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As you will have read in the last Inclusive Newsletter: David Barnes, Rick Dodson and Andrew May became the first kiwi Sonar team to compete at an ISAF Sailing World Cup regatta in more than ten years, earlier this month.
Together they finished the regatta in 6th place overall, a significant feat considering that this was the first time they saw this boat type that is not yet in NZ, let alone go racing in one! The Sonar is a Paralympic class three person keelboat sailed at the most elite level around the world; there were five countries represented at Miami.
“The regatta was a massive learning curve for us” says helmsman David Barnes. “The first few days were just head down and trying to figure out the rig tuning and how to sail the boat.”
Together this new threesome, which refer to themselves as Team Rio Gold, had just three days on the water training before the regatta got underway, all of which were in extremely light winds. Unfortunately their hard practice in light air only came into play on one day of racing (the day they won one of the races), as the regatta was predominantly quite windy.
David continues to report on the regatta: “It was actually bit unfortunate that all our practice was in light conditions, and most racing turned out to be a strong sea breeze. We had beautiful Miami conditions though, t-shirt weather the whole time, really good sailing conditions.” And as for their results: “We had a string of fourth, fifth and sixth place finishes, but come race number 7 we actually won! It was quite light. We were incredibly fast upwind; we pretty much lead from the first top mark all the way to the finish.”
When the breeze picked up again for the final day of racing, they suffered from a broken jib halyard and had to rush back to shore for repairs to make the start of the final race
“Our coach Steve Cranch towed us back in, we put a new halyard on, and got to the start line literally with two minutes before the start. We just had to sheet on and go” Dave says. “With no preparation we finished fifth in that race.”
Overall the team rates the experience as extremely valuable. David explains: “We were improving the whole time and other people agreed that we were one of the fastest boats downwind in most conditions, upwind we suffered when the breeze came up because we were a bit light.
“We just sailed the Sonar a bit like a 470 flat with lots of twist rather than like an Etchell which just goes sideways like a paper bag if you heel it over. It was incredibly valuable to do that regatta”
And as for their personal experience? “It was a real shock to the system!” David says “The last real competitive sailing I did was the Americas Cup in 2003 let alone racing something 25 feet long. So it was very, very different to what I had been doing. When I sailed 470s that serious it was the early 80’s, a long time ago... and given health reasons things are not as easy as they used to be, so I think we actually did really well to be that competitive.”
Team Rio Gold are committed to trying to get themselves to the Rio Paralympics in 2016. The next step on their Paralympic campaign is to look towards the 2013 Sonar World Championships in Ireland this August, but first they will first need to work on getting a boat of their own.
View full results from the Miami OCR
Follow Team Rio Gold on Facebook
