Ride like the Wind

With the wind at his back, solo sailing star Gavin Ball navigates his way toward his goal of becoming both a world champion and a member of a premier yacht racing team. | Photos by Lawrence Tabudlo

When Gavin Ball was about 12, he found himself paddling his surfboard in Hawai‘i Kai Marina one day, heading out to Maunalua Bay and literally running into something gray.

That something, which was quite large and which possessed a dorsal fin, turned out to be a hammerhead shark. By his estimation, the fish measured around 8 feet in length.

“Yeah, it was a big mama,” Ball recalls. “It just bumped right into me.”

The encounter was brief as the wide set-eyed creature seemingly shrugged off the contact and continued on its merry way. But for Ball, his brush with the fish left him unnerved, so much so that he straightaway shelved his surfboard and laid aside his paddle, seemingly for good.

“No one’s ever been hurt by a hammerhead — ever — but it still freaked me out,” he confesses. “From the time when I was young, I had always been in and around the water. But when that happened, I stopped going in, I stopped paddling.”

Ball’s anxiety over what lurks beneath the sea was fortunately short-lived. By the time he turned 14, he had discovered the thrill of sailing and was confidently commanding an O’pen BIC dinghy across the Moloka‘i Channel. And before he was legally an adult, he was comfortably operating foiling sailboats in rough-water conditions just outside of Hanauma Bay.

Six years ago while gliding over waves in Ka‘iwi Channel, he spotted a whale being mauled by “10 14-foot tiger sharks that were munching on it like maggots.”

Did he freeze? No. Did he freak out? Not even for a second.

“I see a lot of marine life when I’m out there,” Ball says almost nonchalantly.

Clearly, his hammerhead experience is but a distant memory. And that’s a good thing, because if the now 22-year-old Ball had not conquered that fear, he wouldn’t be the elite sailing competitor he is today.

Last year at the WASZP Games in Norway, Ball became the first-ever American to crack the Top 10 at the world championship event, finishing eighth out of 180 entrants in the solo men’s regatta. While the results are still worth celebrating, Ball couldn’t help but feel like someone who let a big fish get away.

“I was actually leading the regatta for the first three days, but it’s a six-day event,” Ball explains, adding that the second half of the competition featured a shift in weather conditions, where the temperatures dropped from the 80s down into the 60s and the winds increased from 10 mph to 30-plus mph. Those changes, he adds, were just enough to “foil” his championship aspirations.

“It was amazing being able to hold the yellow jersey for a little bit, but the end was a bit bittersweet.”
He pauses briefly before adding, “Yeah, it still stings a little.”

And yet, the wind appears to be behind his sails these days. Ball is currently in Florida, where he is among the headliners at Foiling Week Pensacola, which runs now through March 2. This is his third year competing in the event, one of several regattas Ball is hoping to capture in 2025. When he returns to the islands, he’ll have a few weeks to both rest and recuperate before he begins preparing for the April 18-22 WASZP Hawai‘i State Championships, hosted by Kāne‘ohe Yacht Club and staged in Kāne‘ohe Bay.

Following the local event, he’ll begin gearing up for this summer’s 2025 WASZP Games in Weymouth, England. Scheduled for July 19-25, the international competition is expected to draw between 200 and 300 sailors.
For Ball, who has experienced his share of major victories before — including wins at the 2023 SailGP Inspire Championship of Champions in San Francisco Bay and last fall’s FIV Foil International in waters off Sardinia, where he teamed up with Honolulu’s Pearl Lattanzi — sailing away with the WASZP Games trophy in hand would be an amazing feat for someone who, just a decade ago, seemed destined to live a life away from the ocean.
“It’s a big deal,” he says of the prestigious regatta. “That’s where the world champion is crowned.”

Sailing can be an expensive sport for most to participate in and it’s no different for Ball, currently the fourth-ranked sailor in his age group (21-30) across the globe.

The class of WASZP boat he rocks costs a cool $12,000, and moving it to and from various competitions around the world can be expensive. When combined with other expenditures, including housing, airfare and sailboat parts, he’s often looking at an annual out-of-pocket commitment of between $15,000 and $18,000.
“I probably have the lowest budget out of anyone who’s ranked in the top 10,” Ball chuckles.

By good fortune, he recently secured a sponsorship from a Detroit-based company called MarkSetBot, which makes autonomous regatta marks (robotic buoys), to help offset his yearly expenses.

Beyond that, the part-time student at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who’s studying atmospheric sciences and meteorology, helps make ends meet by coaching sailing at Kāne’ohe Yacht Club and tackling construction jobs on the side.

“But if I’m not working, I’m out sailing,” he states.

Ball, who was raised in Hawai‘i Kai and still resides there today, comes from aquatic stock. His father, Chris, is an engineer and former member of the U.S. National Kayak Team. His mother, Catherine, is a teacher who swam competitively in college.

He also has a younger sister named Emma, who possesses a growing interest in the sport of windsurfing.
“She’s gotten into windsurfing and is about to do her first out-of-state regatta, which is also going to be in Florida the same time that I’m there,” Ball says. “So I’ll be helping her out, showing her the ropes and, hopefully, getting her hooked on racing.”

Guiding others toward success comes naturally to Ball. Earlier this year, he flew to New Zealand to coach a developmental class made up of Moth sailors. All of the group participants were older than him — the youngest being 25, the oldest 40 — but that didn’t dissuade any from taking instruction from one of the best sailing talents around.

“It was a great learning experience,” he recounts. “I was able to give them input on weather conditions … and giving them pointers on when to be aggressive, and when to dial it back a bit in order to maximize their potential.”

For Ball, such coaching opportunities not only add to his résumé, but get him closer to his ultimate goal: becoming a member of a unit like American Magic, the yacht-racing team that represents New York Yacht Club.
And that’s important to the man whose foiling feats up until now have mostly been solo efforts.

“The goal for me is to get on a bigger team and make it a full-time gig,” Ball says. “Right now, I am a single person competing. But there are teams like SailGP, which has a 20-plus person roster, and there is the America’s Cup, which has hundreds of people on their roster doing different things. They have engineers, sailors and more, all trying to win the oldest trophy in sports.

“So, being a part of a team is ultimately what I want to do and what I’m working for.”