Rulli Family Sailing Has Scare at Lightning World Championships

The Rulli family has sailing in their blood.

The late Roberto Rulli was a founding member of a sailing club in his native Italy, and passed his love of the sport on to his son, Francesco, who then passed it down to his three sons, Edoardo, Stefano and Cosimo. About seven years ago, the Rulli family, who live full time in Bronxville in Westchester County, brought their sailing expertise to the Southampton Yacht Club, near their part-time home on Tuckahoe Lane in Southampton.

Since then, they have been sailing regularly on the weekends in their boat of choice, lightnings, which are somewhat larger sailboats made to fit three people comfortably — perfect, Francesco Rulli said, for a family. Because of this, Rulli said, Southampton Yacht Club has one of the largest fleets of lightnings in the region.

Team Rulli’s boat is named Giovanna — after the family’s late matriarch, mother and grandmother of the family — and it sails in support of the Global Medical Relief Fund (GMRF), a nonprofit organization committed to bringing hope and help to children who are missing or have lost the use of their limbs, have been severely burned, or are otherwise damaged due to the atrocities of war, natural disaster or illness.

The Rullis created a pair of NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, to raise funds for GMRF. One of the NFTs is a photo taken of Giovanna, the team’s racing boat, with its spinnaker at full sail. On the spinnaker is the fleur-de-lis, the official emblem of Florence, Italy — Francesco’s hometown. Francesco took a photo with the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, who is holding the NFT. Francesco Rulli, who is the founder and CEO of Querlo, a customized artificial intelligence solutions company, said the NFT is a unique combination of tradition and technology being that the fleur-de-lis symbol is 2,000 years old.

Another NFT is a video of the Rulli team sailing in one of the Southampton Yacht Club’s races last month. Both NFTs can be found online and in the OpenSea app, a marketplace for NFTs, by searching “Giglio Mondiale” for the photo of the boat and “Sailing For GMRF” for the video of the boat sailing.

The Rullis have seen their fair share of success locally. This year alone, the family crew has sailed in 64 races at Southampton Yacht Club and has won 33 of them and has placed second in 18 of them. That success led to an invitation to the Lightning World Championships, which were hosted by the Carolina Yacht Club in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, this past May. Over the course of the four days of racing, the Rulli team saw myriad conditions, but on one of the days, saw winds range anywhere from 12 to 24 knots with large swells in the Atlantic Ocean.

It made for some intense sailing and led to a life-threatening moment for one of the Rulli’s crew members.

With 50 boats at the starting line of one of the races, a Canadian boat descended upon the Rulli boat. The Canadian crew “covered” the Rulli boat, which in sailing terms means came too close to their boat. So close that the two vessels touched and one of the Rulli crew members, Olmo Cerri, got his hat tangled in one of the Canadian’s boats sails, dragging him off the Rulli boat and into the choppy Atlantic waters.

Just like if the situation would have occurred on an open highway, the Canadian team cannot leave the scene of the “accident” and must help the person in the water, but they sailed off to continue the race. The Rullis, meanwhile, went back to get their now missing crew member, and thankfully the swells helped lead Cerri back to their boat — it was Stefano Rulli who helped pulled him back on board.

“Olmo’s hat got tangled, which then the other boat turned away to try and get out of there, basically, and dragged him off the boat, because the hat was tangled to his life jacket,” Stefano explained. “So then at that point he fell in the water and we had to go back and save him.

“I’ve never really sailed in conditions like that,” he added. “It’s also because it’s the open ocean I hadn’t really sailed like that before. [The wind] wasn’t that bad, I mean that didn’t help, but it was mainly the waves.”

After the race, the Canadian team, Francesco Rulli said, protested the race, accusing the Rulli team of attacking their boat. In the end, race officials disciplined the Canadian team.

“The irony is that they protested us. We weren’t really going to protest. After we saved him, we placed 38th, dead last,” Francesco Rulli said. “But after we came back, the Canadians got four disqualifications: one for coming down on us, another for touching us, another for bad sportsmanship, and another for abandoning a man in the water.”

Stefano, who was 14 years old at the time, was given the youngest sailor award at the World Championships. His younger brother, Cosimo, 11, is set to take on that role when the crew competes at this weekend’s North American Championships, hosted by the Sayville Yacht Club in Blue Point. With those races happening in the Great South Bay, the Rullis should not encounter the same conditions they did at the World Championships. But they’re also not afraid of some turbulence out on the waters. Francesco noted they capsize their boat a few times each summer.

“Once you have adrenaline and you’re competing, you can overcome some things,” he said. “We’re the only team here who every year we capsize once or twice, because when you push, push, push, things can happen. Once you capsize, that is basically the end of the day because you have to take the boat out of the water and recalibrate everything.

“But what happened in North Carolina, that was more of a life-threatening situation.”