Kate Theisen aboard ship during Selection Trials last week in California.
Kate Theisen
Four crews compete in a simulated race during Selection Trials last weekend.
Mountain Mail
SOCORRO – A New Mexico Tech undergraduate has been selected as one of 15 crew members that will make up a world-class yacht-racing team for Roy E. Disney’s upcoming “Morning Light” film project.
Kate Theisen, a junior majoring in astrophysics at the land-locked research university in Socorro, proved her sailing expertise and high-seas mettle when she competed last week in selection trials in Long Beach, Calif. The 19-year-old who learned sailing at such a young age that she calls sailing second nature won a position as a crew member of the Morning Light.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Kate said in an interview with the Mountain Mail. “I’m still in a state of shock.”
Disney is organizing the effort to compete in next year’s 44th staging of the Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. The six-month training program and one-week race will become a feature-length film in 2008.
“Morning Light,” which is also the working title of the anticipated feature-length documentary film, will chronicle the recruitment, training and performance of the youngest 15-member crew ever to sail the Transpacific Yacht Race.
“I signed up for the sailing, but, wow, they’re filming it,” Kate said. “That’s going to be weird. It never sank in that they are making a big-time film until they talked to us 15 at the end [of selection trials].”
One of the other crew members asked what sort of movie Disney is planning. One of the trainers pointed across the street to a megaplex movie theater and said, “The sort of movie that plays over there.”
“That’s a little intimidating,” Kate said. Cameras stayed with the 30 sailors for the entire week during the selection trials. “You get used to cameras pretty quickly. After first day, you don’t notice them.”
For six days last week, Theisen and 29 others competitors sailed on four boats. They trained and did team-building exercises in the mornings and sailed in the afternoons.
“We’d do different drills each day,” Kate said. “Two bouys, beat up wind, then downwind with a spinnaker. We’d race short courses to see how we dealt with changing sails and reacting quickly. A lot of times they didn’t tell us what to do until it was time to do it. We also did a couple man-overboard drills. Those were exciting.
“We did a longer distance race on the last day,” she said. “It was kind of like a real race. It was all four boats racing each other and it was pretty fun.”
“It was pretty nerve-wracking,” Theisen said of the weeklong trials. “They mixed us around and put us in different teams. They never told us the criteria for selecting the crew, but they weren’t looking for the best racers. I grew up on a sailboat, but until this week, I hadn’t done any racing. A lot of the other kids are pro or semi-pro.”
Theisen said she’s very excited and a bit nervous about the adventure. After completing the fall semester, she’ll re-join the other 14 crew members in Hawaii on January 2. They’ll train nearly full-time for six months in Hawaii until the TransPac, as its known in sailing circles, begins in mid-July. The race starts in Long Beach and ends back in Hawaii. The 15-member crew of the Morning Light will probably take about a week to reach Hawaii.
Theisen’s parents, Barbara and Thomas, always had a love of sailing. The Wisconsin family decided to take to the water full-time when Kate was three years old.
“When we moved aboard, the idea as to sail around the world,” Kate said. “But my family is more about about taking our time, enjoying locations and not fighting the weather. We haven’t made it out of Atlantic yet.”
For 16 years, Kate spent nearly all her time on the ocean. After four years of sailing the Great Lakes, the Theisens cruised into the North Atlantic when Kate was 7. The majority of her childhood was spent sailing from North Carolina to the Bahamas and western Carribean.
“Home was wherever the boat was,” she said. “And wherever the winds blew us.”
The Theisens would stop to work for a while, then hit the seas again. For vacations, they’d return to Wisconsin to see family.
“I think I was pretty lucky,” she said. “My parents are pretty amazing people to just take off.”
Kate was home-schooled – or, rather, boat-schooled – for almost all of her school years. She enrolled in public schools a couple times, she said, but “I always went back to home-schooling. I liked it better. I could be done by noon if I wanted to.”
Her mother told her about the Morning Light project and encourage Kate to apply. Kate said she wrote a couple of essays and then was selected as a finalist.
At race time, the average age of the 15 selected will be slightly more than 21 years, a full year under the record. High-definition cameras will record their yacht-racing experiences, as they did this past week, for the documentary’s scheduled release in 2008.
None of the participating crew members selected to star in the film are actors; and, there is no script for the real-life adventure, nor is there be a preconceived outcome of what many sailing enthusiasts, including Disney, consider to be the world’s most dynamic grand-prix-class sailing event.
“If we do our job right, I don’t care as much whether they win or lose as how they come together as a group and wind up as a team in the end,” Disney said. “How they do is how they do ... But, we’re giving them the equipment to win.”
Kate said she envisions the movie as both adventure and documentary – as opposed to a reality show made into a movie.
Theisen said she also was inspired at an early age by another sailboat-racing movie, and she hopes “Morning Light” will do the same for others.
“I saw the movie ‘Wind’ ages ago, and I’ve always wanted to race,” she said. “In the meanwhile, I’ve done small boat racing, and I grew up on a sailboat.”
The New Mexico Tech undergraduate also is one of only two young women chosen for the history making crew of the Morning Light — a group selected from the 30 finalists (out of 538 applicants from throughout the world) who were invited to try out for the team during last week’s selections trials.
From a salty dog sailing the high seas, Kate enrolled in one of the most land-locked schools in North America.
“I wasn’t really looking at location,” she said. “I went for the astrophysics program. It’s kind of an exchange, a change of scenery. Growing up on a boat, I was always in small towns. I enjoy that and the campus here is awesome.”
Kate has spent her last two summers – 2006 and 2005 – at the California Institute of Technology, aka Cal Tech, doing planetary research with Mike Brown.
“It was pure research,” Kate said. “Which was pure heaven. We observed Triton, Neptune’s moon, for changes in brightness and color.”
Kate said she expects to go to grad school after earning a bachelor’s at New Mexico Tech. Ultimately, she hopes to be a planetary scientist …and a sailor.
George Zamora of New Mexico Tech contributed to this article.
