Jon Burnham’s love of sailing began when he was young.
Growing up in Collingswood down the street from the Cooper River Yacht Club – he lives in the same house he grew up in – his curiosity peaked during a wander along the Cooper River.
“I ran into this guy at the Cooper River Yacht Club,” Burnham remembered, thinking the building was just a building with sail boats sitting around it. “The guy was cleaning the floor and I go, ‘Hey mister … what are you doing?”
“The guy turned out to be a commodore – the boss of the yacht club.”
Sure enough, the commodore got Burnham a crewing job on a boat on Sundays.
And that was that. His parents saw his interest and put him in lessons.
“I don’t remember really having a hard time figuring it out,” Burnham said of learning how to sail. “I do have a memory of not doing really well early on in competition.”
But the fire was lit … and still is lit 60-plus years later.
“That just took me over as a little kid,” Burnham said of sailing. “I always credit it with being somewhat of a savior for me that kept me from doing other things.”
Burnham has been competing in boats of all different types from a one-person boat called a laser to a J/29 with a crew of seven, which also includes his wife Tori and son Chaz.
In September, Burnham and his crew – Tori, Chaz, Bob MacCausland, Liz Irwin, Max Pignetti and Andrew Colemn – raced their J/29 Defiant in the Philadelphia Cup Regatta on Sept. 27.
The Regatta was presented by Sea Philly and the Independence Seaport Museum organized by the Liberty Sailing Club.
“It was a tiny little course so it was a lot of fun,” Burnham said.
The scenic 0.5-nautical-mile racecourse saw the PHRF and One-Design J/22 classes sail around the buoys just off Penn’s Landing and the Independence Seaport Museum with the Ben Franklin Bridge in the background. Winds averaged six knots out of the north-northeast.
“Starts are really important,” said Burnham, who is the driver. “[With a crew of seven] there’s a guy up front that literally calls the line telling the crew what they are supposed to do. Telling me how close to the line I can get before it’s 3, 2,1 start.
“The wind was horrible,” Burnham recalled. “It was not only coming from a different direction, it was going around in circles. And you’ve got this tide moving up and down, which you have to take that into account as far as to get to a mark.
“It was super challenging.”
In the end, Defiant championed the PHRF handicap class, which featured seven of the Liberty Sailing Club’s fleet of J/27s, in addition to Burnham’s J/29.
Burnham and his crew are members of the Riverton Yacht Club, who entered the regatta to support sailing in Philadelphia and support the Liberty Sailing Club. The Defiant team won three of four races, finishing with three points after one throw-out.
“It really is a well-oiled machine,” Burnham said of competing with a J/29. “If everybody doesn’t do exactly what they are supposed to do, something’s going to blow up, people can get hurt and things can break.”
But when everybody on a big boat is doing exactly what they need to do, that is when “the crew and boat become one,” he enthused.
Jon Burnham’s love of sailing began when he was young. He started competing in sail- ing when he was 10 years old. His J/29 Defiant, with a crew of seven, recently championed the PHRF class to win the Philadelphia Cup during the 2025 Philadelphia Cup Regatta.
The Riverton sailing season begins mid-May to mid-September and runs races Tuesday and and Wednesday nights or different types of boats. Burnham also competes in the Cooper River Yacht Club Frostbite Series, which runs laser races until two weeks after Thanksgiving.
“I could sail a J/22 [with a three-person crew] on Tuesday nights and jump in a J/29 [with a seven-person crew] on Wednesday nights,” he said. “It gives you more of a chance to compete with other people. It’s a rich competitive layout.”
Burnham serves as vice commodore at the Riverton Yacht Club.
“I’ve been sailing for a long time,” he said. “I got lucky in that my wife and I, we didn’t meet sailing, but we kind of got together sailing. That’s a big part of our lives.
“She cruises on different boats. She is the main sail handler on the big boat, which is a big job.”
Their son Chaz is in his mid-20s and has been on a sailboat essentially since he was born.
“My wife and I were sailing before we had a child,” Burnham said, adding when Chaz came along, they needed a bigger boat. “We found a junker, a 27-foot cruising boat, and worked on it all spring putting it together.
“Our son was crawling all around the deck, falling into holes. He grew up on a boat, he had no choice.
“He doesn’t even realize how ridiculously natural it is for him. He thinks everybody is like him.”
When the season ends, the boats are a work in progress for the next season.
“There’s always a lot of things to do on these boats,” Burnham explained. “Stuff is always breaking.”
Looking back on his 60-plus years of sailing, Burnham highlights a couple of long-distance races and the North American Championship and International Championship in Bermuda.
“It was the best time in the world,” Burnham fondly recalled. “Basically, you just race straight up the side of the island for about 15 to18 miles. Then you have to go through this cut with stone walls. There’s no breeze there.
“If you get there first, you probably win the race, but you could lose the race right there because some people could come in on a puff and blast by.”
And just like he was drawn to the sport of sailing, Burnham is helping to get the next generation into sailboats. Cooper River Yacht Club still hosts sailing lessons every summer.
“It’s kind of a hidden gem,” Burnham said of the Cooper River and all that it has to offer.
“Racing against people challenges you,” he added. “Every time you go sailing, you learn something, it’s just so much fun.”
When Burnham started competing, he remembers mapping visually the optimal path using dotted lines.
“When you start a race, you go against the wind,” he explained. “You have to sail into the wind. The problem with that, the sailboat can’t go straight into the wind. It has to go in a zig zag course, catching the wind on one side to the other.”
And competition after competition, nothing can beat the feeling of making the boat – whether a laser or a j/29 – go its absolute fastest.
“It’s crazy cool,” Burnham said.
For Defiant’s win of the PHRF class, they will have their name engraved on The Philadelphia Cup. The next Philadelphia Cup Regatta will be held in the Fall of 2026.
