Andrew Nutton feels a moral responsibility to share sailing with his community. And his community is now the Vineyard. The 39-year-old British sailing aficionado will officially begin as the new director of programs at Sail Martha’s Vineyard in September.
He spent this summer on the Vineyard working with the organization to start making his mark on the programs.
“Sailing isn’t just a sport, it’s a life skill,” he said in a recent interview with the Gazette.
Mr. Nutton, who ran the sailing department at the Royal Hospital School in England for 10 years, applied to the Vineyard job with little familiarity with the Island. His knowledge of the Vineyard came from the Kennedy aura and a television show his wife, Becky, watched.
“My wife watched Gilmore Girls...and actually they came here once,” he said. That was his knowledge of the Vineyard by name. But his knowledge of the Vineyard by feel relates back to his own childhood. When he visited in December for an interview, he felt welcomed by the winter Island.
“I’m English, bleak weather is nothing new,” he said.
It was in the bleak weather that Mr. Nutton learned to sail. He started in a small boat when he was three years old in his hometown of South Hampton. He continued to be an active sailor throughout secondary school, but then turned to culinary work after school, working as a chef in a gastro-pub in the UK for years. But soon enough sailing called him back to the water.
“I had enough of unsociable hours...three weeks later I was on a train to Shropshire working for a large company, called PGL, a massive children’s holiday company,” he said.
He lived on the Mediterranean for four summers, teaching sailing and racing boats in France and Spain, the Middle East, and in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, a mecca of sailing.
Sailing, Mr. Nutton said, teaches kids independence, communication skills, teamwork, motor skills and problem solving skills.
“Sailing is one of those sports that truly puts children in an adventurous environment,” he said. It certainly did for him. When he was around 15 years old, Mr. Nutton remembers being on a catamaran that capsized, breaking the mainsheet block.
“It was pretty wet and cold and horrible,” he said. “The instructor was probably 25 yards away and just left us to it.”
They fixed it by rigging the block with a lace from the back of Mr. Nutton’s wetsuit boot.
“A child of 10 to be in charge of a boat on their own, they will never have had experience or responsibility like that before,” he said.
As an instructor, he’s fighting the endemic “mum, dad, fix it” mentality with the advice to “just look up.”
“If you’re looking up at a boat when your rigging it and it’s not working, you’ll be able to figure it out,” he said.
Already, Mr. Nutton has acclimated to Vineyard life. He got his clamming license and Mrs. Nutton has given his chowder a stamp of approval. He looks forward to raising his two young sons, two-and-a-half-year-old Griffin and four-month-old Beau, on the Island. He also sees opportunities for Sail Martha’s Vineyard to grow. He plans to expand the fleet, create more opportunities for sailors (non-racing opportunities, a cruising team, qualification programs) and create a pipeline into sailing jobs.
Students from the Royal Hospital School sailing program under Mr. Nutton were able to get their qualifications in instructing, first aide and powerboating.
“They left school in the end of June and bosh they were off, they were working at 18,” he said. “That’s something I would really like to do here with the high school program that’s in place at the moment, that’s fantastic.”
He wants to expand the program into elementary schools, knowing that kids can get hooked as soon as the wind whips through their hair and their adrenaline spikes.
“That’s why people love sailing, because they go fast and they look cool,” he said.
“I was never the greatest sailor in the world, but I thoroughly enjoyed it,” he added.
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