Paying it forwards
When the 14-year-old Commodore of the Junior Yacht Club of the North Star Sail Club in Michigan declared that she was going to sail in the America’s Cup and race around the world she was plenty aware of how she must have come across. A few years on and after breaking down the barriers for women in the Volvo Ocean Race (twice), as well as in the America’s Cup (three times) Dawn Riley went on to make an even greater impact – founding the America True Foundation to promote youth participation in sailing and, since 2010, as the ridiculously energetic CEO of the Oakcliff high-performance training centre in Oyster Bay, New York. Craig Davis caught up with her
Starting out Dawn Riley’s sailing career began young. The Rileys were a sailing family in Detroit
50 SEAHORSE
where Dawn’s father had commissioned a 36ft Great Lakes cutter from local designer Frederick Ford. It was built in mahogany to the CCA rule of the time by the Burr Brothers yard in Marion, Massachusetts. Soon after she was launched the family headed off on a one-year cruise through the Erie barge canal down to New York City, up the coast to Maine and then down to the Caribbean islands. During the cruise they passed through
Newport RI during the period of the 1977 America’s Cup. It was a young and very excited Dawn Riley’s first America’s Cup experience; sticking her nose in wherever she could, she was almost run off the dock by Ted Turner and Gary Jobson. She went back to the boat to tell her parents, ‘This is really so cool… I want to do this.’ Little did she know that she would cross paths with Gary Jobson 15 years later with Bill Koch and America3
. High school doubled up with extra-
curricular activity as a boat captain and occasional sailmaker. ‘After high school I
went to Michigan State and was soon captain of the sailing team. But back in Detroit I’d also watched a documentary about the first Whitbread. OK, I was, like, I want to do that too.’ Next came the fateful encounter with
Tracy Edwards. ‘By this time I was running boats on the east coast. My good friend Cynthia Goss (later to be Dawn’s biogra- pher) had heard about what Tracy was try- ing to do, assembling an all-woman team for the 1989 Whitbread. She says, “You want to do the Whitbread, right. You should do it with them.” But I was like, no, I want to sail with the boys. Obviously I ended up doing it with them anyway!’ So a Whitbread Round the World Race
on the back of what offshore experience, exactly…? ‘Actually, by now I had done a lot of
stuff, but not Southern Ocean-type stuff! I was running boats for the SORC. I’d done the SORC back at that time, the round South Florida races. I delivered boats up and down the east coast and the
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