Remembering Mary von Conta
The community of sailing is an amazing one. Filled with women and men whose achievements and accomplishments have inspired us, taught us and made our sport better.
Mary von Conta was one of those who made sailing better. She passed away on August 7, 2024, at age 90 in Southport, Connecticut. With her passing sailing lost someone special.
The “elevator speech” on Mary would go like this. She spotlighted the need for better sailing instructor training. She developed and implemented a program to bolster ethics, integrity and culture among junior sailors. She identified the importance of sailing instructors receiving proper training in powerboat handling. And she was relentless in her pursuit of making sailing safer for our young sailors (without taking away the fun).
Mary grew up sailing at Pequot Yacht Club in Southport, Connecticut. A teacher by profession, in the early 1980s she served as Chair of Pequot’s junior sailing committee. Her background as an educator drove her to identify the value of instructor training, first at Pequot, then in collaboration with others on Long Island Sound, and ultimately, nationally.
At the same time, recognizing that there was a growing “ethics, integrity and culture” problem in junior sailing, Mary led an effort to develop and implement an ethics program on Long Island Sound, which was also adopted nationally through US Sailing. For this she was awarded US Sailing’s Virginia Long Sail Training Service and Support Award for 1999.
Mary was Board Chair for the Junior Sailing Association of Long Island Sound (JSA) in 1999 and 2000, devoting much of her efforts strengthening a culture of ethics and integrity for our junior sailors.
Culminating several decades volunteering as a US Sailing Training Coordinator for the western Long Island Sound region, Mary embarked on a mission to address a shortfall in the training of sailing instructor powerboat handling. Her efforts resulted in the expansion of the US Powerboating Safe Powerboat Handing course to all JSA member programs in 2013.
Mary was again awarded US Sailing’s Virginia Long award for 2019, the only individual to receive this award twice. The citation for the 2019 Virginia Long award, which was presented in 2020, described Mary as, “The all-around voice of reason on Long Island Sound for over five decades. She has worked tirelessly to promote professionalism among sailing instructors and has recruited some of the best Instructor Trainers from around the country to teach US Sailing courses in her area. She has also pushed hard to have more powerboat training on the Sound, helping to establish a requirement that all instructors must have taken a US Powerboating Safe Powerboat Handling course if they wished to teach. Not satisfied, she pushed host clubs to run higher level US Sailing training courses. Through her efforts, Long Island Sound now supports several Level 2, Level 3, Reach and Adaptive courses each year.”
In 2019, the JSA created the Mary von Conta Award in her honor, to be presented to a JSA member program that has made an exemplary contribution toward improving the quality and safety in the training or instruction of sailors.
If one were to consider that Mary’s focus on safety was not relentless, consider the following: In 2005, the organizers of Pequot Yacht Club’s Blue Jay Invitational regatta thought it might be clever to design a regatta t-shirt depicting a Blue Jay (the boat) sailed by blue jays (the bird). When the draft design was shown to Mary, she looked at it carefully and smiled. Then she frowned and said, “Those birds are sailors, and they need to be wearing PFDs!” The design was changed to put PFD’s on the blue jays.
In spite of all these efforts, Mary found time to raise a family, enjoy big boat sailing and even sail across the Atlantic.
Mary was a sailing “force of nature,” dedicating her life to making junior sailing better, safer and more fun.
She will be missed and greatly appreciated.
A service for Mary will be on Friday 8/23 at 2:00pm at Trinity Church in Southport, CT. Reception to follow at Pequot Yacht Club. Her obituary may be read at this link.
