The Joplin man and the sea

36-year-old follows dream of sailing the ocean

By Melissa Dunson Jason Bates, 36, made his money transporting products overland. Now he wants to spend his life — and his life savings — on the water.

Bates, owner of Tradewinds Transportation, a trucking company in Joplin, returned last week, sunburned and peeling, from the Caribbean, where he realized his dream of oceanic sailboat racing.

Five years ago, Bates had never sailed. He had always had an itch to do it, and like his other hobby, flying, he decided to do something about it.

“I am an ‘A’ type personality, and when I decide to do something, I just do it,” Bates said. “Ten years ago, I wanted to learn how to fly, so I got my pilot’s license. Five years ago, I wanted to learn how to sail, so I bought a boat.”

Bates spent two days with an old marina employee on Stockton Lake “learning” how to sail. After that, he figured it couldn’t be too hard. Bates laughs when he thinks about that summer five years ago and all the days he spent sitting in the middle of the lake, trying to unravel the mystery of his sails.

Five years and a new boat later, Bates said he still learns things every time he gets on the water.

“Sailing isn’t like a lot of other things,” he said. “You learn something new every time you go out, because the wind is always changing.”

Commanding his 31-foot Hunter sailboat, Bates has been racing in Midwest lakes for the last several years. But, he said something was missing. He was looking for a way to really let his sails out for a good two to five miles, but couldn’t find it on a local lake. The open ocean was beckoning.

Once again, Bates set his mind to a new task. He picked a race — the Heineken Regatta in St. Maarten — and started calling. He called race organizers until they found a boat he could help crew. Bates laughs when he talks about his first day in St. Maarten, befriending a group of four Canadians and two Americans he had never met before and racing with them instead.

The ship was the Blue Peter, and the Regatta’s three races sent it around the island of St. Maarten several times from March 6 to 9. Out of 270 boats in 20 classes, Bates’ group placed fourth in its class. But it wasn’t prize money Bates said most of the sailors were after. It was the glory, and the experience of the open seas that he can’t compare to anything else.

“There’s an adrenaline rush as the water is going over the side of the boat,” he said. “The power of the wind and the water is just amazing. It’s like coming back to the old school way of doing things. When you shut the motor off, it’s just you and the wind out there.”

In sailing, the best way to get from point A to point B is not always a straight line. It might be the shortest but not the quickest.

“Straight lines don’t exist in sailing,” Bates said. “It doesn’t matter which direction the wind is blowing, there’s a way to get wherever you want to go.”

His favorite memories of the busy four-day event include arriving at the starting line a little early on the third day, going to make a wide turn and getting hit in the back of the head with the sail. Bates said he went flying off the end of the boat, and caught himself with one hand.

“By then, it was time to start, and I just kept yelling to my crewmates to keep going because we had an excellent start,” he said. “Eventually I was able to pull myself back on, but the best part is it was so distracting to some of the other crews that they missed their starting mark.”

Bates walked away from the race with a sunburn, a lifetime of memories and the desire for a new way of life. His boat currently sits in Grand Lake, but Bates is considering putting it in the Mississippi River, sailing to New Orleans, coming back later and sailing to the Gulf Coast, then finally making his way to the Dominican Republic, where Bates said he wants to live out his life sailing in the Caribbean ocean races.

“What good is having a dream, if you don’t have the ambition to go out and make it happen?” Bates asked. “People talk about what they want to do. I do it. It’s the difference between waking up and saying, ‘I wish I could do that,’ and saying, ‘I’m going to do that.’”

Bates is currently putting together a sailing team to race in the Grand Cup Sailboat Regatta on April 26 on Grand Lake. He has also been invited to race in the Stanford Antigua Sailing Week later this spring in the Caribbean.

“For being 36 years old, I’ve had a pretty eventful life,” Bates said.



Melissa Dunson writes for The Joplin (Mo.) Globe.



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Online tour

For more information and photographs of the 28th Annual Heineken Regatta that Joplin resident Jason Bates recently sailed in, visit www.heinekenregatta.com/. Next year’s event is scheduled for March 5-8 in St. Maarten.