Roy E. Disney passed away December 16, 2009 at the age of 79 after battling stomach cancer. He leaves as one of his many legacies the movie Morning Light, a story about a team of young sailors selected for an opportunity of a lifetime. The movie, produced by Roy Disney, traces their story as they are selected and trained to race in one of the premier sailing events, the Trans-pacific ocean race, known as the transpac.

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I just watched this movie again for the second time since its release, and liked it more than ever. In my opinion, this is the best sailing movie available. It is filmed as a reality-show, documentary and as such gives a pretty honest feeling to the show. There are elements of instruction, camaraderie, ups and downs and loads of sailing footage. The movie starts with the selection process and quickly moves to the sailors training in safety and handling the TP 52 racing sailboat they have been given to race. All the young sailors have previous sailing experience, however the amount varies greatly, from two years to their whole life. The initial group of 15 is selected by the sailing professionals involved with the project and later the team self-selects the remaining 11 who will race to Hawaii after having a chance to sail with each other. The camera work by the twelfth non-crew member, Richard Deppe, is amazing as well, my favorite shot being when one of the competitors comes up on the young groups stern after having been on their own in the race for some time.

The movie did not do particularly well critically or at the box office, however if you are a sailor I think you will like this movie. It shows many aspects of off-shore racing and was very interesting for me to watch having never been off-shore myself. I have been putting off buying this dvd because I want to get it in blu-ray and we don’t have a blu-ray player yet. But when we do you can bet this will be the first movie we get.

TP52 Sailing in Morning Light movie.