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News from Team Racing Europeans Lake Ledro - Final Reports
Following a good performance at the Europeans in The qualifiers got underway yesterday in a light breeze which gradually built during the day to about 8 knots. In the camp today, spirits were high. We hoped for three race wins but with very strong teams opposing us it was always going to be a big challenge. The team gave their best against Starting tomorrow, there will be 4 days of fiercely contested team racing to decide the European Champions. Teams qualified for this event by their results at the IODA European Fleet ENDS
Day 2: wind picked up. Change of format... second round robin, so we are still in for a top 4 position... 10 races planned for us today
Day 3
It was to be a long day for the iRish with 10 match on the program! actually the format had changed cancelling phase two (gold and silver) and offering us a new full round robin with all teams counting double points. The irish started pretty poorly letting Italy run away with the first win. But the reaction was excellent as they took the four following match in a row (Germany, Sweden, Croatia and Norway). Poland and Belgium ran away from them but they then gave a solid match to Russia only loosing by a slim margin. The fighting spirit was there highlighted by Tara winning a tacking duel with the smallest (very small) Russian sailor in barely 3 kts. the next match against Turkey looked well until Tara collected a controversial red flag on the run. the last beat was pretty intense but the Irish team missed the win for a point. We had set our target on 5 wins for the day, so we had to take the Dutch out. It suited us well as we still had it sore from day one and the team was really fired up to take that one... and Colm and his team almost got the perfect sheet. 1-2-3-5! The Dutch tried everything ashore to overturn it as they believed an empire had done a mistake in one of the calls to spoil a great end to our day, but thankefully it went nowhere. So we achieved our daily target of 5 wins. Unfortunately, the teams we were in direct competition with for overall places also did well, so we only overtook one team and now lie 8th. A few stats so far! Ireland won 8 match out of 20 Ireland progressing from round one (3 wins) to round two (5 wins) Ireland was leading 14 match before the last beat Ireland collected the most individual recalls (oops): 11 Colm is one of the most active sailor in giving penalties out. Best score when he gave turns to two Belgiums within 3 seconds of each other! Ireland is the happiest team outthere and definitely the least stressed! Not bad for a team that had 3 hours training together the day before flying to Ledro? After two round Robin 1st Russia 27pts 2nd Italy 19pts 3rd Norway 19pts 4th Turkey 18pts 5th Poland 15pts 6th Croatia 15pts 7th Belgium 15pts 8th IRELAND 13pts 9th Nederland 12pts 10th Sweden 6pts 11th Germany 6pts
Today, the wind really strugled to materialise and priority was given to the semi finals/finals involving only the top 4 teams. Ireland however was given one opportunity to overtake Belgium for 7th... The match did not start well with the Belgiums running away with 1-2-3-7. But the Irish were not to give up without a fight and Amy managed to squeeze back to 3rd on the run whilst Tara took the belgium in 7th out allowing Seafra to squeeze back to 6th... Amy still had hard job to do in trying to dropp the belgium in 4th all the way to 7th. she unfortunately did not succeed in her attempt and the Irish were beaten once more by the Belgiums. Up front, Turkey created the first upset by taking the Russian team out by 2 wins to one. Norway secured their place against them by winning against Italy. Norway kept their good form to take the title whilst Italy pushed Russia out of the podium. Overall it was a very positive campaign for the IRish team with hips of learning. seafra had the last word in saying "sailing was hard, competitive and we actually beat the champion Norway twice out of two matches..." |
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