Winners of Division One in this summer’s Seguin Island Trophy Race and the Boothbay Harbor Regatta, Ken and Ginny Colburn have been racing their Swan 42 Apparition in the New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup in Newport, R.I. this week.

Summer residents of Green Island in the Sheepscot, the Colburns, are avid competitors and generous supporters of youth sailing in the Boothbay region.

First held in 2009, the Invitational Cup is a biennial regatta for amateur sailors. Twenty yacht club teams from thirteen countries and five continents are competing in this year’s competition.

The Colburns’ team on Apparition bested four other teams to be selected for the honor of representing the New York Yacht Club at the starting line. Ken Colburn, two-time class national champion and winner of the Swan 42 division this year at Key West and Block Island Race Weeks, finished second overall in the 2011 Invitational Cup.

The racing is in NYYC Swan 42s, the eighth one-design class created by the New York Yacht Club since 1900. Unlike other one-design regattas, each team in the Invitational Cup uses the same sails. With the rig tuning locked as well, these keelboats are intentionally, and remarkably, evenly matched.

“I started putting this team together last fall, anticipating trying to win the eliminations, so that I would have a team that had a lot of experience together for the Invitational Cup should we be able to represent NYYC again,” Ken Colburn said before the race. “The team has come together very well. The chemistry is good, and the team is good.

“As sailors know, there are a lot of very good individual sailors, but it’s the chemistry of what you put together that counts, especially in this event.”

Neither foiling multihulls, nor extreme sailing, as are integral to the present day America’s Cup happening in San Francisco Bay, the 2013 NYYC Invitational Cup brings five days of intense international racing of a more traditional style to the East Coast this September. The races run September 10 through 14.