Blokarts Sailed on Wildwood Beach

WILDWOOD – Take four days, bright, blue skies, a good breeze, 35 blokarts, Wildwood’s white sandy beach, and what do you have? The perfect weekend for 50 blokart aficionados.
Blokarts have been sailing down Wildwood’s beach for several years, said Francis Gramkowski of Haddonfield. Gramkowski was instrumental in organizing the first Wildwood Beach Blokart Sail. The event was not a race, he noted, but an event to allow blokarters to sail their land yachts on a beach.
“We don’t race them, we just ride them,” Gramkowski said. He added in addition to riding on the beach, blokarts can also be ridden in parking lots as well as dry lake beds.
“There was a couple from Canada here,” he said, “And they couldn’t believe how great it was sailing on the beach.”
Gramkowski, however, is a veteran of riding the Wildwood beach. “This was my eighth time sailing on a beach.”
Developed in New Zealand in 1999, blokarts are small, maneuverable land yachts that can be disassembled without tools and stored in a car’s trunk or taken on an airplane as luggage.
According to Gramkowski, the weekend couldn’t have been better. “We had perfect wind,” he said, noting the need for a 10 mph breeze. “We were spoiled.” Even with the perfect wind, timing was key for the event. “We sail within the tide line so timing is critical,” he noted.
With a deserted beach before them, the 35 blokarts and their operators made full use of the weekend. “We sailed four miles on the beach,” said Gramkowski. “Some people even went 150 miles over the course of the weekend.”
As the brightly-colored land sailers made their way down the beach, several onlookers from the Boardwalk who made their way to water’s edge were treated to a ride in a blokart.
With a seatbelt to hold them in, beach sailors found themselves becoming one with nature. “It’s amazing,” said Gramkowski when asked to describe the experience. “It’s just you, the wind and the quiet.”
“We gave about 20 people a ride,” Gramkowski said, noting the ease of learning to operate the hand-steered land yacht. “It’s a very easy learning curve. It’s a fun thing that anyone can do.”