Editorial- Hot action in Hyeres

by nzeditor@sail-world.com on 27 Apr 2006 Welcome to the Wednesday edition of Sail-World New Zealand

Most of our focus for the last couple of days has been on Semaine Olympique Francaise de Voile at Hyeres, France. This is a massive regatta for the Olympic classes with over 1,000 sailors involved from 50 nations.

New Zealand has a large team at the event with at least one competitor in each Olympic class (bar the Womens Double hander). The size of the regatta is about 2.5 times that of the Olympics and this has required the organisers to run multiple fleets in some classes. So, at this stage the results are a little hard to follow. However several New Zealand crews are either in the top three or close to it, and it will be interesting to see how they respond as the intensity builds in the regatta.

We do have our results system working, and have produced the top five results for each class, plus the New Zealand results each day, so you can pick up the NZL placings at a glance - without having to trawl through the official results lists playing that time honoured game of 'spot the Kiwi'!

There are some excellent photos coming from the event courtesy of Gilles-Martin Raget, and we feature a couple of his image galleries.

Wednesdays results should be up about mid-Thursday morning.

In the Volvo Race, the fleet is undergoing maintenance in Baltimore, however the post-mortems have begun in earnest and we have seen today the first of the crew changes aboard Ericsson Racing. In a surprise move Ken Read (USA) has joined, filling the gap left by John Kostecki.

Read will be best known in NZ for his helming of Stars and Stripes in the 1999/2000 Louis Vuitton Cup. However he is better known, on the international racing circuits, as an outstanding one design sailor, and one of the nicest people in sailing. He will bring an interesting perspective to the Volvo 70 scene.

Also featured are several local stories, based on contributions from readers. Many thanks to those who have sent material. We are pleased to support your class or campaign, or share your moment of glory. Please keep the contributions coming to nzeditor@sail-world.com

Finally a plea from a couple of top young kiwi sailors, Simon Minoprio and Ryan Houst, in London – can anyone help? (See Adam’s story of the Congressional Cup and Algrave Cup in this issue)

'Back in London, trying to kill time before our next match racing event in May. We have three weeks to kill. Ryan and I might be going down to Cowes to do some sailing. Not really sure if it will go ahead, hopefully know in the next day or two.

'Other then that we have nothing to do, so if you know of any one that need two hard working KIWIS for three week, they can reach me on +447890 286268.'

We do have a good international audience on this newsletter and if you can help, it would be appreciated by these two Kiwi sailors.

Good sailing!

Richard Gladwell
NZ Editor