Katy Campbell
Owner - RYA Chief Instructor & Lead Race Skipper
Katy's first job ever was as a dinghy sailing coach, working with kids and teens from beginners through to experienced racers. She worked as a Canadian Yachting Association Instructor Evaluator, race coach and the program director for several yacht clubs in the Vancouver area.
After an indoor hiatus to try being a 'real adult', she came to her senses and found herself marooned in the UK. This is when she realized she had it right the first time- teaching sailing is truly her calling.
Katy earned her Royal Yachting Association Yachtmaster Ocean and Yachtmaster Instructor credentials and has been lucky enough to work as an instructor and skipper in the UK, the Canary Islands, and the Caribbean… before deciding to put her global perspective with combined racing, cruising and offshore experience to work in building Sea to Sky Sailing.
Katy has raced with winning crews in Canada, Europe and the Caribbean on successful campaigns including the Vancouver Area Racing Championship circuit, the VanIsle 360, the Rolex Fastnet and qualifying events, the Rolex Middle Sea Race, a one-design European Championship campaign, and the Caribbean racing circuit. She has coached hundreds of keen new and experienced sailors to success in similar events, and to launch epic cruising adventures all over the world with confidence and pizazz.
Biggest Sailing Adventures (so far)
How do you pick amongst so many shenanigans at sea?!
St.Maarten Heineken Regatta 2023, 1st in class aboard our own Panacea X… which Katy purchased in Croatia over the internet at the end of 2021, then sailed it from Malta all the way to the Caribbean in possibly the hardest way ever… truly a raw Adventure
VanIsle 360 International Yacht Race 2017 & 2019 with pretty Paragon… 4th place overall in class, both times with 2 totally different teams!
Race to Alaska 2018, 8th place with feisty little Pau Hana, rowing & sailing all the way from Port Townsend, WA to Ketchikan, AK.
A lot of other huge sailing adventures on other boats… RORC Caribbean 600 2nd place in 2020. Rolex Milddle Sea Race 2019, 4th in class with the first all female team to ever finish the race and all crew under 21 years old! Rolex Fastnet campaign in 2013 with an all female team. Pacific Cup 2022 and Transpac 2023 aboard Westerly, BC’s only Santa Cruz 70.
Perhaps the biggest adventure? Teaching over 1,000 aspiring sailors to date on how to do boaty things… and then watching them unfurl their sailors and explore this wild world for themselves.
Madelise Van Vuuren
Echo McNaughton
Shore Manager
Shore Manager
Echo started sailing in 2021, since escaping to sea on a RYA course with Katy seemed like excellent decompression from successfully herding two energetic boys / aspiring pirates through the pandemic years. However, Katy has been a bad influence in her life for considerably longer as they were housemates in university where they completed degrees of questionable initial utility (ok, Echo went on to get a proper teaching degree and is therefore a significantly better adult!). Echo's impressive organizational skills, elaborate creativity and strong background as an educator will all be put to good use in the continued development of Sea to Sky Sailing, and we are thrilled to have lured her onto our team.
Echo is also working towards launching more sailing adventures for herself and her family, hoping to explore everything the BC coast has to offer in the coming years!
BIGGEST SAILING ADVENTURE (SO FAR)
First family cruise in which 2 boys and one husband were successfully indoctrinated into the sailing life with almost zero tears, some orcas, a meteor shower viewed while on the anchor, and a lot of laughs.
Madelise has loved the ocean since she was old enough to point at the waves of the Indian Ocean near where she grew up (Margate, South Africa) and strong enough to float in False Bay. She has an immense respect for the power of the sea and storms (kayaking and camping among the Broken Group islands on the west coast of Vancouver Island). Her phone is full of photos of the waves and sky from BC Ferries and Piper's Lagoon.
Madelise admits that many of her water adventures have been power boats - she hopes you won't hold it against her! Wakeboarding on Alouette Lake, BC. Exploring by boat along Antelope Canyon of Lake Powell, UT. Seeing humpback whales breach off the coast of Maui.
Biggest Sailing Adventure (so far)
Catamaran cruise from Curacao seeing the flying fish at sunset!
Jing Wang
RYA Cruising Instructor
Jing moved to the Toronto area during his high school years, finding himself at loose ends on the shores of Lake Ontario. What better way to immerse himself in Canadian life than by taking up sailing?! He dove in in a big way, buying his first boat when he was still in grade 12. This was a strategic decision, as it provided him with a way of commuting to Kingston for university when ‘move-in’ day came. Did he have to effectively refit the entire boat to safely make the journey across one entire Great Lake? Of course (because… boats). Was it a struggle to fit all his suitcases into a Tanzer 22? Sure! But this adventure launched Jing’s life afloat, and he hasn’t looked back since. Upgrading to a bigger boat, Jing cruised the entire Saint Lawrence seaway during his university years, and started venturing abroad, acting as skipper for charter holidays with groups of friends and works as a skipper in Vancouver for False Creek Ferries. Jing completed his Yachtmaster Offshore with us and earned his RYA Cruising Instructor certification in Greece- the first of our own students to clear all the hurdles and launch a whole new career within the RYA gold standard world of sail training.
Biggest sailing adventure (so far)…
Sailing under the northern lights
Shoulder season cruising in the Ionian and Aegean islands of Greece, often being the only boat anchored in beautiful secluded coves.
Exploring the fjords of BC by sailboat
Tim Linsell
Race Instructor and Race Skipper
Tim was first put into a boat at age 6 and was taken ashore after two hours of screaming, bawling, wide-eyed terror and returned home with zero intention to ever venture away from shore again. Fortunately, this intention was not realized and in one shape or form he has lived on, in, and around the water ever since.
Growing up on the East Coast of England Tim soon became heavily involved with the junior racing circuit, and what began as an increasingly exciting weekend hobby progressively became a personality trait. He continued to race in the youth and senior dinghy racing circuits in the UK and would later win a handful of national titles and represent Great Britain at several world championships. Alongside this he began coaching juniors across the UK at 16 and would continue this throughout university; in turn spurring a determination to continue to spread what had been such a fundamentally empowering and formative experience for him.
Following university, he left the UK and worked in a range of jobs around New Zealand and Australia. After discovering SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef, he decided to continue this training, ultimately becoming a divemaster and latterly a dive instructor in Rarotonga. And it was diving that would ultimately bring Tim back to sailing in earnest. After finding a job working for a summer camp oriented around sailing, diving, and student leadership on a catamaran in the Caribbean, he soon took a full-time position on board S/Y Argo – a 112ft schooner offering 90-day study abroad and gap year programs to college students from around the world. Ultimately becoming captain, he completed four Atlantic, two Pacific, and one Indian Ocean crossing on board, and helped to train several hundred students in sailing, diving, and the art of a pancake breakfast for 30.
Biggest Sailing Adventure (so far)…
• Working as skipper and expedition manager in the Svalbard archipelago in the summer of 2022
• Crossing Felixstowe bar on a blustery day at low tide a week prior to the UK Fireball nationals
• Crossing the Pacific during the coronavirus pandemic
• Chasing Vervet monkeys off the boat whilst in South Africa
• Transiting New York’s East River
• Hosting the president of the Republic of Palau on board S/Y Argo
Benjamin Daniels
First Mate - Caribbean Operations
Ben grew up on Vancouver Island, taking his first sailing trip to iconic Desolation Sound when he was just 2 weeks old. Clearly his parents set him down a questionable path in life right from the get go. He was just 15 years old for his first ocean race, logging serious miles in the VicMaui aboard a Santa Cruz 50. He raced Lasers at a high level, taking first place in the BC Summer Games amongst other strong results in a decade of competitive dinghy racing. Then he took things a step further by becoming a Sail Canada coach, inflicting his enthusiasm for sailing on the next generation of impressionable young minds while working his way through an engineering degree. University was just a decoy phase of life, giving the brief illusion of pursing adulthood. We’re thrilled to have Ben joining the Sea to Sky team for another Caribbean season of kicking butt and taking names on the racing circuit. Ben’s excellent coaching and competitive racing background will be a huge asset on board, while he has the opportunity to develop his sailing CV and explore what the wide world of sailing has to offer for those of us firmly committed to avoiding adulting.
Biggest Sailing Adventure (so far)…
I mean, when you’ve been sailing since you were 2 weeks old, there are a lot of adventures to choose from. Let’s go with the most recent one, the 2022 Pacific Cup aboard Westerly, our beautiful local Santa Cruz 70. Not only did the team get 2nd place overall, but the 8 days of racing to Hawaii gave Ben enough time to talk Katy into creating a Caribbean apprenticeship in 2023 for him and upgrading to a real job in 2024! Ben has also had the honour of representing Canada at the SSL Gold Cup in 2023 and is gunning for the Doublehanded Offshore World Championships in September 2024.
Jacob Binnema
Sailing Instructor & Race Skipper
Jacob grew up sailing in Barbados, the one island nation that doesn't quite fit in the convenient Windward - Leeward island chain. Sailing upwind offshore, often both ways to get just about anywhere else is a classic Sea to Sky trait that most Bajan sailors share and Jacob is no exception. Something about calm seas never making skilled sailors...
As a Type 2 Fun enthusiast, Jacob has raced competitively in a wide variety of dinghies and sport boats throughout the Caribbean and has been doing short handed deliveries in the Caribbean and to the USA since he was 16. He worked as the head coach at Barbados Yacht Club and was later selected for specialized coaching training under World Sailing, helping further develop a wealth of teaching and sailing experience drawn from the challenging conditions of big seas and strong winds in Barbados.
After meeting the Sea to Sky team at Barbados Sailing Week 2024, Jacob has plunged in the deep end by joining our seasonal migration to Canada for summers of coaching and local racing in BC, and back to the Caribbean for winters of epic offshore adventures and international racing.
Biggest sailing adventures (so far)...
Launching into the 2024 Round Barbados Race in a ridiculously tiny MR15 dinghy with 2 crew... surviving a serious squall at North Point, and the infamous breaking waves off Ragged Point, before being defeated by rudder loss with less than 20% of the route to go. #nexttime
Doublehanded delivery from Grenada to Fort Lauderdale at 18 years old, including dodging a hurricane along the way, as you do.
First in class at Grenada Sailing Week 2024 with a Tartan 10, first in class in Barbados Sailing Week 2024 with a J/121, in 2023 with a Melges 24 and in 2022 with a J/24, and a slew of podium places in dinghy racing at the national and regional level.
Liisa Hannus
Bookkeeper
Liisa started sailing in 2017, taking her Competent Crew in the hopes of not looking like a total idiot on a new friend's boat. She quickly realized it can be tricky to get out sailing as often as she wanted to, so after a summer of cruising did not materialize so she decided to start racing. In November. Through the winter. Her first race involved a broach in 25+ knots and almost running into a freighter (take any of our training courses to avoid these issues, or at the very least handle them with flair!). Surprisingly, she showed up for the next race 2 weeks later. In the intervening 4 years she has developed a profound sailing addiction, participating in almost every Polar Bear race, a few Snowflake races, more than 20 VARC/VIRS events on the local racing circuit, and raced on the Sea to Sky team in the Crystal Cup Women’s Championship Regatta. Along the way she also completed her Day Skipper training with Sea to Sky Sailing and bought her own emotional support vessel, SV Bluebird. Liisa committed 3.5 years of service to Sea to Sky as our first permanent Shore Manager, helping us survive the pandemic and settling into the After Times. After answering more than her fair share of questions about sailing, Liisa is taking a step back from the front lines but continuing to help us keep ourselves afloat behind the scenes.
Biggest Sailing Adventures (So Far)
Her first Southern Straits race will always be special as the first overnight race she competed in. (Although finishing 6 hours earlier the following year was nice.) Being part of the Division 3-winning crew on Flaming Redhead for Polar Bear 2018-2019 will always be a highlight, as that was the year everything started to make sense.
