2025 Open Finn European Championship at Circolo del Remo e della Vela Italia - Day 2
by Robert Deaves 10 Apr 00:28 BST
5-12 April 2025
Valerian Lebrun, from France, has extended his lead at the 2025 Open Finn Europeans in Naples, Italy, to nine points. Estonia's Deniss Karpak is up to second with Italy's Arkadii Kistanov down one place in third. The race wins went to Peter Peet and Kistanov.
After a short wait ashore for the sea breeze to fill in the sailors set out at 12.15 for two more races in a solid breeze building to 12-15 knots. Race 3 took several attempts to get under way with a number of boats picking up a black flag disqualification. After that it was all plain sailing.
Eventually the left side paid on the first beat with those starting at the pin rounding ahead. Australia's Paul McKenzie rounded first from Peter Peet from The Netherland and Australia's Rob McMillan. Peet went further left downwind and took the lead, while Britain's Lawrence Crispin moved up to second on the next lap with Germany's Fabian Lemmel crossing third.
It was a similar situation in the Race 4 with McMillan coming in from the left to round the top mark just ahead of Kistanov and Italy's Nicola Capriglione. This time Kistanov took the lead downwind and maintained it to win his second race of the series. Lebrun was playing catch up again and moved into second on the last downwind with McMillan in third.
While Italy's Federico Colaninno is leading the U29 Championship in tenth place overall, two of the other U29 sailors are having a great event so far. Germany's Jonas Jung has been leading various initiatives with the U29 groups recently. He picked up two top ten placings on the first day and now sits in 28th overall after a difficult second day.
He said, "My day was not too bad and not too good either. I built my expectations after having a very good day of racing yesterday, but then again conditions today were extremely different. Today we had a nice thermal breeze, which is what I think we're expecting for the next days. Naples is treating us nicely; we had a sea breeze with a lot of pressure. The championship is perfectly organised and obviously the scenery is insane; sailing under Mount Vesuvius is so iconic."
In 24th overall and only sailing his third ever Finn regatta, 20 year old Michal Gonciarz from Poland said, "My day was pretty tough. I got a yellow flag after the first start, and that made me lose a lot of positions, but fortunately, the second race was much better for me, scoring a top 20 result, so I'm pretty happy also because this is my first big Finn class regatta, and my third Finn regatta overall.
"I am just enjoying the time and the opportunity to sail against so many great sailors. I really like the class so far. I've only completed in Polish events, so this makes me even happier about the result. Hopefully conditions will get lighter as I'm a light Finn sailor myself."
Racing is scheduled to continue at 13.00 on Thursday with a similar forecast expected. The championship concludes on Saturday.
Results after Day 2: (top ten, 2 races)
1 FRA 111 Valerian Lebrun 12pts
2 EST 2 Deniss Karpak 21pts
3 ITA 51 Arkadii Kistanov 31pts
4 AUS 2 Rob McMillan 33pts
5 FRA 75 Laurent Hay 34pts
6 GBR 74 Lawrence Crispin 36pts
7 ITA 1103 Alessandro Marega 41pts
8 HUN 808 Kristóf Kaiser 51pts
9 GER 501 Fabian Lemmel 52pts
10 ITA 71 Federico Colaninno 52pts
Full results available here.
Full gallery available here.