but that ended up working out well, because we had the older, more experienced kids move into a mentorship role and help the younger kids or the inexperienced people.”

Each day started out with on-shore training; everyone together would go over sailing tactics before splitting up. Parents in the class helped their small children rig the boats for the first couple days, but it wasn’t necessary for long.

“We’d let the younger kids go out [first], and the older kids would help them get the boats ready,” said Drebenstedt. “That was mainly the first week. By the second week, the first-year students were able to rig the boats by themselves.”

While the youngsters were on the water, the older students stayed on shore a little longer and touched more in-depth topics.

With multiple styles of craft, students were assigned to boats based on their sizes and abilities.

Though some training boats are specifically designed for children, “Alex Sundstrom, Nick’s brother, donated several bigger boats for us, which has made it available for older people,” Drebenstedt explained. This year, eight adults took the course.

Of the Access Dinghy, which is built to be more stable, he said that some kids with cognitive disabilities used it, and “that boat is a huge benefit to the program, because it’s able to open up the program to people who usually wouldn’t be able to do this.”

Other kids tried the Access Dinghy, too, but —

“One of the things kids love to do is tip their boats,” Drebenstedt said. “The second day on the water, we show them how to tip their boat and ride it. With this boat, you can’t tip it because it’s a weighted keel, so it’s extremely stable. And when the kids figured that out, they wanted to go back to the other boats that they could tip.”

–The shallow, protected waters of this part of Little Bay de Noc made for a good learning environment. During many of the capsizing drills, students could stand up in the water. Of course, everyone wore life jackets, and safety was a top priority.

Even when a storm caught them off-guard during a race on the very last day of class, the kids got rained on, but “all that it did was blow them up onto the beach,” Drebenstedt said, noting that wind in that area is predominantly from the south.

The other thing that came as a surprise this year was the number of students — double the previous year’s.

Next year, the plan is to split up the school into multiple one-week courses, separated by skill level. The smaller class sizes, with better instructor-to-student ratios, are expected to provide more valuable learning time with different curriculum.

“We’re going to do more advanced sailing techniques for the kids and adults that have been in the program for the last four years,” Drebenstedt said. “There are a lot of kids that want to get into sail racing, so we want to focus on some of that. We’re looking at updating our fleet of boats, so hopefully we can get some newer equipment in there.”

He mentioned that Gladstone Sail School would like to obtain a couple more accessible boats, but that they’re expensive and not very commonly found.