505 Euro Cup at Fraglia Vela Riva, Lake Garda, Italy - Day 1

Day one brought conditions that most competitors would have preferred not to have seen. Cold temperatures and heavy rain. At the morning briefing the Race Team told competitors that they saw a window for racing between 1 and 3pm. I'm pretty sure that looking out onto the lake, no one believed him. However, at noon the race team left the dock and headed out and against all our instincts we all followed out.

Turned out he was correct and we ended up having 3 good races in a 10-15 knot Northerly wind. Not classic Garda, but good none the less. With 43 boats from 10 countries on a crowded start line, considerable starting challenges befell the fleet. Race 1 saw an abandonment with a minute to go when a big shift and an over amped fleet were clearly going to be over the line. After a restart the race was on, Americans AJ Conrads and Jon Bell in their new boat set the pace to cross first, but they along with 11 other boats were scored UFD. That left Howie Hamlin and Peter Alarie from the USA to take the win from British team Mike Sims and Carl Gibbons and German Father and son team Tim and Finn Boger.

Race 2 followed a similar pattern, busy start, plenty of boats UFD'd but Brits Roger Gilbert and Ian Mitchell controlled the race from the first mark to take the win, AJ and Jon again going well to take second and Mike Holt and Rob Woelfel from the USA in third. Race 3 was started very promptly with the wind up a bit, rain getting heavier. Australian/British team of Mike Quirk and Tim Needham held off the challenge of British team Paul Brotherton and James Fawcett, with Mike and Carl having another good race to take 3rd.

After 3 races, a very muddled leader board sees the consistency of Mike and Rob leading from Roger and Ian and Paul and James third. Plenty of teams will be looking to get to race 5 and lose their UFD from the score, very much all still to play for!