Waka Racing in action in Bermuda. Image copyright Subzero Images/WMRT.
by Garth Ellingham
With so many teams competing at the Gold Cup it meant we weren’t out racing today until the afternoon. Conditions were once again patchy with sailing the shifts taking presidence over all else. Each group completed 3 races and have one reamining tomorrow to complete the round robin.
For us it was a tough day. It started well with a comfortable victory over veteran Terry McLaughlin, after we managed to nail a couple of good shifts up the first beat.
Next up was current World Tour leader Mathieu Richard who had just come off a black flag defeat and was fired up. Unfortunately we felt the full force of the frenchmans frustration coming off the line slower than him. From here we tried everything to get past him and we did pick a couple of nice shifts to close up the lead but in these conditions the boat in front has a lot of power to pick and choose where to go. First lose.
Our last race of the day was against hot shot Danish match racer Jesper Radich. We had an intense prestart where we did a nice job of coming in on the disadvantaged port entry and getting across Jesper’s bow. From here we did well leading back to line and we thought we had completely nailed Jesper late for the start and underneath the commitee boat lay line. Unfortunately for us the umpires ruled we did not keep clear of Jesper when he tried to luff and make the committee boat unsuccessfully and they gave us a double penalty. This meant we had to complete one of our turns immediately and effectivley ended the race from the start.
So overall a pretty frustrating day as we completely disagreed with the penalty call as the umpires don’t seem to understand whatis and isn’t possible in these boats. However we will suck it up and move on. We have one more match left tomorrow against a familiar face in Bjorn Hansen with the winner moving on into the repechage.
Results Group 1 Day 2:
Radich 5-1
Canfield 5-1
Richard 2.5-3
Robertson 3-3
Hansen 2-4
MacGregor 2-4
Buckley 2-4
McLaughlin 2-4
Waka Racing would like to thank our main sponsor Tax Management NZ and all the support we receive from the RNZYS, Frontend, Zhik , Wells and Co, PredictWind and Devine Consultants.
WAKA RACING is Phil Robertson, Garth Ellingham, James Williamson and Sam Bell.
Waka Racing
World Match Racing Tour
