This Sailor is a Steward of the Sea

Herb Mccormick

Former America's Cup sailor David Rockefeller Jr. has created an ocean conservation organization for sailors called Sailors for the Sea.

He started sailing as a child, kicking around the waters of Maine in wooden boats: first a Herreshoff 12, then a Luders 16, and finally an International One Design, or IOD. Then there were those magical summers in the 1960s, when he participated as a crewman in three America's Cup campaigns, aboard the 12-Meters Nefertiti, Constellation, and Valiant. He began taking his parents' Bermuda 40 on coastal cruises before graduating to his own series of racing and cruising boats, including a C&C 39, a Beneteau First 42, and currently, an IMX-45.

And then there were the summer-long expeditions he arranged with and for his friends, every five years, to Newfoundland, Alaska, Scotland, and other locales. Some of them were major logistical challenges, with as many as six boats and a rotating group of hundreds of sailors coming aboard for two-week stints. The best trips were the wildest ones, where other boats and people were few and far between.

Make no mistake about it: David Rockefeller Jr.-- yes, from those Rockefellers-- is most assuredly a passionate sailor. These days, he's hoping to gather like-minded mariners to join a new, related cause that's stirred his passion, the ocean conservation group he helped launch called Sailors for the Sea (SfS).

"There's an estimated 2.5 million sailors in this country, and in ten years I'd love it if one percent of them, or 25,000 sailors, had joined the organization," he said. "I don't think SfS will ever be an advocacy organization, but if we can get you to sign up and educate you more about what the important issues are, then you can decide where you want to fit in the bigger picture."

Rockefeller's vocations are philanthropy, nonprofits, and finance, but his avocations have always been sailing and conservation. In the 1990s he became seriously involved with the National Parks Foundation, and during that time he began to learn about land/sea issues, particularly in the fishing sector, at places like Key Biscayne, Florida; the Channel Islands, California; and the Dry Tortugas, Florida. This led him to a broader interest in ocean problems, and ultimately, at the turn of this decade, to an appointment to the Pew Oceans Commission, a group whose charge was to study the health of U.S. marine waters.