Italian Match Race Championships

Alexander Heinzman, Kyle Martin, Eric Servais and Cameron Ho attended the Italian Jr match race regatta in Italy, here is there report:

We got invited again to attend the Italiana Cup Match racing regatta, this was my third year attending the event and second year skippering. For the rest of the team; Kyle Martin, Eric Servais, Cameron Ho; it was the second year attending this event. Kyle and I flew in directly from the Laser Junior worlds not giving us a lot of time to prepare.

The first race we sailed we made some unnecessary mistakes and thus lost our first match. We improved every match we sailed, and ended the round robin in third place; we fought hard in the semi final and led off the start in the first race, but got passed downwind by the British team, although we managed to keep it close all the way to the finish. In the second match, of three, semi-final we had a decent start and first lap, but lost distance when we had a poor mark rounding at the leeward mark.

The next day we fought for third place against the best Italian team. We won the first pre-start and led to the first mark, though we got passed downwind due to the fact that we did not notice the leeward mark was skewed to the wind. At the leeward mark, we forced them close to the mark and covered their wind, as a result we managed to make them do a slow speed, wide rounding letting us sneak inside the mark.

We led to the next windward mark and after a nice gybe set we managed to win the first race. In the Second race, we again led off the start and through an aggressive move by the Italians gained them a penalty though they did manage to take the lead by doing so and thus I was very surprised when they did not receive a red flag.

When they rounded the leeward mark, the Italians made sure that we didn’t think of going inside them again by shooting up into the wind as they rounded the mark. By doing this they slowed down significantly letting us shoot out underneath them when we rounded outside of them.

When we reached the port lay line they were too close for us to tack in front so we had to wait for them to tack first and go towards the mark. I was very surprised when they tried to give us a penalty and even more when they did their penalty and came back at us on starboard, but because of how we had positioned ourselves before they had completed their penalty gybe they did not give us enough room to avoid them and we had to avoid before they had gained right of way.

So we put up the Y flag and the umpire flagged the Italians giving them another penalty just seconds after they cleared their last one. We lead the rest of the race and ended up taking third.

At the end of the event I personally was very happy with how we had performed and I think the rest of the team was as well. We improved a lot throughout the event and considering how much preparation we had, we did perform well.

I would like to thank Tony Martin for coaching us at this event; his knowledge of keel boats was invaluable.