When Annie Voss PZ ’26 initially received the email that told her she had secured a spot to 5C Sailing Club’s first outing of the spring semester, she was more than a little hesitant about going. With Southern California in the midst of a winter storm, she said it was much colder and wetter than she would have liked. Still, although the weather was not ideal, Voss ultimately decided to go.
“I figured, what the hell,” she said. “I’m never gonna get to go sailing for free again in my life.”
Unfortunately, as Voss and her fellow attendees quickly learned, the best things in life are not always free.
On Sunday, Feb. 4, nine members of 5C Sailing Club were involved in a shipwreck on a 40-foot sailing boat off the coast of Long Beach, leaving them temporarily stranded. They were rescued soon afterwards with no reported injuries.
Like many of the members in 5C Sailing Club, Voss had no previous experience with sailing; Sunday’s outing was her first. According to Reese Elana Ger SC ’24, the club’s president, 5C Sailing welcomes members like these. She noted the historically exclusive nature of the sport and emphasized how the club tries to change that narrative.
“The goal of this is to give the opportunity of sailing to people who’ve never ever had the chance and to do that all for free,” Ger, who was not present at the wreck, said. “Every single trip we run is completely free, because sailing has so many barriers.”
The Feb. 4 outing was no different. At around 10 a.m., nine students from 5C Sailing arrived at the Long Beach Yacht Club, where they had been told by a student event organizer to meet. According to many of the students in attendance, little else was known about the outing ahead of time.
“Even before the wreck happened, I was already thinking, ‘This is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done,’” Voss said. “We show[ed] up at the Long Beach Yacht Club … Then, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be racing.’ I didn’t know we were gonna be racing.”
Michael Houk CM ’26, another student present at the wreck, expressed a similar feeling of surprise upon arrival.
“Not a lot of information was sent out,” he said. “No one knew it was a race … The only information we got was, ‘come here at this time and we’re not getting you lunch.’”
As Ger later clarified, Sunday’s outing was on a boat that was registered for one race in a series of races known as the 2024 Two Gates Pursuit Series and hosted by the Long Beach Yacht Club.
5C Sailing had been invited onto one of the competing boats, specifically one owned by the previous CEO of LaserFiche, a private technology company based in Long Beach that is now run by Harvey Mudd College alumnus Karl Chan HM ’89.
According to Ger, the club has a long history with this particular boat and its crew, which consists largely of LaserFiche employees. She estimated that 5C Sailing has been on over ten trips with them in the past, all of them free for the club.
In addition to the nine 5C Sailing members present at Sunday’s outing were ten other individuals, including the boat’s crew. Ger emphasized that, while only a third of the 5C students in attendance had been sailing before, there were plenty of experienced people on the boat to safely operate it.
“I think you can sail this boat with like, three people,” she said. “They had 19, which is a totally safe number to have on this boat — it’s just that 16 of them don’t really have to do very much. So our students were just there to enjoy the race.”
According to the students present at the wreck, the boat was entirely operated by the original crew during the race. Ger described the members of the crew as highly experienced sailors who she trusted in taking the students out on the water.
“Especially Bob, the captain of the boat,” she said. “He has over forty years of experience — he practically lives on that boat. It’s his full-time job to maintain it.”
Brian McKeever, another member of the crew who has years of experience, explained that he’s been sailing on this particular boat for the past seven or eight years, ever since it was first purchased back in 2016.
With such a highly experienced crew on deck, the students were not expected to operate the boat during the race. However, as some of them later explained, they were asked to run back and forth across the boat several times in a maneuver that McKeever referred to as “tacking.”
“We were not really sailing at all,” Houk said. “We were just like counterweights.”
Zoe Feuer CM ’26, one of the three students present who had previous sailing experience, described the difficulty of the situation.
“There were a couple of times when we had to switch sides of the boat where I actually could have fallen off,” she said. “People had to grab my legs because I’m like, so physically inept.”
Voss explained that this was when she first started to get scared.
“I personally felt very uncomfortable doing it, having not had any training or experience or life jacket,” she said. “I was like, ‘this is unsafe.’”
As the race progressed, students described the weather conditions as quickly worsening. While these conditions were, to some degree, expected — around half of the boats initially enrolled in the race had dropped out, some students speculated because of the weather — students explained that they hadn’t expected to be caught in the rain, which was supposed to start after the race’s end.
To their surprise, they found themselves in the midst of record rainfall less than halfway through the race. Still, some of the more experienced sailors on board later seemed to agree that the weather was not unusual for typical sailing conditions, nor was it especially dangerous.
“It was fairly normal,” Feuer said. “I found it to be quite unpleasant, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t an unsafe situation.”
Moreover, Ger suggested that the boat and its crew had been fully equipped to sail safely, even in unusually stormy weather.
“They’ve taken that boat to Hawai’i twice now on a race called the Trans Pac, which is a race all the way across the ocean in really crazy conditions,” she said, explaining that the boat had encountered twice as much wind then as it did on Sunday. “It was pretty much the same crew from the company that was going out [on Sunday], so if they felt comfortable, I was totally fine with that.”
Despite the qualifications of the boat and its crew, disaster struck about an hour into the race.
“At this point, we’re just sopping wet — like, completely drenched — and it is starting to pour down rain,” Voss said. “I’m like, ‘gee, I really hope that we’re done soon,’ when I just hear this huge crack.”
Students later explained that the ship’s mast had broken, leaving the crew with no control over the boat.
“The mast had completely snapped in half,” Voss said. “If that mast had fallen on someone, they probably would have died. If it had fallen in the other direction, it could have flipped our boat over. We got very lucky that it did not do either of those things.”
Lorance Wong CM ’26, another student in the wreck who had previous sailing experience, expressed his fear when he realized that the mast had broken.
“It was pretty terrifying,” he said. “I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t really know what was going on. You never expect the mast to snap.”
Still, despite the initial shock brought on by the breaking of the mast, McKeever suggested that everyone on board kept their cool.
“Everybody stayed calm,” he said. “I was really impressed by how everybody kept it together and helped each other out.”
The Long Beach Fire Department (LBFD), who Voss later estimated was approximately ten minutes away from the wreck site, was immediately notified of the incident. In the meantime, as McKeever attempted to drop the anchor and stabilize the boat, people ran to put on life jackets and grab their belongings from the hull.
As this was happening, what Voss described as a “tiny little dinghy,” a small rescue boat, came to help some of the boat’s passengers get out. The dinghy, operated by two men, had been present as a safety measure throughout the duration of the race. However, it was not able to hold everyone.
Houk was one of the few people on board who was able to get into the dinghy. He explained that, after he got in, it had to circle around the larger ship before anyone else could try to get in.
“I remember looking at Lo [Wong] because I thought he was left behind,” he said, recounting his fear at the prospect of losing Wong, his teammate on the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps football team. “That was pretty terrifying.”
Ultimately, the dinghy returned and several more people were able to get on, including Wong. Still, the majority of the people on board that day were not.
With no mast to control the boat and the anchor refusing to take, the crew could not prevent the boat from drifting towards a nearby rocky seawall, where it would inevitably crash.
Students explained that, as this became increasingly clear, people began jumping into the water and climbing onto the seawall. At some point, McKeever recalled the boat moving out from under him as it crashed into the rocks, knocking him over and leaving him hanging by his knees from the lifelines. A second crash into the rocks sent him tumbling backwards into the open water.
To Feuer, watching McKeever fall was the scariest part of the wreck.
“That was really scary to see, because there was a chance in my mind that the boat would rock … back on him,” she said.
After falling into the water, McKeever’s life jacket automatically inflated and he was able to swim over to the dinghy, which he estimated was only about 100 feet away. Other than a dislocated shoulder — resulting from somebody that he jokingly described as “a little overzealous” grabbing his arm and pulling him into the lifeboat — he was fine.
Another non-5C student in the wreck found his leg caught between the rocks and the ship as this was going on. Those who had made it onto the rocks had to help pull him out.
Soon afterwards, the LBFD appeared and everyone on the rocks, as well as those in the dinghy, were transported to a larger race committee boat before being returned safely to shore. Other than the individual whose leg had been caught in the rocks, who suffered minor injuries, everyone involved in the wreck was unharmed.
Many of them, however, lost their phones, wallets, car keys and other personal items in the wreck. According to Ger, the club is currently working closely with various administrative members and directors at the colleges, as well as with LaserFiche, to address these losses and to support students in their return to campus.
Many of the students suggested that their Feb. 4 sailing endeavor would not be their last.
“It was pretty fun before the crash,” Houk said, explaining that the wreck had actually spiked his interest in sailing. “If the boat didn’t crash, that was a great trip.”
Wong agreed, explaining that he has family in Hawai’i and spends a lot of time in the water. He stated that incidents like Sunday’s wreck are sometimes inevitable.
“I think that’s just one of the risks,” Wong said. “It’s kind of delicate, you’re at the mercy of the ocean.”
Following the Feb. 4 wreck, Ger explained that 5C Sailing would be taking a break before hosting another outing.
“While the sailing club will be taking a pause while we find new ways to get back on the water, ASPC has greenlit the club clearing us of any wrongdoings or safety concerns,” she said in an email to TSL.
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