Southern Star reports on 2008 Star Worlds

by Hamish Pepper and Carl Williams on 20 Apr 2008
The Southern Star team of Hamish Pepper and Carl Williams report on the 2008 Star Worlds in which they finished sixth overall.

Hello all

Sixth Place in the 2008 Star World championship - disappointed but happy!

You can probably understand us being a little disappointed after slipping from 4th to 6th overall but then wondering how we can be happy with our performance!
For us the big goal was to sail well and most importantly sign off on NZL8187 for the Olympics! As you know we have had some work done to lighten and improve her for China.

Although we didn’t win or medal in this regatta, this had no bearing on how the boat performed. We often felt fast during the racing and with a little luck gone our way the results could have been a lot different.

Mateusz Kusznierewicz & Dominik Zycki from Poland are the new Star World Champions. The Polish are certainly in hot form at the moment and are currently ranked no 1 in the world. Mateusz is a Gold and Bronze medallist from the 1996 – 2004 Olympics in the Finn class, so no stranger to being on the podium. Their win is well deserved.

I always say when your sailing well you manage to create a little luck when it counts, with this in mind we can’t have been sailing well enough to win. The polish fought hard and were on the right side of lady luck when they were deep in the pack. Us on the other hand were on the other side of the fence this time. No more so than the last race as we rounded the top mark in 3rd place and with what should have been a straight forward down wind 2nd leg.

We were on the correct gybe pointing towards the bottom marks only to have a new breeze line come in from behind and on the other side, favoring the boats back in the pack. At the 2nd mark we had slipped from 3rd to 33rd making our chances of a podium very slim indeed. Unfortunately for us the top 3 boats in the regatta capitalized on the opportunity and jumped up the leader board. Once ashore someone told us if the raced had finished at the 1st mark we would have won the regatta…… hmmm not sure if this made the day better or worse!

This is the start of our 4 month Olympic build up and we have lots happening next month with boats, mast, sails and booms, with possibly all or some of our Olympic equipment coming from this development program.
The conclusions from this regatta is that NZL8187 is fast enough and it will just be a matter of dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s and sailing to our potential to win a medal at the Olympics.

A huge thank you must go out to our sponsors and friends for without them I doubt we would be in the running. Dan Meyers of Sextant, Peter Cornes, Yachting New Zealand and Sparc, John Street of Fosters, Ross Munro of Line 7 and Tony Hambrook of Alloy Yachts. Also our coaches Rod Davis, David Giles and Mark Bradford from North sails.

Next for us is two weeks of testing and checking out some development gear in Valencia before heading to Holland regatta and then the eastern Europeans in Croatia. Carl is running a blog website which is worth checking out. http://carlwilliams30.blogspot.com/

Thanks Carl and Hamish

Final Results

1 09/ 8170 POL Kusznierewicz, Mateusz/Zycki, Dominik 1 1 [44] 3 4 5 14.00
2 25/ 8266 ITA Negri, Diego/Viale, Luigi 3 3 [25] 9 2 6 23.00
3 55/ 8255 BRA Scheidt, Robert/Prada, Bruno [37] 12 2 1 14 4 33.00
4 96/ 8296 SUI Marazzi, Flavio/De Maria, Enrico 6 14 [47] 10 8 2 40.00
5 33/ 8333 GER Pickel, Marc/Borkowski, Ingo 5 [105/BFD] 6 18 5 11 45.00
6 87/ 8187 NZL Pepper, Hamish/Williams, Carl 12 [105/BFD] 3 2 15 19 51.00
7 67/ 8267 USA Mendelblatt, Mark/Strube, Mark 2 6 [32] 17 11 20 56.00
8 14/ 7836 AUS Murray, Iain/Palfrey, Andrew 11 11 5 24 [31] 18 69.00
9 47/ 8107 FRA Rohart, Xavier/Rambeau, Pascal 26 21 1 4 20 [27] 72.00
10 12/ 8312 USA Merriman, Rick/Sharp, Brian [58] 20 29 19 6 3 77.00