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Picton Harbour was a hive of activity at Marlborough anniversary weekend as the Queen Charlotte Yacht Club held high performance clinics for its young optimist and starling class sailors.
Jim Maloney, one of Yachting New Zealand's top coaches, was in town to run a two-day clinic for the club's teenage starling sailors, and Briar Dye-Hutchison, from Auckland, travelled south to coach its top optimist sailors over three days. The help of Maloney, who coaches the two-handed youth classes, gave a big boost to the club's growing starling fleet leading up to the national championships being hosted in Picton during the April school holidays.
Dye-Hutchison has coached two of the club's top young sailors, Hamish Clark and Alistair Gifford, at national and international regattas for several years.
With club coach Neeta Cameron running a large Learn to Sail course and the green fleeters also in action, Picton Harbour was very busy on Saturday morning.
The young sailors enjoyed a mixture of conditions over the three days, from strong, gusty winds on Saturday, to much lighter conditions on Sunday and a cold southerly wind on Monday.
Club junior convenor and coaching co-ordinator Ben Cowley said the weekend was a great success and had dramatically improved the young sailors' skills.
This weekend, the club sailors will put their training to the test when they compete in the Nelson-Marlborough regional championships in Nelson.
The event, an important early season regatta, encompasses the P Class Tanner Cup trials to select a regional representative for the P Class nationals in January, the South Island P Class championships and the South Island Starling Traveller series.
