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Courtesy Georgetown Sports Information

Freshman Charlie Buckingham embraces sophomore crew Alex Taylor. Buckingham and Taylor cruised to victory in the B division.

For freshman Charlie Buckingham, ignorance was bliss.

When he arrived at Georgetown last fall, he didn’t know his new teammates well enough to know if winning a national championship was a realistic goal or not. So he didn’t bother worrying about it.

At the fleet racing national championships last week, he forgot about the competition, ignored the other boats and set visions of glory where they belonged — in the back of his mind, for another day.

And when his A-division counterpart, Chris Behm, one of the country’s best sailors, finished outside of the top 10 in five of the first six races, Buckingham took a deep breath and stuck with what he was doing. He would put no unnecessary pressure on himself. His division was the only one he could affect and so it was the only one he thought about. He just sailed.

When all was said and done last week, when his utter mastery of the B division had propelled Georgetown to its second national title in three years, the young skipper was anything but ignorant.

Then, it was simply bliss.

“It was just an incredible year sailing with the team,” he said. “Just a perfect way to end. It felt great and I felt we worked really hard as a team all year and we really deserved it.”

While Behm rebounded with aplomb and took home the prestigious College Sailor of the Year award later in the week, it was Buckingham’s mastery that allowed Georgetown to secured the ICSA Gill Dinghy National Champions.

Charlie Buckingham and sophomore crew Alex Taylor finished first five times and second twice and accumulated just 97 points (lower the better). Boston College was a distant second, 26 points behind.

“They barely had any mistakes the first two days,” Head Coach Mike Callahan said of his B boat. “They were consistently in the top 10, they won a lot of races, the conditions were really good for those two … They were great, they were steady, they made great decisions throughout entire event. I was impressed by maturity and poise.”

Buckingham and Taylor were so strong early that after six races (a third of the regatta), Georgetown was just three points off the lead despite the A boat being two points out of last place.

Of course, Behm could not be held down for long. Along with junior crew Carly Chamberlain, he finished in the top 10 in each of the next six races, winning one of them, and add in the consistent Buckingham, Georgetown was in second place and within 17 points of Boston College heading into the final day.

The Hoyas closed the gap to eight after BC’s A boat stumbled to a last place finish in the day’s first race and overtook the top spot in the next competition when Georgetown’s B boat finished first (the A boat was 12th) and Boston College’s two boats recorded 17th and 11th place marks. Behm finished first, second and second in his final three races, causing most to forget about his early struggles. For the regatta, Georgetown was fourth in the A division, ahead of BC and St. Mary’s, its two closest competitors, and just eight points behind leader Brown.

“We had a few bad races that were kind of a struggle,” Behm said. “It was just a matter of us just going out and having fun and sailing our own races and we were able to do that. It ended up in our regatta, the biggest thing was a change in conditions.”

Indeed, a change of conditions on the final day made Rhode Island feel like home. Light air, shifty winds and conditions that Callahan called true “college sailing conditions,” resembled those often found on the Potomac and gave Georgetown a leg up, especially in the A division, Callahan said.

“It was decently windy but not too windy and there was a ton of current which we have a lot of on the Potomac River,” Buckingham said. “If you analyze the current in relation to the wind before you go out into the race you can have an upper-hand on your competitors and I think Chris and I really tried to get a sense of what was going on before the race.”

Indeed, Buckingham had the upperhand throughout. He won the B division by 26 points and at times led by even more.

Buckingham said, almost bashfully: “I guess I did win B pretty comfortable, so I was pretty surprised at the end.”

“I don’t think anyone expected them to win by that much, but they were good enough,” Callahan added.

Still, it was Behm that took home the individual hardware at the end of the week. Behm won the A division at most of the regattas he sailed in this year, including the conference championship and the west regionals. Also nominated for sailor of the year were competitors from BC, Harvard, and St. Mary’s, but after Behm beat all three in the fleet racing championship, the choice was clear.

“Any of the four guys that got nominated deserved it as much as I did,” Behm said. “I was just honored. That’s another thing, words can’t describe the feeling. You’ve been working so hard the whole year and you get recognized with something like that.”

Said Callahan: “It was a good acknowledgement that Chris had had an unbelievable season.”

In large part, Behm can thank Chamberlain for his success. As his crew for much of the last two years, Chamberlain took much of the pressure off of Behm’s shoulders.

“I think the biggest factor is we both trust each other,” Behm said. “When I’m looking one direction and she’s looking the other I don’t need to look in her direction and double check. We’ve gotten to the point where we know what the other is thinking.”

In Behm, Buckingham sees what he could one day become.

“I definitely look up to Chris as a role model and a great sailor,” Buckingham said. “I’m definitely going to try and achieve that for myself in three years. Most of all I want to be successful with the team. I think he was a great team player and with that came college sailor of the year.”

When Georgetown won its first sailing championship in 2001, the decisive victory came on June 4. On hand to watch the triumph was the Arrigan family, long time sailing supporters who had lost their son, Bobby, on that date more than a decade earlier, after his freshman season on the sailing team.

Last week, the Arrigans were on hand once again. And the date of Georgetown’s victory?
June 4.

“Not to be too religious, but something was on our side that day,” Callahan said.