After many years of record breaking offshore competition, Chesapeake sailor Ryan Breymaier returns home to the Bay to compete in the Annapolis to Newport Race.
This year’s Annapolis-Newport Race (A2N) will bring home an old Chesapeake hand who has gone on to bigger things. Ryan Breymaier, the six-foot-three, blue-eyed St. Mary’s College grad who used to crash in the attic of J/35 skipper Jimmy Sagerholm’s place in Annapolis, returns aboard one of the favorites to take line honors in the 450-mile classic.
Breymaier worked over the winter in Spain refitting the old Volvo 70 “Camper” for this year’s racing season. He and the boat, now named Warrior, will arrive for the A2N fresh from the Voile de St. Barth’s Regatta and the Antigua-Bermuda Race. The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Sailing Foundation’s yacht will be used for training ill and injured warriors as well as raising awareness for warrior programs.
Rehabbing and racing Warrior is just another in a string of high-profile projects for Breymaier, 41, who grew up in Damascus, MD, and quit lacrosse when he discovered sailing as a freshman at St. Mary’s. After graduating, he took a brief shot at corporate life and then found his way to Annapolis and got a job rigging sailboats. He was so good that he wound up a few years later in Brittany, France, where shorthanded offshore racing is practically the native sport.
He studied the game and climbed the ranks, becoming a protégé of the French sailing superstar Roland Jourdain. That connection led to a berth aboard the Open 60 Neutrogena in the 2011 Barcelona World Race (doublehanded ‘round the world), where he finished fifth with German co-skipper Boris Herrmann.
In the six years since that breakthrough he’s been busy. He helped set the speed record for the New York-San Francisco passage around Cape Horn as watch leader on the 70-footer Maserati, completing the 13,000-mile passage in 47 days and cutting 10 days off the old record. He and ex-America’s Cup sailor John Sangmeister tried for the Transpac Race 2013 record from California to Hawaii on a 70-foot trimaran but came up just short. “Three months of nonstop work, and we missed the record by an hour.”
He was also the first American to win an IMOCA race in 2014 by winning the New York to Barcelona race as co-skipper on Hugo Boss. Then in 2015, as co-skipper on the 105-foot trimaran Lending Club 2, he helped set a record of 23 hours for a Newport-to-Bermuda passage, as well as setting world records for Cowes to Dinard and the outright Transpac.
Breymaier is sought after these days as much for his rigging and managerial skills as for his sailing talents, and generally he’s involved in getting boats ready long before they go racing. That leads to a nomadic lifestyle, and when asked where he and wife Nicola and their two baby girls, Rosemary and Ruby, are living, his answer is simple. “We don’t really have a home.”
“Most of our stuff is in France in various people’s garages and basements, and we’re pretty sure we’ll be going back there to live when we get settled,” he says. But for the time being, they go where the work is.
He has one big goal remaining, and that’s to tackle the biggest challenge of all in ocean racing, the quadrennial Vendée-Globe singlehanded ‘round-the-world Race. “That’s been the goal since Barcelona, and it’s not easy,” he said. He came close to finding sponsorship for 2016-17, but the deal fell through. Now he’s devoting much of his energy to cracking the financial barriers to make the next edition in 2020.
It is by all accounts the hardest sailing event in the world—three to four months alone, bashing nonstop through whatever horrible conditions arise, down the Atlantic from France to the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa; then east across the Southern Ocean in the Roaring 40s and Furious 50s, leaving Australia and New Zealand on the left and Antarctica on the right; then 6500 miles across the South Pacific to stormy Cape Horn and back up the Atlantic to France.
Breymaier knows the route, having done it on Neutrogena. And he knows from bitter experience that the challenges at sea when things break and the weather deteriorates are modest compared to the challenges of getting sponsorship in time to prepare a good boat.
Only one American was among the 29 sailors at the starting line for the 2016-17 Vendée Globe, 66-year-old Rich Wilson, who competed for the second time and finished a respectable 13th. Breymaier hopes to do better, but will need a timely sponsor to put together a fully competitive entry. So if you see him here in June, prepare yourself for a pitch.
Sadly, with a draft of 17 feet with the canting keel down, Warrior can’t tie up in Annapolis before the race. She’ll be at the Baltimore Marine Center, where Breymaier and boat skipper Jan Majer, another Annapolis native with an impressive ocean racing resume, will be putting the final touches on before the gun sounds.
by Angus Phillips
