Making Sailing More Accessible At Boston’s Community Boating

Charlie Zechel’s crowning achievement was ensuring that the ‘community’ in Community Boating left no one stuck on shore.

Community Boating Inc., nestled behind the Longfellow Bridge on Boston’s Charles River, was already a robust nonprofit when Charlie Zechel arrived as the adult program director in 1998. “It’s a bit of a funny story,” Charlie says of how he came to Community Boating, or CBI. “I had a conventional career path and was working for a big company, but I wasn’t fulfilled.

But I loved sailing and I loved teaching sailing, so I came home one day and said to my wife, ‘Honey, I’ve quit my job! I’m going to teach sailing in Newport, Rhode Island.’ Silence.”

A New Mission at Community Boating

Charlie taught at J/World sailing school in Newport and from there, “with my wife’s support, I pursued every opportunity I could to find sailing-related employment.” Then, a position opened at CBI, founded nearly a century ago by “a gentleman who came up with the idea of taking kids from the West End of Boston out onto the Charles River,” said Charlie. “At that time, the Charles was a place for people with yachts and university rowers. Having kids who were first-generation immigrants, not affluent at all, coming down the river was like oil and water.”

That founding story inspired the center’s current motto, “Sailing for All,” a mission that CBI has pursued with long-standing, robust scholarship programs to help children and adults of varying socioeconomic backgrounds access the water and qualified boating instruction. But by the time Charlie ascended to executive director, he wanted to do more to make sure CBI really was “for all.”

Building A Sailing Program For People With Disabilities

In 2005, Charlie attended a US Sailing conference and was inspired by several presentations from sailors with disabilities. “I was profoundly impacted by their experiences and what it meant to them to be able to go sailing,” he reflected. “It was immediately clear that Community Boating, with our location, facility, and body of water, had all the boxes checked to host an accessible program.” There’s much distance between ideas and reality, however. It took two years of planning and collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation – which owns the land that CBI occupies – to launch what would become the Universal Access Program.

‘There’s Almost Nothing We Won’t Say Yes To’

“It started very ad hoc,” Charlie explained. “Someone would come in the front door and ask, ‘Can I do this?’ And we’d say, ‘Why not? If you tell us how we can help you get into the boat, we can get you sailing.’”

Everything came in incremental improvements, many of which would’ve been impossible without a few dedicated – and incredibly patient – volunteers. Gigi Ranno was one of them. “Gigi had multiple sclerosis and used a wheelchair, and she volunteered to be my guinea pig. For a whole year, we met at CBI on Wednesdays and experimented with how to get her into the boats.”

Charlie and other CBI staff invented all sorts of modifications to support Gigi and others. They installed dune buggy seats to provide back support, engineered custom keels for improved stability, raised goosenecks so the sailboats’ booms would clear sailors’ heads more easily, and even created a “dashboard” using discarded mast tubes that could slide toward a skipper, allowing steering controls to move to wherever was most convenient. “If someone has the full ability of both arms, they can steer, trim the main, and furl the jib. And we just made all that stuff,” Charlie said.

With time, ingenuity, and the right attitude, the Universal Access Program continued expanding as new participants with varying abilities knocked on CBI’s door. “When I started, we didn’t allow dogs,” Charlie said, somewhat incredulously. “But once we started this program, people showed up with their service dogs and guide dogs, and I thought, well, we have to allow dogs! Now we have life jackets for every size dog.”

CBI has an active blind sailing community and partnerships with the Carol Center for the Blind and Perkins School for the Blind. These days, it doesn’t matter what kind of disability someone might have. “If there’s a person who wants to go sailing, that’s what we do – end of story. There’s almost nothing we won’t say ‘yes’ to.”

Charlie reports that around 200 people sail at CBI through the Universal Access Program during any given summer. He credits part of the program’s success to being an outsider: When he started back in 1998, Charlie was one of only a handful of staff who hadn’t learned to sail at CBI. As anyone familiar with clubs knows, ingrained cultures can run strong. “I came in fresh,” he said, unburdened by preexisting conceptions of what was possible. Clearly, that open-minded attitude worked out pretty well.