By Donovan Webster | June/July 2009 | 

The Inn Place to Sail

A father and son get schooled at the Tides Inn on the Chesapeake Bay 

The silence is always a shock. on that first day sailing every year, there’s a moment when the sheets fill, the lines creak tight, and the boat lurches forcefully and almost mutely forward with the wind. And yet—each year—the thought still arrives: Sailing is so darned quiet.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a Hobie Cat in Arkansas, an oceangoing yacht out of Tortola, or, like today, a 30-foot racing day-sailor on the Chesapeake Bay. Each time, as wind gets purchase on the sheets and begins to push us along, it’s amazing.

“I think we should let a little sail out,” our instructor Arabella is saying to my son, James, sixteen, who sits at the tiller, steering us toward the bay’s mouth. “You’re fighting to steer a little too hard. If the boat is designed well, and has properly sized sails, you shouldn’t have to fight the tiller at all.”

James—who has officially been a sailor for forty-five minutes—reaches authoritatively toward a rubberized bit that clasps the mainsail line. He pops the rope free and lets some out. Within seconds, the boat rights a bit without losing speed and sails more easily. Then he bites the line back down.

“That’s it,” Arabella is saying. “Do you feel that? Can you feel the difference?”

James nods and smiles. He looks slightly starboard: downwind and to our south. Out that way, where the Chesapeake opens into the Atlantic Ocean, there is only horizon: blue on blue. It’s a big world out there.

Sail Away
At some point in life, everyone should go to sailing school. If only because it gets you outdoors while also forcing you to interact with nature as you learn from it. In coming to know sailing, and getting to sail in the bargain, you remind yourself that you can cut your own individual route across the world.

And while there are some good sailing schools around—in Annapolis and Fort Myers and Nassau and St. Barts—few approach the sumptuous yet professional pleasures of the Premier Sailing School at the Tides Inn, in Irvington, Virginia. Established in 1998, the school is overseen by its two Irish owners, Phil and Arabella Denvir, who have been sailing all their lives. Before fetching up at the Tides, they owned a sailing school on rocky, gorgeous Malta, in the Mediterranean. At Premier Sailing, you can learn to sail anything from dinghies like Sunfish and Lasers to 24-, 30-, and 36-foot “big boats.”

“But the main point,” Arabella confides as James continues at the tiller on this afternoon, “is always the same: Get out on the water, get some understanding of how sailing works, and enjoy it.”

With classes that can comprise two-hour afternoon knock-arounds or full-on five-day race training shakedowns, Premier Sailing also happens to be the only accredited sailing school associated with a luxury hotel on the East Coast.

“We’re the only one,” says Peter Regan, director of marketing at the Tides, a 106-room all-amenities resort, originally built in 1947 and recently refurbished to the tune of $18 million. As Regan is saying this, we’re having a sunset refreshment on the hotel’s peaceful bay-facing brick patio, sailboats filling the sixty-slip marina. He stares out across the thick lawn in the foreground: past the precisely shorn rectangle of the croquet pitch to our right (where the inn regularly hosts Croquet and Chardonnay weekends) and onto the shimmer of the Chesapeake beyond.

Between where we sit and the bay, a large swimming pool area and the glass-walled Pool Grille are tucked into a hillside below. James has already headed back to the room. Later, we’ll eat crab cakes and a steak in the hotel’s formal East Room (gentlemen, please remember to wear a jacket) as we watch day become night across a scrim of cloudless electric-blue sky.