RS Feva World Championships in Santander - Day 1
by Golly Tucker 26 Jul 2016 17:43 BST
24 July 2016
Day 1 of the RS Feva World Championships 2016 in Santander © Peter Newton /
www.peternewton.zenfolio.com
Tension and Relief. Show time. After the training, the prep, the travel, the registering, the scrutineering... it is now the chips are to be played.
Champagne stuff is very overused in sailing, but with temperature in the high twenties, 15kts average, 3 qualifying series races, your mates are your arch competitors it is at the very least aqua frizzante, or full fat coke and not the zero stuff. OK, after race one the wind did ease off and by race 3 it was more like 8-10kts.
Following the 12 practice race general recalls the fleet behaved for the first championship start – all three fleets got away first time. Happy PRO keeping the U & Black flags in the box!
Freddie Peters & Louis Johnson, the newly crowned UK champions continued their blitz of races taking an impeccable 3 bullets on day 1. Given that three fleets were racing it would be remiss to not point out that Charles Elliott/Ethan Miles scored 1,1,2 for second and Jack Lewis/Lucas Marshall pulled in a 1,1,3 to be 3rd overnight.
Leading juniors after day 1 are William Pank/Finlay Dickenson from Norwich school in 6th. Pablo Fernandez/Laureano are top locals with Mattia Zinetti/Davide Carbonelli top Italians. Mattia is, we think, competing in his 6th RS Feva Worlds as both crew and helm! Pushing them hard are New Zealanders Eli Liefting/Rose Dickson who in turn have Oscar Andersson/Ragnar Alfredsson from Sweden breathing down their necks.
Given the closeness of points there could be great variations in rankings tomorrow. In principle the 162 boats who have made the start line will be divided into Gold, Silver and Bronze fleets after racing tomorrow. At present the top of the leaderboard has GBR, ESP, NZL, SWE, ITA, NED, CZE, RUS and USA making the gold fleet cut. So it is still all to do on Tuesday.
The results [PDF] are - at the time of writing - only provisional as there are 5 protests being heard.
More news tomorrow folks. Stay tuned on the RS Feva Facebook page for frequent videos and updates!
Thanks to PA Consulting, Allen Performance Sailing and RS Sailing/LDC for their generous sponsorship.