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