For several days next week, brothers Matt and Nick Budington and about 550 other young mariners will spend hours working the rudders and rigging of their sailboats as they try to carve the perfect path through the Mediterranean Sea.
The 13-year-old twins from Chevy Chase are heading to a Spanish fishing village where they’ll participate in an international regatta with competitors from 29 nations. For all the physical strength each one will need to control a roughly 80-pound sailboat, the key to success will be mental fortitude, Nick explained.
“If you can’t keep a good mentality and can’t focus, you forget everything you know, and you just break down,” he said.
Fortunately, Matt and Nick have had each other’s backs since they started learning to sail a couple years ago in the choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Though their Optimist boats are one-person dinghies, they’ve found ways of helping each other, offering encouragement and advice and looking out for each other during races.
“We’ve always been really close brothers,” said Matt, who’s in eighth grade with his brother at Westland Middle School in Bethesda.
Their mother, Susannah Budington, said she’s not sure the boys are identical twins, but they are close enough in appearance that their sailing coach had to slap a strip of duct tape across one of their life-vests so he could keep them straight. They’re the same height and the same weight, and they have an eerie tendency to finish within a few spots of each other during competitions, Budington said.
Matt Budington, 13, will represent the U.S. in an international regatta in Spain later this month. Courtesy of Susannah Budington.
Their experience with the water started at a young age, from the time their father started taking them out on his sailboat. The duo picked up the sport themselves a couple of years ago, when their parents enrolled them in a sailing camp.
Although they fell in love with sailing right away, the learning process wasn’t always smooth.
Nick remembers one competition so difficult that he almost quit in frustration. It was his first race, and he’d “failed so hard,” dissolving into tears after flipping his dinghy three times.
That’s when his coach stepped in with a sandwich and words of encouragement.
“He said, ‘Just keep trying. Practice makes perfect, and eventually, you’ll get over it.’ That’s what made me start to love racing,” Nick said.
The sport demands dogged persistence, the twins’ mother said.
Budington said her sons spend every day on the Chesapeake Bay during the summertime and don dry suits in November and March so they can sail through the freezing air.
And the regattas are exhausting for competitors and spectators alike.
The racers spend long hours on the water, navigating around a trapezoid to prove their skill. Since so much depends on the ever-shifting wind speed, the contests are not decided by completion time but by a points system, Budington said.
Nick said that at the end of a race day, it’s all he can do to collapse in bed after guzzling down bottle after bottle of water.
The twins have risen through the competitive ranks and have traveled to sail in Canada, Wisconsin, New York and Florida. The qualifying regatta for the upcoming Palamos Optimist Trophy Nations Cup in Spain took place over Thanksgiving in New Orleans, Budington said.
Matt will sail for the 15-member team representing the U.S. in the Palamos event, which will take place from Feb. 16 to 19. Nick is participating as a guest sailor on the Finnish team.
Budington said the twins hope to start sailing together when they grow enough to graduate to a larger boat, and they’re already debating who will crew and who will skipper.
“We think sailing is great for them because it requires you to be strong and athletic, but also smart,” she wrote in an email. “And patient when there’s light wind and BRAVE when it’s blowing 25+.”
She signed one of her emails, “proud mom.”
Nick Budington, 13, said the key to successful sailing is keeping a positive attitude. Photo courtesy of Susanna Budington.
