Bermuda SailGP: Keeron Wilson was serving cocktails on a tourist boat. Now he's building F50s

As a specialist boat builder for SailGP, Wilson works at the league’s primary production facility in Southampton. Jason Ludlow for SailGP Share articleEditor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s coverage of SailGP, an international sailing competition that has been likened to Formula 1 on water. Follow SailGP here. In the summer of 2017, Keeron Wilson was an 18-year-old deckhand working on a spectator boat in Bermuda, serving cocktails and carving out a modest living as part of the island’s tourism industry. He was aboard Calico Jack’s, a 60-foot motorized pirate-themed tour boat equipped with a diving plank and a busy bar in the central bay to the west of the island known as the Great Sound. It was a comfortable Bermudian existence. Then a fleet of America’s Cup AC50 catamarans — 50-foot carbon-fiber flying behemoths — came shrieking past Calico Jack’s at speeds approaching 50 knots. To the tourists on board, it was a photo opportunity. To Wilson, it was a lightning bolt. “To see those catamarans flying across the water at such high speeds, with no engines,“ Wilson tells The Athletic, speaking from the far less tropical setting of Southampton, on the south coast of England. “Just the science and technology behind it… “I’m young, and everybody likes speed. I saw that and said, ‘I want to build those’.” Almost a decade later, Wilson isn’t just watching such vessels from the sidelines; he is indeed building those very same 50ft catamarans, although now they have been repurposed, upgraded and souped up for SailGP, the global racing league which was launched in 2019. As a specialist boat builder for SailGP, Wilson works at the league’s primary production facility in Southampton. His journey from ‘barge laborer’ in Bermuda to ‘composite technician’ in the UK is testament to the league’s ‘Inspire’ initiative; as well as a personal drive that has seen him seize every opportunity thrown his way, and which has taken him far beyond his idyllic home island. The 27-year-old currently works on one of the most complex and critical sections of the F50 catamaran: the ‘pod’, which sits beneath the trampoline across which the sailors run from side to side during high-speed maneuvers in races. If the F50 were a human body, the hulls would be the legs, the wing the lungs; the pod — as the central spine of the boat — is the nervous system. “The pod has all the brains in it,“ says Wilson. “It has the hydraulic pumps, the batteries, the wiring systems. My role is to create the shell and fit out the interior, so when the electricians and hydraulic engineers come in, they can just mount their brackets and go.” The work is grueling. To save every gram of weight, the pod is stripped to its bare essentials, meaning Wilson often spends long shifts squeezed into a dark, carbon-fiber tube, working with LED lamps and a portable AC unit to keep from sweating through his protective suit. “You’ve got to be quite small to get in there, and you’re cramped up all day. But you want it to be perfect. You want people to go inside there and realize you’ve done a good job, even in that tight space.” This level of precision is a far cry from the more agricultural GRP (glass-reinforced plastic) repairs Wilson performed as an apprentice shipwright, essentially a carpenter specialising in composite or wooden boats, in Bermuda under his mentor, Douglas Sunderland. While he gained a strong grounding in the fundamentals of his craft at The Landing School of Boat Building and Design in Maine, SailGP operates with high-tech materials and a level of precision and accuracy to rival the aerospace industry. However, one of the most unexpected hurdles for the Bermudian was getting the numbers right. Bermuda, greatly influenced by its proximity to the United States, operates on the imperial system. “In Bermuda, we deal with inches, half-inches, feet,” Wilson says. “Coming here, everything is metric. Millimeters and centimeters. That was one of the biggest challenges, getting over the measurements.” The league’s tech team provides Wilson with spreadsheets and drawings that must be followed to the decimal point to deliver ‘one-design’ parity across the fleet. Whether he is laying up pre-preg carbon fiber in a clean room or ‘cooking’ a front beam in a massive oven, the goal is to ensure that the most recently launched boat is identical to the first one. When disaster strikes on the water, as it frequently does in a league where 13 boats at full tilt are jostling for position on a tight racecourse, Wilson’s role swiftly shifts from construction to triage. Whether it was the Australian wing collapse in San Francisco last season or the high-speed collision between France and New Zealand earlier this year in Auckland, pulling an all-nighter is all part of the job. “When you see a crash live, you stay professional. You don’t blow up,“ he says. “You just go back to the tent and get prepared. If the boat comes in at 9:30pm, the boss might split the team. Half go home to sleep, the other half works until 5am. I actually like the intensity. You know exactly what you have to do. You do whatever it takes to get that boat back out of the shed and on the water again.” As SailGP prepares for its upcoming event this weekend in Bermuda, Wilson is returning home not as a spectator, but as an example of what’s possible. He is one of a trio of Bermudians, along with Bryce Williams in logistics and Andrew White in finance, who have established a place for themselves in SailGP’s global workforce. For Wilson, this trip home is a chance to see family and celebrate his birthday with a traditional dinner. It is also an opportunity to serve as a bridge for the next generation. “My friends tell me, ‘Keeron, you made it out. Stay away, stay traveling’,” he smiles. “But for any of my cousins or friends who say they want to do what I do, I tell them, ‘You have to have a passion for it’. You can learn the trade, but if you don’t love it, it’s just a job. This doesn’t feel like a job to me. I wake up, happy to come to a clean and professional environment, and see something that I built on TV, out there on the water, racing.” The ‘Bermudian mindset’, as Wilson describes it, is one of energy and friendliness, but he acknowledges that the island’s beauty can be a ‘gilded cage’ for young local talent: “People are comfortable on a beautiful island where the sun is shining and you can go to the beach every day. Why leave? But there are careers that aren’t in Bermuda. It’s not like you can be an astronaut (by staying in Bermuda). If people open their minds to a bigger world, they can just go.” Despite the allure of international travel, with the opportunity of following SailGP to all its glamorous destinations around the world, Wilson has chosen to spend more time this season back at the factory in the UK. His goal is to attain a more senior role, his long-term dream to become the mentor that the younger builders go to for advice. He says he has adjusted well to life in England, swapping the turquoise waters of the Atlantic for the gray buildings of Southampton’s city center, plus a growing passion for supporting Arsenal in the Premier League. Yet, the island never truly leaves him. When he lands in Bermuda a few days before the SailGP weekend, his priority after visiting family will be trying to catch some fish. “I’m going as soon as I land,“ he says, listing off local favorites such as snappers, turbots, coneys and tuna. “I grew up fishing every day. My best friend is a commercial fisherman now. I still fix his boat for him. We’ve been so far out you can’t even see the island, and he’ll say, ‘Keeron, you know this is the boat you fixed?’, and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, I know, bro’. As long as the engine works and there are no holes, I feel safe,” he laughs. After fishing and family, Wilson’s focus will return to rejoining his colleagues and maintaining the fleet of F50s, making sure they are race-ready for a high-octane weekend of competition back on the Great Sound. Somewhere across the water, he might even spot Calico Jack’s, the tourist boat where this great adventure began. And maybe serving drinks on board to the SailGP spectators, there might be another Keeron Wilson, about to be inspired. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms