ISAF Women's Match Racing World Championship

The ISAF Womens's Match Racing World Championships are taking place in Kinsale, Co. Cork this June. The event will see the best all female match racing teams fighting for the world title from the 3rd until the 8th of June.

Two wild card entries have been allocated for Irish teams to compete at the event. There has been interest from a number of Irish teams who want to compete at the worlds. Therefore a qualifying event is being run this Sunday, 11th of April, in Howth Yacht Club to decide who will earn to right to represent Ireland at the World's in June.

In the run up to the qualifier I have been spending some time with one of the teams preparing for the event. Below are a few picture from our training session this morning. We did a lot of pre-start work and tacking practice, before working on some kite work later in the day. It was a great session for everyone and it was really nice to get some two boat training in. Hopefully this recent interest in Match racing in Ireland will continue into the future.

Royal Southern Match Cup

After a great summer of racing on the West Coast I flew straight from the seeing America's Cup in San Francisco to Hamble, for Royal Southern Yacht Club grade 3 match racing event.
Myself, Ryan, Luke and Sam joined back together after a few months doing our own sailing around the world. We chose the event to get some racing practice in J80's before the Student Yachting World Cup. Which was 3 weeks later as well as to gain some more match racing experience.

Day 2 - Windless Solent

It had been a while since we sailed together and that was certainly reflected in our results. Racing started in around 10 knots on Saturday and we were straight back in to it. Our teamwork and boat handling was a bit rusty during the first few races of the day.  We lost our first four matches of the day and we were beginning to think it would be a very long day. However we turned things around for the second half of the day.  We improved massively as the day went on and managed to find more and more boat speed in every race while our boat handling became a lot slicker too. We went on to win our remaining 5 races of the day.

Unfortunately that was all the racing completed at the Royal Southern Match Cup as day 2 saw the Solent completely windless for the whole day. We sat out on the race course until the early afternoon before the decision was made to abandon racing for the day.

The overall results were decided from Saturdays round robin results and we came away with 4th place. Although we only got to complete one day of racing we were still happy with our progress.

Our aim for the event was to get comfortable sailing asymmetric J80's and to get our boat handling down before we went to France. Match racing is ideal for improving boat handling due to the amount of maneuvers completed in a short space of time and by the end of Saturday we were pretty happy with out boat handling.

It was also really useful for me to get back into match racing before I headed to Germany for the Youth Europeans the following day.

The Team at the Royal Southern YC with HYC Burgee

Irish Match Racing National Championships

The format for the Irish Match Racing National Championships was changed in 2012. The title would now be decided through a challenge event. This meant that any team could challenge the current national champion for the title. Which is exactly what we did. The event was sailed in J80's in our home club of Howth. We took on the 2011 champions, Team Top Gun, in what was effectively a first to 3 points championship.

The weight limit just about allowed us to sail with a crew of 5.  We had the same team as from Nantes a few weeks earlier, with the addition of Graham, who helped out on the bow and in the cockpit. We had been sailing the boats quite a lot in the run up to the event, doing Wednesday night races and training at the weekends, so were were really happy with our boat handling and speed. 

 The racing took place in relatively flat water outside Howth Harbor, with about 15-18 knots of breeze. We started the series well, getting a penalty on Team Top Gun in the pre-start of race 1. They lead off the line, but they couldn't find enough room to shed their penalty before the finish. In race two we came from behind and gained the lead after a big luffing battle on the first downwind leg. We extend our lead around the course and took a comfortable win.

We just needed one more win to completes the series. But the third race started badly for us. We got a penalty in the pre-start for a port-starboard infringement. The two boats split off the start line. We headed out to the left hand side of the course and managed to gain enough of a lead to fit in a penalty turn on the port lay line. We crossed ahead and lead around the top mark. From there we managed to hang on to the lead and took the win in race 3, making us the new Irish Match Racing National Champions!

We all had high expectations coming in the event so there was a great sense of relief when we crossed the finish line in race 3. We were also delighted to have won the title.

We look forward to defending the title in the future.