WORLD YOUTH CHAMPS
IT WAS AN EXPERIENCE WE WILL NEVER FORGET .
CENTREBOARD
After Sophie and I qualified for the ISAF Youth Worlds in Langkawi , Malaysia . We spent hours upon hours on the water training for this prestigious event . We really wanted to perform well on an international stage and worked hard at being as best prepared for the event as we can .
It was our first day in Langkawi , the whole team gathered in the lobby of the hotel at 7:30am to carry out some fitness and get an insight of the area in which we were situated on the island . The air was hot and sticky 29 degrees and 60 % humidity . What caught the whole team by surprise was the amount of wind there was as we woke up . It was gusting up to 20 knots . Most of the team thought it was going to be light winds for the whole regatta but we were excited and motivated to get out there on the water . On 27th of December we got allocated the boats for the regatta , but for us , there was only 8 boats with 16 teams racing in the SL16s so this meant for us to share boats . The worse part of all was that for the next two days we had no boats to set up or sail due to missing sails and rigging . This was frustrating as all the other competitors had their boats and were setting them up and the SL16s could not rig up . We both backed each other and stayed positive , realising there was nothing we could do in our situation and reminded ourselves that “ everyone is in the same boat ,” literally . Within these first few days we hanged about the hotel and backed our other teammates who were competing and assisting them in all possible ways .
Our first day of racing we were in the yellow SL16 fleet , we hit the water at 10am in the morning , knowing the little experience we have had in the boat and up to 20 knots forecast we were first out on the race course . We had certain goals for this day , with no expectation going into this regatta we wanted to keep the boat going fast and own the starts .
Richard Aspland from World Sailing wrote “ Shaun Connor and Sophie Renouf ( AUS ) took the first two bullets of the class schedule , but it was more of a shock as today was the first time the team had been on an SL16 .” Richard also interviewed us at the end of the day with Sophie concluding “ Coming into the regatta we had never sailed the boat before , so we had been training on a few different boats to get used to not having a feel for the boat and knowing rig tensions etc , and it worked out
58 YACHTSMAN