Sail West 2011
The NSST sailors had a fantastic 4 days in Gimli, Manitoba at Sail West. We were part of a huge BC team, it was great to see so many west coast sailors at the event. Ryan, Andrew, Cisco and Diego sailed optis, and Chris and Fillah raced radials. This was the lead-up to the Opti Canadians for Cisco, and Youth Nationals for Chris and Fillah; both those events will be in Nova Scotia later this month.
We started the week with a day and a half of training, followed by the practice race on Friday afternoon. The conditions on Thursday and Friday were great: hot and sunny with a solid breeze. Unfortunately, the light wind and sloppy waves for the first day of racing on Saturday made for some challenging conditions for all the sailors. Fortunately, the BC sailors have spent a lot of training time in light wind and big waves. Sunday was much better after a short on land postponement and the wind filled in nicely for some quality racing.
BC sailors dominated the opti fleet. Our NSST sailors were very competitive, with consistent top-10 results throughout the event. Ryan and Cisco were 4th and 6th in the opti red fleet, and 4th and 9th overall. Andrew was our only opti blue sailor, he won his fleet and was 7th overall. Diego was 5th in white fleet, and 15th overall in the 23-boat fleet.
On the big course, the radial fleet was the biggest at the event, and one of the most competitive. Chris won the radial fleet after some very consistent sailing (and dropping an OCS). Fillah was 4th, after being black flagged on the start in the 2nd race.
A big thank you to the Wood family for driving the trailer to Gimli and back!
Congratulations to all the NSST sailors at the event, and good luck to the sailors heading back east to their National Championships!
Some photos are posted on the NSST Opti Flickr page, www.flickr.com/photos/nsstopti. There are more photos and full results posted on the event website www.sailwest2011.com.
