Peter MacDougal

Gregg Ferguson, during a race in Kingston, Ontario, believes people from the Prairies feel at home on large bodies of water

Visit the Glenmore Reservoir on a Wednesday summer evening, and you’ll see over a hundred trim, white triangular sails: a veritable fleet of boats cruising and racing over the water, like a misplaced scene from a Gulf Island or Halifax postcard. It’s club night for the Glenmore Sailing Club, and according to the club’s past commodore, Gregg Ferguson, this is just the tip of the mast for the city’s unexpectedly rich sailing culture.

“Probably the biggest thing I didn’t understand was how large a sailing community there is in Calgary,” says Ferguson, recalling when he got involved in the sport 10 years ago. “For a landlocked place, it’s shocking.”

Indeed, Calgary boasts two longstanding and extremely active sailing clubs at the Glenmore Reservoir and Lake Chestermere. Astoundingly, the city’s sailing schools have the second highest number of graduates per year in North America, beating out places like Newport, North Carolina and Florida. And, notes Ferguson, if you take a stroll along some of the West Coast marinas and look at the names and cities painted on the sterns of boats, there is an overwhelming Prairie connection. “It’s wild. Probably 80 to 90 per cent of [the large charter company] fleets are owned by, chartered out and managed by Calgarians or people from Alberta. It’s quite unbelievable,” says Ferguson.

An avid small-boat sail racer, Ferguson got involved when a friend in graduate school “conned” him into signing up. A speed enthusiast who raced cars in his younger days, Ferguson quickly found sailing indulged his thrill-seeking desires. He also discovered that there was plenty of local competition. He began racing his fireball-class sailboat (a high-performance, two-person sailing dinghy with a simple design) on club nights at Glenmore and Chestermere, and before long was competing in various regattas run by sailing clubs throughout the province. Then it was off to national competitions where Ferguson began scoring top-three finishes. Nowadays, he competes at the sport’s top level; in 2006, he placed 17th at the Fireball World Championships in Esquimalt.

The graying 49-year-old, who runs an architecture design firm out of Inglewood, has a youthful enthusiasm that lights up his demeanour whenever he talks about his favourite pastime. “It’s a cool thing. You can do this extreme sport that takes no gasoline and no internal combustion engine and go fast enough to scare the living daylights out of you,” he says.

The Prairies boast some of Canada’s best competitive sailors, including a variety of past and current Olympians, as well as many of the country’s top coaches and teachers. Still, this counterintuitive Prairie mastery of the seas is something of a well-kept secret, as demonstrated when Ferguson and four other Prairie sailing-mates competed in the 2000 Vic-to-Maui, a gruelling 2,308-nautical-mile (3,770-kilometre) offshore sailing race from Victoria, B.C. to Lahaina, Hawaii. They entered with a 11-metre boat called the Prairie Voyager and endured quizzical frowns and good-natured jibes as their coastal brethren asked them if they had portaged the boat over the Rockies and sailed it down the Fraser River.

“A lot of people must have thought, oh, these are the rubes from the Prairies,” says Ferguson with a smile. Soon, however, the Prairie voyagers were the ones laughing as they moved to the head of the pack. “We were pretty competitive; for the first eight days we were in and out of the top three places. People quit laughing.” Unfortunately, Prairie sailing skill couldn’t overcome bad luck; their rudder broke 1,100 nautical miles (2,035 kilometres) out of Hawaii, ending their dream of winning one of long-distance sailing’s coveted prizes.

Ferguson attributes the popularity of sailing in Alberta to a number of factors. It may partly be a legacy of the Second World War, when many Albertans enlisted into the Canadian Navy. “Maybe it’s because of Southern Alberta’s lack of water that people really gravitate to activities on the water,” adds Ferguson, who also theorizes that people from the Prairies are probably more comfortable in large, open spaces and so don’t have a fear of being stuck out on large bodies of water.

There’s also the fact that Alberta’s prosperity means there are a lot of people with the money to keep boats on the coast. However, Ferguson hastens to add that sailing is an accessible and affordable sport, especially if one is a “little boat guy” like himself. It’s as cheap as lessons through the City of Calgary’s Glenmore sailing school (around $200), or you can simply show up on a club night — Ferguson says there are often boats looking for crew, and that people in the community are always willing to help newcomers.

“Sailing has this rap of being an elitist, snobby sport. Yeah, there are a couple of clubs like that in North America that’ll go unmentioned. But on the whole, it’s one of the most open, welcoming communities I’ve ever found.”

For info on the Glenmore Sailing Club visit www.glenmoresailingclub.com; for the Calgary Yacht Club at Lake Chestermere, visit www.cyc.ab.ca. Do a search on www.calgary.ca to find out more about the city-run Glenmore Sailing school.

HOME SWEET SAIL

For those looking for a great sailing experience in Alberta, sail racer Gregg Ferguson recommends:

• Lake Newell: “It’s like sailing on the moon. The water is beautiful.”

• Lake Wabamun: “Fantastic clubs and club houses — it’s where everyone in the province really gets together.

• St. Mary Reservoir: “When it blows there, there’s nothing else like it in the province.”

• The Glenmore Reservoir: “The conditions are so tricky — it’s a fantastic breeding ground for great racers.”