After a long and hopeful wait the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda’s Race Committee was finally forced to postpone racing in the Moby M30 World Championship scheduled to be sailed off Porto Cervo, Sardinia overnight.
The wind off the north-eastern coast of Sardinia did just about everything today except remain stable, including going completely round the compass, not once, but twice, and ranging from 2 to 16 knots.
At around 4.30 pm the fleet began to take position for a start, encouraged by 12 to 15 knots of fairly stable easterly wind. As the 39 boats lined up the wind shifted 20° left causing a bunch-up at the leeward end and then dropped out to 3 knots. At this point the Race Committee had no choice but to send the weary crews home.
Back on the docks the fleet’s only Australian competitor, RSYS member Guy Stenning, was satisfied with the performance of his Optimumm which came in second in the pre-worlds races and is currently sitting in sixth place overall.
“I’m very happy so far, the first race was a bit of a disaster for us, as you can see from the results, we came in 21st,” Stening explained. “We were running third in the second race until we got no room around the top mark and we touched the mark and had to do our turns, that pushed us back to eighth.
“We had a fantastic race in the last race yesterday, we led all the way round the course; we had a wonderful run on the finishing run, the wind got up to about 21 knots and we were smoking!”
Stening was also quietly confident about the rest of the week. Adding: “We just want to keep improving and hopefully come out with a better result than we did in the pre worlds! Everybody here is good though, there are a lot of very very talented sailors here so it’s a very very hard competition.”
Tomorrow’s weather forecast predicts more unstable conditions with light and variable winds and a strong possibility of heavy showers. Racing is scheduled to begin at 11.10 am. – Event Media/Peter Campbell
For further information, Notice of Race, Entry list etc. please visit www.yccs.it or www.mobym30worlds.com
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