Friday, January 22, 2010

Andrew Campbell on the 2010 Star Worlds


Photo by Friedbits.com

11th Overall at 2010 Star World Championships

Yesterday capped off a tricky 2010 Star World Championships. From the first race of the regatta inside the confines of Rio’s Guanabara Bay to nasty swirling current mixed with ocean slop, the racing was extremely testing at times for even the best sailors at the event.

Yesterday was not in the regular seabreeze pattern. When we arrived on the course, the wind had already filled from the southwest in anticipation of a small trough of weather. We were able to start in the 210 direction, but as we went up the first beat, the clouds moving over head quickly burned off revealing yet another 95 degree day. Brad and I had a great start near the boat-end of the line, tacked and crossed to the right side of the course. Ultimately we were crossed by only three boats in the final few hundred yards of the course from the left side of the fleet. Because the current was finally not pushing us upwind, the 2.1 mile windward beat took almost 45 minutes.


The race took nearly three hours to complete, and the final direction for the last beat was almost 100 degrees left of where we started. In retrospect as the clouds burned off the breeze started to trend left towards the normal seabreeze direction. We made a critical error on the second beat letting too many boats get left of us, and were only able to hold onto a 14th place finish in the race. We were able to hold off Percy and Simpson as they sailed across the line for their World Championship, and were able to put some serious points on a number of other teams that were deep in the race allowing us to move up the leaderboard to 11th overall, one point out of tenth and only three behind Robert Scheidt and Bruno Prada in 9th.

If you take a look at the results list, it provides a pretty good “box score” analysis of how difficult the event was. It was not uncommon for sailors that finished in the top ten to have 30s, 40s, even 50s in their series.

Today we will pack up the boats into containers and hopefully have them ship back to the US before Bacardi Cup in about 8 weeks. Next up, I will be coaching Charlie Buckingham at Miami OCR.

Good times in Rio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0lRYMQO3ic