Istanbul Europea Race - Estrella Damm Sailing Team 1876 heads to Nice

by Daniel Ferrando on 30 Aug 2009 At 11:22 am local time in Turkey (10:22 am CET) Estrella Damm Sailing Team and their five rivals crossed the start line to begin the first leg of the Istanbul Europa Race from the Turkish city to Nice (France) with a south-easterly wind of eight knots.

The teams completed a first lap between the buoys set for yesterday’s coastal race before leaving the Bosphorous behind them. Estrella Damm was the second boat to finish the initial lap behind Michel Desjoyeaux’s Foncia. The first leg of the race is expected to be tactically challenging due to the typical instability of the wind in the Mediterranean; a factor which concerns both skippers Guillermo Altadill and Pachi Rivero. As Rivero commented this morning,'As the prediction for this leg is for light wind, it could well take longer than expected, even up to nine days, and for that reason we have packed a little more food.'

For Altadill, variable wind and the numerous islands and coastal areas in the Mediterranean make tactical decisions both primordial and unpredictable, 'It’s like a puzzle, with so many options,' explains the Barcelona-born skipper, 'in the Atlantic you can choose a position and defend yourself better, but here it is easy to lose twenty miles in one go.'

After yesterday’s Bosphorous Trophy, the first non-scoring coastal race, Guillermo Altadill was quite obviously keen to start racing, 'It was an excellent warm-up. The team worked really well and the boat showed great performance. Since we got the boat we have sailed over 3000 miles, and I think we have now grown to understand its potential. But nothing is ever as educational as a real racing situation. The small event in the Bosphorous has really whetted my appetite, and the Istanbul Europa Race is very important for the Estrella Damm Sailing Team programme. It will be a great starting point for the future.'

Similarly Pachi Rivero agrees that after a long period of training the team is ready and ‘confident’ of ‘having done their homework well’ and hope to ‘play a good role’ in the Istanbul Europa Race, that has just begun.

The experience of the fleet is yet another motivational factor to undertake the race with the utmost concentration. For Altadill the lower number of competitors is more than compensated by the incredibly high level of the participants, 'There are only six boats but they are all of an incredibly high level, as are their crews. When testing the boat and yourself, it is often better to have only six well-experienced teams to compete against, than twelve average ones,' he states.

According to Altadill the participants in the Istanbul Europa Race, 'don’t need an introduction' and 'if you were to choose six highly competitive teams, you would find them here.'

Such an attractive and challenging competition makes the Istanbul Europa Race the ideal regatta to initiate the Estrella Damm Sailing Team’s competition calendar, and it will be interesting to observe the progress of the fleet over this first leg of the race.

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