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West End Racing Club

    COME ABOUT

    Winds of Change Come to West End Racing Children’s Community Sailing

    Grounded in its past, WERCCS looks to the future

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Susan Avellar is the first to arrive at the West End Racing Children’s Community Sailing (WERCCS) clubhouse around 8:30 on a foggy Monday morning. Ms. Avellar, as she has been fondly known by members for more than 30 years, climbs the stairs amid colorful life jackets and ropes with her dog, Andes.

    For a moment, there’s only the sound of the sand-covered floorboards and Andes settling into her spot under the balcony table — the clubhouse is perhaps the quietest it will be all day.

    “It has its own mystique,” says Avellar, 77, of the building and the program it is home to.

    Susan Avellar says the sailing clubhouse feels like home. (Photos by Elizabeth G. Brooke)

    WERCCS, renamed from the West End Racing Club in 2017, has taught local kids ages 8 to 14 knot tying, sailing, racing, and more during the summer for over 70 years. The program is a bargain: $100 per child for the entire summer; additional children in the same family pay $50. WERCCS enrolls 140 to 160 kids annually, according to its website.

    Now, it’s approaching a period of transition.

    A cohort of younger instructors like Sara Akbari, 32, and Elias Brode, 23, surround Avellar and her fellow lead instructor, Dan Hoeflinger, who has also been teaching at the clubhouse for more than three decades. Avellar acknowledges that she’s “lived a long time” but says she plans to keep teaching as long as she’s physically able.

    Olivia Dutra, a sailing trainer, heads out into the harbor with Nora Hay and Wila Parkington.

    Change is inevitable, but the process is gradual. Akbari says that Avellar and Hoeflinger have been working to build capacity for whatever lies ahead. That includes ceding some responsibilities: Akbari registered some kids this summer for the first time. Hoeflinger has been teaching volunteers to fix up items around the clubhouse.

    Still, Akbari says she doesn’t want to imagine a world without Avellar at WERCCS, who along with Hoeflinger makes the program what it is.

    Akbari’s experience at the clubhouse began 25 years ago when she spent a week sailing during a childhood vacation in Provincetown. Her family began spending whole summers on the Outer Cape soon after, and Akbari spent that time with her siblings at WERCCS.

    She worked seven years for the program before taking a decade-long hiatus. She describes being lured back by Avellar a couple of years ago, although that enticement may have been more of a gentle demand.

    “Coming back was an easy decision,” says Akbari, who teaches in Boston during the school year. “I was appreciated for being bossy,” she adds with a laugh.

    “It gave her lifelong teaching skills,” Avellar says.

    Children are taught to tie classic sailors’ knots like the cleat.

    Brode, who is from Uppsala, Sweden, has been coming to Provincetown for the summer for more than 10 years. His grandmother retired on the Cape, and he started coming to the sailing club because of his cousins.

    “I very quickly fell in love with the place,” Brode says. Coming to Provincetown and the sailing club was like “another world.” The program has been the foundation for all his relationships in the area, he says.

    “It’s been a natural transition from a kid to a skipper to a volunteer and then a counselor,” he says. “I’d love to come back for as long as I can.”

    A potential threat to WERCCS’s future comes from just outside its doors. The waterfront property, at 83 Commercial St. in the West End, is vulnerable to rising sea levels. According to Avellar, the property has flooded several times over the past few years. She hopes one day to raise the building to protect it, although there are no concrete plans to do so yet.

    “We have some big things to deal with in the future for this program to be able to continue,” Avellar says.

    But she remains confident about whatever comes next.

    “Somebody will be here, and somebody will sustain the program and see it forward,” Avellar says. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

    Left to right, top to bottom: Kupala Avellar, Aaron Avellar, Mila Stojiljkovic, Olivia Francis, Kaysen Woznac, Wila Parkington, Nora Hay, Ryan Fenton-Hilt, Kevin Wosznac, and Maddy Potenza.

    Inside the clubhouse, the program continues to be built on peer teaching, which dates back to its initial days when children informally gathered on “Flyer’s Beach” at program founder Francis Santos’s boatyard.

    “When you learned how to sail, if you wanted to sail again, you had to teach somebody else how to do it,” Avellar says.

    The fruits of that legacy are clear today. On Tuesday and Thursday sailboat races, children who have passed their skipper’s test and demonstrated they can handle the boat on their own pick another less experienced child to form their crew.

    “It’s really fun when people trust me,” says Maddie Gunn, 14, who became a skipper last summer.

    At one recent race, the young sailors rounded three marks — red flags weighed down by old sand-filled detergent jugs. The pairs tacked and jibed while dodging moored boats in Provincetown’s protected cove.

    Junior skippers learn on the nearly 14-foot Sunfish before taking on more complex vessels.

    Ryan Fenton-Hilt, 13, belts out a song while passing by the safety boat on one of her laps. She yells as she crosses the invisible finish line in second place in the senior skipper division. The moment was a small indication of her competitiveness, but like many WERCCS students, she wasn’t always this passionate.

    “I didn’t really like sailing at all,” Fenton-Hilt says, describing her fearful initial experience with the program. “I just sat up here and did nothing,” she says from the building’s balcony. But a day of practice later, she changed her mind and became a skipper.

    Last summer, Fenton-Hilt won the first-place award for junior skipper races. The trophy sits on the desk by her bed. She wants to become a sailing trainer, WERCCS’s version of a counselor, when she’s older. If she does, she will join the ranks of those who just can’t seem to leave the storied West End institution behind.

    AMICUS CURIAE

    Town and Sailing Club Weigh In on Sal’s Place Case

    A conflict between neighbors focuses on intertidal property rights

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The Colonial Ordinances of 1641-1647 are getting a lot of attention lately, both statewide and in the West End, where Sal’s Place has been serving diners on the beach behind its neighbor’s property since 2020.

    Sal’s owner says she is exercising her right to use the intertidal land behind 101 Commercial St. The town’s zoning board of appeals granted her permission to do so in 2020 to provide safe seating during the pandemic.

    Owner Siobhan Carew and her daughter, Michela Carew-Murphy, are in a drawn out legal tangle with the neighbor, Gregory Connors, who sued Sal’s Place in 2016 over the use of an easement between the properties and other issues.

    This summer, Land Court Judge Michael Vhay issued an injunction barring Sal’s from using the beach behind Connors’s property. When the restaurant continued to seat customers there, Vhay found Carew in comtempt of court and levied fines. Vhay also ordered Carew to pay Connors’s legal fees.

    But the battle is not over. On Sept. 9, an attorney working pro bono for the West End Racing Children’s Community Sailing club filed an amicus curiae, or friend of the court, brief arguing that the intertidal zone is not Connors’s property but belongs to the commonwealth. Town counsel Amy Kwesell filed a similar amicus curiae brief on Sept. 16.

    Dinner is served on the beach by Sal’s Place on Monday, Sept. 20. (Photo K.C. Myers)

    Both Kwesell and attorney Karl Buch, who represents the sailing club and has a home on Point Street, pointed to Provincetown’s well-established relationship to those Colonial Ordinances.

    While private property ownership in Massachusetts generally extends to the mean low water line, an exception was made for the area west of Howland Street in Provincetown. Here, private property extends only to the mean high water line, and the intertidal area is owned by the state.

    This policy goes back to the founding of the Outer Cape towns, when the area east of Howland Street was part of Truro. The area to the west was known as the Province Lands. When Provincetown became a town in 1727, “the charter did not provide the new town with authority to grant land to its settlers … So, west of Howland Street, is Commonwealth tidelands,” according to the town’s website.

    Carew’s attorney, Anthony Panebianco, tried to connect this history with the case in previous hearings. But Judge Vhay said the evidence was neither sufficient nor relevant. His concern was that the Carews had been violating his injunction all summer.

    Nonetheless, the town and the West End Racing Club both want the judge to address Provincetown’s unique intertidal situation.

    “The public’s ability to utilize the intertidal area in front of 83 Commercial Street is key to the success of the [West End Racing Club’s] program, and the general welfare of those in the community,” stated Buch in court documents.

    The Provincetown ZBA is also a defendant, because it granted the beach seating permit in 2020. Until now, the town has largely stayed out of the dispute. “But due to the May 13 decision, subsequent injunctions, and rulings on contempt, the board and town now have an interest in ensuring that ownership of the intertidal zone is fully adjudicated because of the potential adverse effects of the current ruling to the town and its residents,” wrote Kwesell.

    None of the attorneys would comment for this article.

    The ability to swim and stroll on the bay would be greatly curtailed if Provincetown’s intertidal lands are found to be private property. But Vhay has not ruled on that matter, nor will he. Anything that would change the interpretation of land ownership in a precedent setting way would have to come from an appeals court, said Michael Fee, a Truro resident and attorney with Pierce & Mandell.

    “You have to understand the way Land Court works,” said Fee. Vhay, he said, was asked to rule on a specific question based on the evidence before him. He ruled that the “defendants have not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their claims nor a substantial risk of irreparable harm in the absence of a preliminary injunction that outweighs any similar risk of harm to the plaintiff.”

    When Panebianco tried to call Town Manager Alex Morse to testify in the contempt of court trial on Aug. 3, Vhay said Morse’s testimony was not relevant.

    “The Carew Defendants may not re-litigate at the upcoming contempt trial the issue of who owns the intertidal zone,” Vhay stated.

    The matter before Vhay now is simply how much Carew must pay Alan Lipkind, Connors’s attorney, who has submitted a bill for $88,820. Lipkind called the amicus brief by the sailing club “frivolous” and now seeks attorney fees from the club as well, according to court documents.

    The question posed by the town and the sailing club would be properly handled in an appeals court once a final decision has been rendered in Land Court, Fee said.

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