Challenging conditions

Danish team wins the Yngling Women's World Championship

Shirley Robertson and her team of Sarah Webb and Sarah Ayton rounded off their weekend at the Yngling Women's World Championship in Santander with a win in the 10th and final race.

The end of the series came with good breeze from the northeast. Fourth in the last race was the Danish crew of Bankinvest, led by Trine Palludan and with Christina Otzen and Ida Hartvig, who won the championship just two points ahead of their fellow Danes on Dorte Jensen's boat.

Cruelly this result was not good enough to get Palludan and her Bankinvest team to Athens. Their nationals selectors had stipulated that the Danish favourites, Dorte Jensen's crew, had to finish within ten places of Palludan's team to get the ticket.

Throughout the week conditions were challenging for the teams. Santander is located in northern Spain and the race course was in open Atlantic. "Short start line, quite a lot of tide, big waves, no wind and really slow, underpowered boats," described British coach Ian Walker. "If you were back from line at all you couldn’t accelerate and make a good start. If you got on the line you were stationary and couldn’t make a good start, because it was so light and the boats point so low you were effectively being leebowed by the boat to leeward of you. Even if you started at the wrong end you couldn’t get space because the line was only 150m long."

Because of this the results through the regatta were higly erractic with no boats able to sail consistently and steal a march on the others. Scoring was extremely high - in a 37 boat regatta with nine counting races and one discard, Palludan's team scored a hefty 84 points or an average place of 9th...

The national and personal qualification provided an interesting sideshow. Results from the regatta now see the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Canada join the other 12 qualified nations in Athens in three months time (subject to ISAF ratification), at the expense of Columbia and Japan who failed to qualify.

There was a similar story to the Danish selection, between the Dutch teams. Here another intense war was raging between the crews of Janneke Hin and Annalies Thies. This also went to the wire with Hin's sixth place in the final race enabling her to beat Thies by one place but still one place short of getting her to Athens.

Despite ending on a high and winning the practise race - both, it should be noted, were in more breeze - it was a disappointing championship for Shirley Robertson's team, who finished 16th overall. Robertson had a terrible first day, when in the first race she got a bad start, got the shift wrong on the first beat and then becalmed on the run. In the second race she was black flagged. "They had too many bad starts, they weren’t quick enough downwind - we know why that was - and because of that they couldn’t really get in when they were at the back of the field," commented Walker. However he added that there were few obvious errors. "Normally the coaches sit there knowledgeably in their coach boats and watching the racing everything it is really obvious. This time all the coaches were scratching their heads."

Robertson, Ayton and Webb will now return home for a short break before competing in SPA Regatta, Holland from the 26-30 May.

To see the full results - click here