The presence of William Bahen, a finance industry dropout turned bartender with a vision of bringing democratized sailing to Manhattan, does not immediately evoke a biblical character.

But in this instance, he can’t help himself.

“I feel like Job, man,” the 34-year-old said jokingly as he pushed a 2,000-pound Rainbow 24 sailboat on a trailer into place on a launching dock in the Bronx. “But I’m doing it for the kids.”

This week, Mr. Bahen will sail his fleet of four sailboats from the Bronx to Pier 66 in Chelsea, where he will inaugurate the Hudson River Community Sailing program, a free sailing and maritime education organization targeting urban youth.

Next month, Mr. Bahen will be offering youth who are affiliated with various partner programs throughout the city free sailing lessons and the opportunity, as he explains it, to see the city of New York from a viewpoint that many of them don’t often get.

“We want to get as many kids as possible out there so they can see the city from the perspective of the water,” he said.

For Mr. Bahen and his partner in the endeavor, Sean Patch, there was nothing coincidental about choosing sailing as their vehicle for both leisure and education.

“Sailing, by its nature, is exclusionary,” Mr. Patch, a teacher of math and science at Bayard Rustin High School in Chelsea, said. “And so the question becomes how do you increase accessibility to people who have never had the opportunity to sail.”

This fall, HRCS will offer students from Bayard Rustin science and engineering credits by participating in an educational sailing program. Organizers expect to sign up more high schools in the coming weeks.

The idea of a free sailing program for inner city youth was born as much from Messrs. Bahen and Patch’s shared passion for the sea as from their own professional wanderings.

After college Mr. Bahen worked at a startup in Boston, then in financial sales for his friend’s father.

“And I came to work one day and I was just like, I am not liking this. I needed to figure out what I really want to do,” Mr. Bahen said.

He worked as a camp counselor and gave free sailing lessons at a sailing center in Connecticut.

“And I was like, what a cool concept. There were no commodores, or blue blazers walking around. It was just a visceral sailing experience,” he said.

When the Hudson River Park Trust put out a request for proposals for Pier 66, which was already outfitted with boat slips in 2006, Mr. Bahen saw his chance. He quickly put together a board of directors and recruited Mr. Patch, whom he had first met while working at Outward Bound.

The four 24-foot Rainbows that make up his fleet were donated to him by the Annapolis Sailing School. Mr. Bahen’s various responsibilities include towing the boats one by one from Annapolis, helping sand and paint them, organizing a June 5 fundraiser on a boat docked on the Hudson, and operating a forklift. Mr. Bahen, who tends bar Saturday nights in the West Village, is stretching his meager resources.

“I don’t have a fund-raising board, I don’t have an auction committee. We’re doing all of this,” he said.

The next challenge will be generating interest in sailing among New York youth whose experience on the Hudson is likely limited.

“It’s all about presenting the idea of hands-on sailing that will bring kids out,” a 17-year old senior at Bayard Rustin High School, Shawn Maclorrain, said. Mr. Maclorrain was one of the four seniors who came out to help prepare the boats for their launch, sanding, scraping, and cleaning on the docks of the SUNY Maritime College, underneath the Throgs Neck Bridge. None of the four high school students present that day had ever sailed.

“Nobody wants to watch somebody sail. You want to be controlling it. In the classroom, you are just watching someone teach you about math. This way you get to sail and see it all for yourself,” Mr. Maclorrain said.

Mr. Patch, who once sailed from Maine to the Caribbean — much of it solo — says there are many applicable lessons to be gleaned from sailing and navigation. In the math and science textbooks he teaches from he says he has encountered hundreds of maritime references in the text. “They use these references as ‘real world’ experiences. But that is just not applicable to many New York City students, most of them have never been sailing. So there is this disconnect between publishers and the students, and so we are like, let’s just give them that experience,” he said.

The organization’s Web site is www.hudsonsailing.org.