Optimist European Championship - Aussies compete in Poland

by Carolina Townsend Arellano on 4 Aug 2010 Optimist European Championship saw two Australian sailors, Tom Trottman from Victoria and Carolina Townsend Arellano, compete at the event at Kamien Pormoski in Poland from third – 10th July. As there were only two of us, we formed a team with NZL sailors and shared a coach; Susannah Pyatt.

We arrived in Poland four days early for some pre-regatta training. The regatta was very well organised – we were picked up from the Berlin airport, shuttled between the hotel and regatta site and they made the charter boat logistics and measurement processes very smooth. All the sailors stayed in one big hotel, every day after the sailing the swimming pool was packed with about 200 excited optimist sailors.

We sailed on a lake in the north of Poland where there is supposed to be enough wind for racing 360 days a year. The water had algae in it, therefore you couldn’t always see the wind on the water which was initially confusing, but we got used to it.

There was very little wind during the training days but on the day of the practice race the wind picked up. There were 247 competitors from 42 countries. Each had qualified through national selection so the standard of competition was high.

Each sailor had a GPS tracker attached to their boat so that the eager parents could watch the sailing on-line. There were also on-water cameras capturing the action which was displayed real-time on huge outdoor screens onshore.

The sailors were divided into girls and boys fleets –but we all sailed on the same course. The first day of racing was accompanied by light winds but unfortunately after 60 minutes on the water it was realised that the unusual name of an Israeli girl had resulted in her being incorrectly placed in the boys’ fleet. This impacted all the fleet allocations for the countries alphabetically below ‘I’- so we all needed to return to the shore!

With such a competitive fleet, a good start was very challenging. I wish that I could practice with fleets like this on the Swan River every weekend!

The next day there was not enough wind to sail but the day after that the wind picked up to about 18 knots. Tom was very pleased about this – he really enjoyed the windy weather scoring a first and fifth place! Quite likely this is the first race win for an Aussie at a European Opti championship.

The next day was also quite windy. I managed a great start in race two which had me third round the top mark. I held this through the off-wind legs and then just slipped to 10th on the shifty final upwind leg to the finish. The next two were too light to sail, but everyone amused themselves with lots of T-shirt swapping and also collecting signatures on mini-sails making friends along the way!

The final result was Tom in 65th out of 146 boats in the boys’ fleet and I finished 66th out of 101 in the girls’ fleet.

For more information, please go to: www.wa.yachting.org.au