by Susie Klein, Wayland Post Contributor
Longtime Wayland residents Susie Klein, 68, and Jim Hammitt, 69, bested a fleet of 21 boats to win the Sandpiper Class National Championship Regatta sailed on Duxbury Bay in August.
The couple was then selected by U.S. Sailing, the sport’s governing body, to race in the 50th annual edition of the Championship of Champions, a regatta that pits 20 national or world champions of various one-design class sailboats against each other in a different locale and in different one-design class sailboats each year. Like most sailing competitions, the Championship of Champions has no age, weight, or gender classes. Susie was the only female skipper among the 20 two-person crews, and she and Jim were among the oldest competitors, racing against sailors half their age.
This year, the Championship of Champions was sailed September 10-13 on Buzzards Bay in Sandpipers, a 15-foot fiberglass dinghy with a single sail. They are modeled after the shallow, wide-bodied catboats used by oystermen and other water folk in the 19th century.
Susie and Jim were also the lightest crew in combined weight — a disadvantage with Buzzards Bay’s strong breezes and choppy waters. They finished 15th out of 20 of the top small-boat sailors in the U.S.
The couple attended both events with extensive experience in sailboat racing. In the 1970s, Susie was an All-American member of the UC Berkeley Sailing Team, and Jim was named All-American for Harvard. Due to career and family responsibilities, the couple stepped away from competitive sailing for three decades and took up cruising. In 2005-06, they sailed their 40-foot sailboat with their then-teenage sons, Rob and Galen Hammitt, from Cape Cod across the Atlantic and Mediterranean to Turkey.
In 2021 and 2023, Jim won overall or in class in the arduous Bermuda 1-2 Regatta, an event that involves sailing alone 650 miles from Newport to Bermuda and then back with one crew member. In 2022, he won class in the doublehanded division of the famed Newport-Bermuda Race, one of yachting’s longest-running and most prestigious offshore races.
— Susie Klein, Wayland Post Contributor
