More than 700 youth sailors are set to arrive in Coconut Grove for the Orange Bowl International Youth Regatta — the Western Hemisphere’s largest such event — where they will weave through the increasingly crowded waters of Biscayne Bay in pursuit of a coveted Orange Bowl championship ring.
From Dec. 26–30, six classes of boats will race across four courses in an event hosted by Coral Reef Yacht Club since 1946 — a point of pride for Miami’s sailing community and a rite of passage for young sailors from around the world.
This year, however, the regatta unfolds under a shadow. Just months ago, three girls were killed and two others seriously injured in two separate youth sailing-related accidents in Biscayne Bay — tragedies that shook Coconut Grove’s tight-knit sailing world and rattled parents’ confidence in Biscayne Bay as a safe place to send their children.
The back-to-back incidents — one involving a Coconut Grove Sailing Club summer camp, the other a Miami Yacht Club program — raised uncomfortable questions: How could two long-standing programs experience catastrophic accidents within weeks of each other? Has youth sailing become more dangerous, or has the bay around it changed?
As the Orange Bowl event approaches, sailors, parents and coaches are grappling with those questions — weighing the growing congestion and horsepower on Biscayne Bay against decades of safety records, training standards and new precautions put in place since the summer’s tragedies.
READ MORE: Coming of age on Biscayne Bay: Young sailors making their mark on the world stage
On July 10, an 11-year-old girl’s right leg was nearly amputated by a boat propeller while swimming during a Coconut Grove Sailing Club summer camp.
Just a few weeks later, a barge collided with a Miami Yacht Club sailboat, killing three girls, aged seven, 10 and 13. Another girl was seriously injured.
Whether the twin incidents were rare accidents or the result of mounting pressures — a booming youth sailing scene, increasingly crowded waterways and questions about supervision — remains unsettled within the sailing community.
Mark Kamilar, a longtime fixture in Coconut Grove’s sailing community and a board member of the U.S. Sailing Center Miami, calls last summer’s youth sailing accidents a “catastrophe” — but not evidence that the sport itself has become unsafe.
“If you look at the number of kids that we put on the water in this area over the years that I’ve been involved in it, and the few accidents that there have been, it’s worked out very well,” Kamilar said.
Kamilar, who also served a stint as commodore of Coral Reef Yacht Club, argues that sailing’s constant reassessment of training and safety protocols — particularly in the wake of serious incidents — has helped keep the sport remarkably low-risk despite increasingly crowded waterways.
But to Michiel “Monkey” Johan van de Kreeke, a Grove resident and lifelong sailor, the summer’s tragedies were no fluke.
“It was an accident waiting to happen,” he said.
Van de Kreeke — a familiar presence among sailors who spend their days tacking off Coconut Grove’s shoreline — said concerns about Biscayne Bay’s growing congestion had been building for years.
“We’d been lucky until this summer,” he said.
In his view, the problem is straightforward: increasingly overcrowded waterways filled with boats that are bigger, faster and more powerful, driven by a boating culture that has shifted toward high-speed recreation and party cruising.
“It’s like playing Frogger,” he said, invoking the 1980s arcade game.
Kamilar won’t dispute the risk. Years ago, he explained that he and others resorted to training young sailors in three-foot-deep waters, in hopes that large boats would not be able to reach them.
To be sure, Miami’s sailing and boating veterans all agree, Biscayne Bay is home to far more powerboats with far bigger engines than decades past.
And perhaps not unexpectedly, tragedy strikes. In May 2024, a 15-year-old Ransom Everglades student was killed after being struck by a 42-foot powerboat while wakeboarding near Key Biscayne. And just over a month ago, in the same area, a 63-year-old man was killed following the collision of two 34-foot powerboats.
“I don’t think [the recent tragedies] is a safety issue as far as sailing, it’s a safety issue in general for boating,” said Mike Brill, a lifelong sailor whose son now sails competitively.
Because of that risk, renewed scrutiny has fallen on the role — and training — of youth sailing coaches and counselors, many of whom are only a few years older than the children they instruct and supervise.
In the lawsuit stemming from the Coconut Grove Sailing Club incident, each of the three counselors on duty that day — ages 19 to 21 — has been named. Justin Shapiro, the attorney representing the Viteri family, has argued that college-aged counselors lack the experience necessary to safely oversee water-based camps.
Not everyone agrees. Olivia Drulard, a product of Miami’s youth sailing scene who now sails competitively for Dartmouth College, has also worked as a youth coach, at Paradise Sailing, a nonprofit sailing program running out of Coconut Grove’s U.S. Sailing Center.
“Even as a coach at 18 years old, you still have so many hours that you’ve spent in these different scenarios that I feel it’s just such a low probability [of an accident],” Drulard said.
As for her own experience as a youth sailor in Miami? “I always did feel really safe,” Drulard said. “You grow up on the water with coaches who spend so much time on the water. They know what they’re doing.”
And that’s by design, Kamilar insists.
“We test our counselors to make sure they can operate in difficult conditions,” Kamilar said. “We talk about safety all the time. We change equipment. We made up our own equipment to be safer than what was made by the manufacturer.”
Accidents like those of the summer only make safety and training protocols more rigorous.
As an example, Kamilar recalls the tragic death in 2011 of a 14-year-old boy in Maryland after being trapped inside an overturned sailboat. The incident inspired Kamilar to devise new safety protocols – shared with counselors at Coral Reef Yacht Club and other local programs – to rescue trapped sailors.
This summer’s tragedies have spawned similar reevaluations and reinventions.
“Do we need to make changes? Are these programs well run?” Kamilar said. “Is this a situation where it is safe? Are there more boats on the water or more powerful engines? Is anything changing dramatically, more recently, that causes more accidents?”
Among the proposals discussed within the sailing community are moving events farther south to less-trafficked waters and expanding — or requiring — the use on safety boats of propeller guards, devices designed to shield rotating blades.
While no major new safety protocols or interventions are in place for this year’s Orange Bowl regatta, sailors for the first time will be required to wear a properly fitted U.S. Coast Guard-approved life vests, a rule that was previously not enforced for international competitors.
Event organizers are also calling on parents watching from spectator boats to serve as an extra set of eyes, staying alert to rogue powerboats and other safety threats.
“We have an additional attention to detail in our safety this year,” said Vince Menditto, chairman of this year’s regatta.
Van de Kreeke applauds the move: “You can never have enough safety boats out there and typically there’s only one or two. They can’t be everywhere at once.”
Another piece of the safety calculus, many parents and youth sailing administrators argue, lies with the sailors themselves, trained from an early age to anticipate danger — chiefly other boats and weather — and to avoid it.
Maykel Alonso is the coach of Coral Reef Yacht Club’s Green Fleet Team, the beginner age group for competitive sailors, for children as young as eight. He says from the start, children are taught to respect the unexpected: “Safety for us is paramount,” said Alonso. “We always go to the foundation and the basics on the water. One never underestimates any situation.”
Alonso, Kamilar and others within Miami’s close-knit sailing world say they’ve noticed no drop-off in numbers, or enthusiasm, for youth sailing programs and competition.
And aside from club-based youth sailing, high school sailing programs in the area, by all accounts, remain in growth mode for a sport that is often billed as a ticket to elite college admission.
Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart and Immaculata-La Salle did not respond to requests for comment regarding their sailing programs, and Ransom Everglades declined to answer questions, though insiders say each school is working to revamp safety protocols.
Drulard, herself a Ransom Everglades graduate who sailed competitively at the school, said the rewards justify the risks. “It’s been amazing for me growing up sailing in Miami,” she said. “If you can give your child that opportunity, I’d say take it every time.”
This story was originally published in the Coconut Grove Spotlight, a WLRN News partner.
