Queensland Match Racing Championship to go ahead at Sail Mooloolaba

by Tracey Johnstone on 20 May 2014 Queensland Match Racing Championship 2014 - Yachting Queensland announced today that this year’s Queensland Match Racing Championship will be held as part of the Sail Mooloolaba celebration of sailing.

The dates for the Championship are 20th to 22nd June 2014. Mooloolaba Yacht Club will be the organising authority with Melbourne’s John Middleton acting as Chief Umpire. The racing will be in Elliott 6s for the ISAF Grade 4 (pending) event.

The Championship is open to Youth, Women’s and Open teams from both Queensland and inter-state. Racing is on the Mooloolah River in front of The Wharf Mooloolaba which provides an excellent, close-up vantage point for the team supporters and spectators. The course area is near enough for spectators to hear the Umpire calls and the competitor’s challenges.

Leading the inter-state challengers is Victoria’s Sandringham Yacht Club (SYC). The club’s team, under the stewardship of Jack Felsenthal, won last year’s Queensland Youth Championship trophy. This year the SYC team will be led by 19-year-old Tom Trotman. His crew will be Jack Lloyd on mainsheet and Daniel Gomez on the bow.

Trotman was on Felsenthal’s team last year so has already experienced the competition in the challenging conditions on the Mooloolaba harbour.

'Last year we hadn’t done a lot of Match Racing and so we weren’t very well prepared. And we didn’t realise the standard of racing we encountered.

'We also have to get used to sailing in close quarters because it’s on a river. We have been doing a lot of training for that. Our boat handling has to be really spot on. We learnt that from last year. We need to improve our tacks and the quick decisions,' Trotman said.

The decision to again send a team to Mooloolaba is a reflection of the revitalisation of Match Racing at the Melbourne club. Rear Commodore of Sailing, Rob Davis, explained, 'After a period of not much activity on the Match Racing side of things in Melbourne and at the club, it’s just re-established itself in the last year. We have really upped the ante on it and so we are really these guys are going away and we have got it going again. They are doing some training with the CYCA squad in Sydney and we will be hosting the State Match Racing championships here in the next few months.

'It has also been good as it’s got about 20 of our intermediate club members back out on the water through the Match Racing program,' he added.

The first Queensland team to enter is Noosa Yacht and Rowing Club led by skipper Klade Hauschildt. Last year the Noosa team finished third overall and first Queensland team.

Hauschildt is Queensland’s top ranked Match Racing skipper and has competed in Match Racing events inter-state and overseas. He will be racing with a team drawn from Noosa’s youth squad. 'I need to see who is available for the event. We will then get some training done on our club’s Blazers before we hop in the Elliott 6s,' Hauschildt said.

His interest in Match Racing also extends to the management of the discipline with Hauschildt selected to represent the Sunshine Coast on the working group that will this week start the process of re-establishing the discipline’s representative group, to be called the Australian Match Racing Association.

Other teams expected to enter this year’s Queensland Match Racing Championship will come from Sydney, the Gold Coast and Brisbane.

For more information on Sail Mooloolaba’s 2014 Queensland Match Racing Championship, go here.