Annabelle Rennie Younger - 1st Radial overall and women 2021 NSFW Laser Champs
 

Results
 

Beautiful autumn weather, the usual challenging lake breezes and an excellent fleet in both the Radials and Standards resulted in a great 7 race series over the weekend. Saturday's 5 to 10 knot SW breeze was very shifty and gusty, only to be replaced with a similar strength, if slightly more predictable, NE breeze on Sunday.

 

The outstanding turnout of our womens Radial fleet was a feature of the weekend, highlighted by Annabel Rennie-Younger taking out the title by the narrowest single point margin from top Youth sailor Caleb Armit. Second womens sailor was leading youth Greta Pilkington in 4th overall while Sophia Morgan scored a couple of 3rd places  to end up 3rd woman and 7th overall. Phil Wild was the leading Masters in 3rd overall while Matthew Rist (Y) was 5th overall after what was, for him, a rather inconsistent weekend, winning 2 races on Saturday but struggling to find form in Sundays NE breeze. Second Master was Mike Pascoe, who has recently returned to the class, with a second in one race showing (otherwise well) hidden potential.

 

In the Standards it was a regatta of two halves. Luke Deegan was only able to sail Saturday and put on an awesome display, with 4 convincing wins. However tracking him all the way on Saturday and then stepping up on Sunday was Harrison Baker (O), who took out the Standard title in convincing fashion. He was followed by a group of 4 leading masters, all of whom managed to be consistently at the front of a very close and competitive masters fleet. In the end it was was expat GM Gavin Dagley, who was over from Melbourne for family reasons and took the weekend off to give the rest of us a sailing lesson, who just secured second overall. He was followed by Masters Giles Grigg and Tony Nicholson while 5th overall and second GM was Cris Brodie.

 

The usual great range of prizes finished off an awesome weekend for the last major regatta for the season. With overseas travel still severely curtailed we hope to see all the sailors back at Pupuke regularly over the winter, keeping their hands in for a full set of regattas next season.

Harrison Baker leads Tony Nicholson

Gavin Dagley and Cris Brodie

Annabelle Rennie-Younger

Greta Pilkington

Harrison Baker

Gavin Dagley

Volunteers - Dave, Garth, John, Neil and Wayne (photo kindly supplied by the NZ Police)