Seventy five year old Lou Abraham’s tells the story of the deciding race in the Sydney 38 Nationals

by Rob Kothe on 15 Aug 2002 Seventy five year old Lou Abraham’s dockside tells the story of the race that sealed his second Sydney 38 National Championship.

‘We’d been sailing in company with AMI Jade, we reached the gybe mark, Jade was just in front of us, we surged on a wave and our bow clipped Jade’s stern. We did a 720 and we carried on, but with that we were eight places back.

We were a little bit concerned but we settled down to work our way back up the fleet. As it turned out we came up through the fleet by eight places but not enough. But AMI Jade came down a bit so we just won the series.
The Sydney 38 One Design racing is the best racing I’ve ever done, really exciting stuff. The standard is up considerably from last year. It has been such great racing, yesterday the boats were bow on stern, up the beaches…it was unbelievable. Every race, every placing mattered so much,
(Another Challenge’s principal helmsman Carl Schmidt was plucked out of dinghies at age seventeen by Abraham’s and he’s been a key crewmember of the crew for some years). After we did our penalty turns, there were very few passing lines, given our position we tried a few tactical gambles. The wind was up and down from 20 knots, down to 8 knots but we could not break through but in the end it did not matter. We are pleased to win the Nationals for the second year in a row.’

Second placed Peter McNamara was disappointed ‘We had to get a third today and have Another Challenge behind us to knock Lou off. But it was not to be. We tried hard and it was our first real regatta in anger, so we are pretty happy with where we are… with some of the best yachties in the country behind us.'