ST. MARY’S CITY — St. Mary’s College of Maryland senior captain Nathan Jensen and sophomore crew Lauren Choi were named Middle Atlantic Intercollegiate Sailing Association Open Sailors of the Week on Nov. 4 after winning A division at the War Memorial, the conference’s fall open fleet-race championship, in two days of barely-there wind on the Severn River.
Jensen, of Sudbury, Mass., and Choi, of Corona del Mar, Calif., finished the Oct. 31-Nov. 1 regatta hosted by the U.S. Naval Academy with a low score of 20 points in A division, taking top-five finishes in four of the five races sailed. They won Race 3 and placed second in Race 1, according to the college’s release.
The conditions made every point count. Race organizers reported a northwest breeze that clocked through north, northeast, east and southeast on Saturday before dying below 4 knots by mid-afternoon, and a Sunday in which the wind hovered around 4 knots against an outgoing current. Only five races per division were completed before Sunday’s 3 p.m. cutoff.
Division win, team slide
The A-division win was not enough to keep the Seahawks on top of the conference. St. Mary’s finished sixth of 17 teams with 62 points, its B-division boat scoring 42. Georgetown won the War Memorial with 31 points, followed by Navy with 40 and Hobart and William Smith with 44. Pennsylvania and Fordham rounded out the top five.
The result ends a two-year run at the top of MAISA fall fleet racing. St. Mary’s won back-to-back War Memorials in 2024 on its home river and in 2025 on Seneca Lake in Geneva, N.Y., where Jensen skippered the A boat to a tiebreaker fourth in his division and the B boat finished second.
Jensen and Choi are the only St. Mary’s pairing honored this fall in a MAISA weekly award list dominated by Navy and Georgetown. The Hoyas’ Owen Kohut and Navy’s Henry Allgeier and Fiona Cullen were each recognized twice.
Fretwell 15th at singlehanded nationals
First-year skipper Owen Fretwell of San Diego, who earned an at-large berth to the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association Open Singlehanded National Championship, finished 15th of 18 sailors at the Glen S. Foster Trophy on Nov. 7-8, hosted by Fordham in Rye, N.Y. Fretwell totaled 168 points in the ILCA 7 fleet. Tulane’s Hamilton Barclay won with 58, ahead of College of Charleston’s Thomas Kraak with 85 and Boston College’s Jake Homberger with 88.
Fretwell was one of 12 at-large selections to the field after a seventh at the ILCA South in September and a third at the Carl Van Duyne, the MAISA singlehanded championship.
The War Memorial closed the regular-season fall schedule for the Seahawks’ fleet-racing squads. The team returns to competition in the spring semester, when St. Mary’s again hosts conference and interconference events on the St. Mary’s River.
