Who We Are
The Jong School has run twice a year, every year, since 2012 — the Utara race under the northeast monsoon, the Selatan race under the southwest wind that follows it. What began as a single afternoon in Teluk Bakau, organized by Michel Lippitsch together with the late Zakir, a local elder who spent his life among these boats, has grown into one of Bintan’s few genuinely grassroots cultural events: unmanned, hand-carved sailboats no longer than a child, raced across shallow water on nothing but wind and craft.
Fifteen years in, the tradition is still standing on the same beach, still run by the same community, still asking sponsors for exactly what it asked for at the start — a little help to keep something alive that would otherwise have quietly disappeared.
Why This Still Matters
Jong racing traces back to the kolek sauh, a working sailboat once found the length of the Riau Archipelago, and further back still to offerings once carried out to the sea’s own spirits — betel nut, betel leaves, rice, sent afloat in exactly this shape of hull. The Orang Suku Laut, the sea nomads who once governed these waters entirely, carried the tradition forward for generations before modern life pushed most of them onto land they never chose.
Less than a century ago, this whole archipelago sat at the crossing point of world trade between east and west, its waters full of sail. Almost none of that remains today — a handful of provincially funded races, a few fishing canoes, and, holding on against all of it, the jong. We’re not trying to preserve a museum piece. We’re trying to keep something in active use — sailed, argued over, rebuilt, raced again the following season.
What 2027 Looks Like
The core of the day stays what it’s always been: the Selatan race itself, divided by hull size, run in heats until a handful of finalists cross the line between two posts, decided by inches as often as by wind.
Around that core, the day’s grown into something closer to a festival than a single competition: a children’s category, now a fixture rather than an experiment, with prizes of school supplies and small jongs rather than cash, so no child races for stakes that outweigh the point of racing at all; demonstrations through the day of tuning, rigging, and reading wind and tide, run by the same builders and racers who actually do it for a living; evening performances that have grown stranger and better every year — traditional dangkung dance alongside contemporary and avant-garde work, Malay music, and, in recent years, a piece choreographed and danced by the school’s own children; a market of local food and craft, run by the same families who’ve always fed this event, generation after generation; and an opening offering in the Sekapur Sirih tradition — betel leaf and lime, respect and hospitality — the same gesture the jong itself was originally built to carry out to sea.
What We’re Asking For
We’re seeking sponsors, in cash or in kind, to cover the costs a fifteen-year-old grassroots tradition still can’t cover on its own: prize money across both adult and children’s categories, materials for the youth building sessions, transport for villages who’d otherwise be priced out of attending, and the basic hospitality — food, shade, water — that makes a full day on an open beach possible for several hundred people.
We keep the branding at these events deliberately quiet. No logos strung across the boats or the beach — sponsors are thanked by name and by presence, not by advertising. It’s a harder balance to hold than it sounds, and we only manage it because the sponsors who’ve stayed with us understand exactly why it matters. Nikoi Island has backed this event for years now on precisely those terms, and it remains one of the reasons this tradition still exists in a form worth protecting.