VERO BEACH — When 16-year-old Nathan Fields started sailing, it was merely a summer hobby, something to occupy his time while his parents renovated their summer home on Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia.
“I couldn’t do anything else in the summers,” he says. “I was too young to work on the cottage. I had to do something. My parents couldn’t watch after me all day.”
So off Nathan, then 8, went to the Lunenburg Yacht Club for sailing lessons.
“I raced once and hated it. I said I’d never do it again,” he recalled. “And here I am going to the World Cup. I really ate my words!”
Nathan, a well-spoken and outgoing teenager from Vero Beach, currently is in Australia with the U.S. Youth Sailing Team preparing to compete in the 2012 World Laser Radial Youth Championship being held in Brisbane now through July 4.
Laser Radials are solo-sailor boats, meant for lightweight sailors, and because all boats are built identically, the competition comes down purely to the skill of the competitors.
In an interview by phone from Newport, R.I., where he was selected among 93 other teenagers to attend an advanced sailing clinic before his Brisbane departure, Nathan shed some light on how he got to this point.
“I get very frustrated when I’m not doing the best I can,” he said of his introduction to sailing. ”I wasn’t good at it. I’m always very competitive.”
But that attitude abruptly changed when Nathan started winning and now he can’t sail enough days of the year to satisfy his longing to be out on the water on his Laser sailboat.
“Whenever I’m on the water it doesn’t matter if it’s not a great racing day, even when it’s not fast or exciting, or when its windy, sporty, blowing 30 knots of wind, it’s like my home. It’s life. It’s all fun for me. Whenever I get on a sailboat, I feel in tune, I feel connected to it.”
Nathan, a senior at Indian River Charter High School, juggles academics with sailing and time with friends.
Describing his social life as “slim to none,” he said: “It’s hard to have a girlfriend when you’re never home.”
While Nova Scotia’s Mahone Bay is where Nathan cemented his love for sailing in the summers, it is in Fort Lauderdale where he advanced his skills, spending each weekend with a host family whose daughter is also a high level sailor, to train with the Lauderdale Yacht Club.
With the Indian River Lagoon so close to his home in Vero, the level of sailing competition just isn’t there, thus necessitating travel to Fort Lauderdale where he races.
Besides, the Intracoastal Waterway is very shallow in most parts.
“You can technically walk across. My dagger board cuts in to the bottom.”
An only-child, Nathan attributes his success thus far to his parents, grandmother and uncles, as well as his host family in Fort Lauderdale, whom he stays with each weekend throughout the year except during the Christmas holiday.
His father, John Fields, is a commercial airline pilot, and is often able to arrange his schedule to be off on weekends so that he can take Nathan to Fort Lauderdale and various regattas.
“It’s a large commitment from the parents,” Marsha Fields, Nathan’s mom, said in an interview from Nova Scotia. “
She’s not nervous about her son sailing unfamiliar waters half way around the world. “These kids have been sailing half their lives. The proficiency I see in them is just astounding. I have a lot of faith in his reading the water, his respect for the ocean, his skills. He is very confident.”
As for Nathan, he’s in self-pinching mode.
“It’s baffling. I never had any idea I’d be doing this.”
So what was the teenager’s frame of mind just two days before heading to Australia?
“I’m excited about everything. But I’m nervous about the competition.”
Some 130 boats are competing.
As for his academic life, Nathan favors science, specifically, physics, and would like to be an engineer or boat captain some day.
He plans to apply to the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Coast Guard.
“At this point in time, I’m aiming for both,” he said. “My goal is to get accepted.”
