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Nacra17 multihull campaigners Jason Saunders and Gemma Jones report in on the recent Nacra17 World Championships, where they placed 9th and what’s on next…
We are back in New Zealand again and recovering from a hard Europe trip and a bit of jet-lag! It’s been a successful trip and we are both very happy with how things panned out.
With the World Championships as our pinnacle event of the year we wanted to come into it feeling ready to tackle any conditions and come away with a good result. We had a great lead-up to the worlds by doing the Kiel regatta in Germany, followed by 3 weeks of training at the worlds venue in Scheveningen, Holland. Kiel went well for us, we had a lot of good races and managed to place 6th overall. We knew what we needed to work on after the regatta and along with the other kiwis, Tomer and Nicole, we teamed up with the Argentinian’s to do some speed testing and work on our boat handling. This was great training and we got a variety of conditions to practice in. It was a pretty full on few weeks, with plenty of time on the water or in the gym, and also spending a lot of time fine tuning the systems we wanted on our boat. With one week to go before the event, we met our coach Anton who was with us for the worlds. Anton won a gold medal in Beijing in the Tornado class for Spain, and had a tonne of experience to share with us. It was great to have someone to help us analyse our sailing, and we learned a lot in the short space of time we were with him. We felt like we had done a good job preparing for the regatta and were looking forward to getting started!
Unfortunately the theme of the regatta was sit back and wait.. with light winds forecasted all week, the weather really tested our patience and we got very good at putting our sails up and down! Throughout the qualifying series we only managed to get in a handful of races and we knew every race was going to be important. We started off very well and going into the gold fleet we were in 8th overall. Our speed was very encouraging for us, and we felt comfortable racing in any conditions. We also were managing to get off the line cleanly and enjoying the racing out there! The first day of gold fleet once again saw us waiting around a lot, before finally they sent us out late in the day in a tricky light breeze. We sailed well in the race and came away with a solid 7th pace. This put us in a great position going into the final day before the medal race. We were in 5th and close to a podium if things went our way.
The day turned out to be a very frustrating one for us. In the first race we were in a good position going down the last downwind, when a shift and a new breeze come in and dropped us 8 places to a disappointing 18th. We then got sent in quickly as thunderstorms were approaching and waited patiently on shore while the passed by. We managed to get out for one more race and were keen to put the last race behind us. It started off pretty well and we rounded the top mark in the top bunch. Somehow the race really got away from us though.. We made a decision to follow the leaders on the next upwind and split off from the likes of the Suisse and French who were right behind us. As it turned out things did not go well for us here! At the next mark we were way back in about 14th place while the Suisse rounded in second! It was just one of those days unfortunately. This meant we had dropped to 9th overall after the day and felt like a good opportunity to get on the podium passed us by. That was where we would stay as the medal race day was again frustratingly cancelled due to lack of wind. Nonetheless there were so many positives to take away from the regatta and it was great to have made the top 10.
After packing our boat into the container and having a good night out at the local bar we were off in a hurry back home! It has been a fantastic year for us and we never would have expected to be so competitive after such a short time in the boat together. We know we have a lot we can work on and we are very excited about the next 3 years on our road to Rio!
For me personally, I am off again to San Francisco tomorrow as I write this (8th August), and am starting on a new adventure! The Redbull Youth Americas Cup starts on the 1st September, and I will be joining the rest of the team to start training in the incredibly fast and challenging AC45’s! It is definitely going to be a different style of sailing to what we are all used to, and we can’t wait to make the most of the opportunity. We have had a huge amount of support from a lot of people who donated through the thrill pledge project and can’t wait to show everyone what we can do!
A big thanks has to go to the whole Jones family for helping us out over there! Especially Jan for doing an outstanding job cooking for us and doing all the shopping and jobs we didn’t like doing!
I would also like to thank all of our supporters for being behind us and making this all possible!
Thanks to; Kaenon Sunglasses, Donaghy’s, ThreeBond, Zhik, Langford Optometrists, Yachting New Zealand.
