BY GEORGE ALBANO
Staff Writer

Eric Raybon and Jason Bilow represented the United States well at the recent Volvo Youth Sailing ISAFWorld Championships in Ontario, Canada, finishing eighth overall. Longtime friends Eric Raybon and Jason Bilow of Shrewsbury have a lot of common interests.

But they never thought becoming two of the top youth sailors in the country would be one of them.

Raybon and Bilow, both 16 and juniors at Red Bank Regional High School, recently represented the United States at the Volvo Youth Sailing ISAF World Championships in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

In fact, the 37th Youth Worlds for boys and girls ages 18 and under is the biggest youth sailing world competition held in North America, and all Raybon and Billow did was finish eighth in the Hobie class.

That was not only a drastic improvement from last year when the U.S. Hobie team finished last, but it represented the best finish ever by an American team in the 16-foot catamaran class.

What's more, the multihull Hobie class had its largest number of entries ever with 15. Raybon, the skipper, and Bilow, the crew, both sail out of the Sandy Hook Bay Catamaran Club with the Hobie Fleet 250.

But what made their eighth-place finish at last month's Youth Sailing World Championships even more impressive, if not amazing, was the fact that they hooked up as a team only by chance.

"I started sailing when I was about 12," Bilow said. "I started out on pretty standard sailboats, but then a few years ago Eric asked me if I wanted to sail a Hobie with him. I never even heard of them. But he asked me to come along a couple of times and try it.

"So I did, and it was fun. I've stayed with it ever since."

"I brought him into the sport," Raybon, who started sailing when he was 11, added with a laugh. "We were friends and I knew he had sailed before, but not Hobies. So I told him, 'Come race with me.' "

It proved to be a winning combination that saw the local duo qualify for the Youth Worlds last summer at the North American Youth Multihull competition in Miami Beach.

"I expected us to do well, but I didn't expect to qualify," Bilow admitted.

"We just thought we'd go there and do our best, but not qualify. It was kind of a nice shock."

"I was pretty excited," Raybon agreed. "Going in, I didn't really know what it was like, but it ended up being pretty cool."

Raybon and Bilow had a whole year to prepare for the world championships, although that can be difficult during the winter months on the East Coast.

"We started out training in the fall and even into early winter," Raybon explained. "But then it got too cold."

"I have some home-rowing equipment, so I did a little bit of rowing during the winter to keep in shape," Bilow added. "Then when the weather got warmer, we trained for a couple of weeks in the water, and by April we started doing some local races."

"Once summer started, we were in the water whenever we could be - two, three hours a day, several days a week," Raybon said.

What made their task even more daunting, however, was they had to adjust to sailing with a spinnaker on their boat.

"That's not normal for USA 16 (-foot boats) sailing. I don't use a spinnaker when I usually race," Raybon said. "It's a kite-like sail in front of the boat that aids you going downwind. U.S. Sailing sent us a spinnaker kit over the winter to put on our boat.

"Then I went out and bought another one so we could put it on another 16-foot boat and have something to compare with. My dad would race the other boat so we could test our boat against it and learn how to use the spinnaker."

"We had to learn how to use it and how to sail different with it," Bilow added. "When you turn to go downwind, you have to pull it out and hoist it up. Then when you start to go upwind, you have to bring it down."

After several weeks of practice, Raybon and Billow headed to Canada ready to take on the world.

"I thought we were as ready as we were gonna be," Bilow said.

A total of 226 of the world's best youth sailors from 52 nations representing 170 boats competed for gold medals in seven classes. U.S. Sailing was represented by nine members of its U.S. World Team, including Raybon and Bilow.

The prestigious event was held in Portsmouth Olympic Harbor, the site of the 1976 Olympic sailing competition and an area commonly referred to as the "fresh water sailing capital of the world."

"It was just a beautiful place to sail," Bilow said. "It probably was the best place I ever sailed. It had good wind and nice water."

"It was a pretty cool venue," Raybon concurred. "There was a lot of space and wind, very accommodating to sailors. It was nice."

It was a certainly a perfect backdrop for the festive opening ceremonies on July 13 where all of the competitors, arranged by nation, paraded in from Lake Ontario to Grant Hall at Queens University with flags representing each country.

"It was great just to be a part of that," Bilow said. "It was pretty cool seeing all the different countries and all the flags."

He and Raybon were able to get one practice in before the start of the races on July 14. The Hobie 16s usually had two races per day over a course between Kingston and Wolfe Island.

But there were three races the first day and Raybon and Bilow had a rough debut, finishing 10th in the first race, fifth in the second, and then 10th again in the third.

"We struggled at the beginning," Bilow admitted, "but then we started to get the hang of it and how to use the spinnaker. We improved as the week went on."

That they did, finishing sixth in their first race the next day, but forced to retire before the completion of the second race.

"It was real windy that day, about 20 knots or so, and our boat flipped three times at the start of the race," Bilow pointed out. "By that time we were so far behind we wouldn't have been able to finish."

They came back the next day and finished fifth and 12th before a lay day on July 17. The time off apparently did Bilow and Raybon a lot of good, because they came back the next day and put together back-to-back runner-up finishes in the two races for their best day of sailing.

"We were real excited about that," Bilow said of finishing second to Brazil in both races. "We basically sailed perfect. We had great starts and kept up with everybody."

"There was a little different breeze that day. Pretty steady, I'd say," Raybon noted. "We had a good start in both races, everything went the right way, and we had two good races.

"By that time, too, we got the hang of the spinnaker. There were not too many problems after that first day." Bilow agreed.

"In our first race, there were a couple of teams that had spinnakers on their standard boats. They were used to sailing with them," he said. "So we started looking at those boats to see what they were doing and we earned a couple of tricks and got better."

That would also turn out to be their final two races of the competition.

Racing was called off the next day because of thunderstorms, and Raybon and Bilow did not compete on the final day, July 20, when a crucial piece of equipment on their boat broke, forcing them to retire.

"It was real windy again, and our boat flipped three more times and a piece of equipment broke," Bilow explained.

The two second-place finishes, however, were enough to carry the local tandem to its eighth-place finish. Great Britain won the gold medal, while Denmark captured the silver and the bronze went to Australia.

"I was happy we climbed back up in the standings," Raybon said, "but I was a little disappointed we couldn't race the last day. We were pretty close to sixth and seventh and we could have scored higher with another good day."

"If we got out there, we probably could've done better," Bilow added. "It was disappointing, but it happens sometimes."

Besides, there's always next year, when both Eric Raybon and Jason Bilow hope to return to the Youth Sailing World Championships.

"We'd like to do that, but first we have to qualify again, and that will be tough," Bilow concluded.

"But I'm sure the experience of competing this year will help us a lot."