Unexpected Reunion

Jeremy Leonard of Sail Revolution shares a story about a sailing community coming together to get a sailor’s lost Velocitek back to him against massive odds.

Even though Santa Cruz (CA) is a small, tight knit beach community, Warren Pelz and Doug Wood might have never crossed paths if not for a set of random circumstances. Culminating with an epic act of good samaritanism, and aided by the technology built into an incredibly sturdy Velocitek ProStart, Warren and Doug met at the hoist in front of the Santa Cruz Yacht Club to make an amazing exchange.

Doug begins, “I was walking my dog on the beach, and there was this thing lying upside-down in the surf. I thought it must be a GPS of some sort.” It certainly was a GPS, it was a Velocitek ProStart that had fallen overboard a week prior as Warren and his family were sailing in the Jack and Jill Regatta off of Santa Cruz.

Doug had to do some legwork to figure out what he found on the beach that day. He recalls, “I didn’t know what a Velocitek was, so I took it home, cleaned it off, put some batteries in it, looked it up on the web, and figured out what it was. I contacted Velocitek, and they were able to use the data files to pinpoint a dock location right in front of the Santa Cruz Yacht Club. I contacted the Yacht Club, and several people from the club hung fliers here on the docks and spread the word.”

So after rolling around in the surf at one of Santa Cruz’s more crushing beach breaks for more than a week, not only did the computer fire up, but the track data was still useable! Velocitek immediately posted the track on their blog and the word was out. The news spread like wildfire on various sailing centric social media sites, and the hunt was on!

The story gets better…Read on