Nevertheless, the regatta saw the return of one of Harvard’s best skippers, as Porter sailed for the Crimson for the first time in the 2004-5 season after spending the fall semester studying abroad. Porter was the 2003 ICSA/Vanguard men’s singlehanded national champion, and a Sailing World preseason article proposed that he could follow Cardwell Potts ’04 and keep national College Sailor of the Year honors at Harvard.

“Last semester, we were struggling to find skippers,” Johnson said. “He’s an awesome skipper. He’s going to make things a lot easier.”

If anything, the Crimson is trying to find how best to use the skippers it has. The team potentially has five, but it only launches three dinghies per regatta, so in the early spring season, the team will have to assess how best to use the personnel available.

Spring also poses another challenge: a change in the format of the regattas the team will race, for spring is Harvard’s team racing season.

Fleet racing, the focus of the fall season, pits individual boats against each other in a large—often 18-boat—field, and a squad’s performance is the sum of individual performances.

Team racing is, as the name indicates, a team sport, pitting three boats from one team directly against three boats from another, with both teams striving to combine finishes for the lower score. The objective is not only to make one’s own team faster, but to make one’s opponents slower, within the rules permitted by intercollegiate sailing.

“It’s a lot more like three-on-three basketball,” captain Sloan Devlin said. “There are plays to slow people down.”

The Crimson has a legacy to maintain in the sport. Harvard tied for sixth last year in the Team Racing National Championships, but light winds helped the Crimson to the team title in the spring of 2003.

Then-freshmen Porter and Schlitz were on board for the last team championship at skipper and crew, respectively.

“Especially for team racing, it sort of makes a bigger difference having practice under your belt,” Porter said. “For team racing more than anything experience matters.”

—Staff writer Samuel C. Scott can be reached at sscott@fas.harvard.edu.