IFDS Worlds Day 2 - Schmitter leads 2.4mR

by IFDS Worlds on 12 Jan 2012 On day 2 of the 2012 International Association for Disabled Sailing World Championships, a front brought steady 14-knot winds that gusted past 20 knots at times to test the world’s best on Charlotte Harbor.

Theirry Schmitter of The Netherlands shook off a slow start in Tuesday’s races to vault to the top of the 2.4mR leaderboard, while Canada’s Paul Tingley struggled to repeat his Day One results. With a fifth and a 13th, he dropped into second.

Ireland’s John Twomey, Anthony Hegarty and Ian Costello were knotted atop the Sonar class with Aleksander Wang-Hansen, Marie Solberg and Per Eugen Kristiansen of Norway, with France’s Bruno Jourdren, Eric Flageul and Nicolas Vimont-Vicary just a point back in third.

In the SKUD class, also idle on Tuesday, Jennifer French and Jean-Paul Creignou of the United States and Alexandra Rickham and Niki Birrell of Great Britain battled for the top two spots all day, going 1-2 in all three races. The Americans claimed a one-point lead by bookending two wins around the Brits win in the middle one. Hagar Zehavi and Shimon Ben Yakov of Israel took third with Scott Whitman and Julia Dorsett of the United States in fourth and Daniel Fitzgibbon and Liesl Tesch of Australia fifth after a disqualification in the first race cost them the third-place spot.

Schmitter, the three-time defending world champion and top-ranked 2.4mR sailor, surged out of the middle of the pack after a disappointing start of the regatta, taking second in Race Four and winning the final race. Heiko Kröger went second in the final race and was two points ahead of Marc Leblanc of the States, who won the first race of the day, but slipped to fourth overall with a seventh-place finish in final race of the day. Barend Kol sat in fifth, three points back.

After failing to get a race in on Tuesday due to light winds, the Sonar crews were chomping at the bit and finished three races on Wednesday, all with different winners. Twoney topped the fleet in the first race, but dropped to third and sixth, while Wang-Hansen hung on to second ahead of Jourdren with a second place in the final race. The French team took first in the third race to slip past Great Britain’s John Robertson, Hannah Stodel and Steve Thomas. Americans Paul Callahan, Tom Brown and Brad Johnson found themselves in fifth. The Dutch team of Udo Hessels, Marcel van de Veen and Mischa Rossen logged the other win, but an OCS in the final race dropped them into sixth place.

Eleven races are scheduled in total for each class. Racing is set to resume Thursday, with the first warning sounded at 10:25 a.m. Overall results in the SKUD class are provisional pending protest results.

Results are available on the event website at www.IFDSWorlds2012.com.