Congratulations to our Club Members who competed at Sail Sydney 2018 last week: Casey Imeneo, Oli Tweddell, Jack Lloyd, Tess Lloyd and Charlie Dixon.
Sail Sydney featured some great footage of a bit of carnage on the last leg of the 49erFX race. It is quite entertaining. We looked out for SSCBC Member Tess Lloyd and her new crew Jamie Ryan in the footage. They were nowhere to be seen, so we sat down and asked a few questions.
Tess and Jamie had great regatta, finishing in 1st place with 19 points and a massive lead over 2nd place who had twice as many points. Tess and Jamie are a new team combination that has been paired up by Australian Sailing. They have been training for a couple of months and most recently put in a really solid training block that turned out to be particularly successful.
The training block focused on crew speed processes and risk management. Jamie came from a 470 background so her processes needed to be more precise at the lower speed, and the training block adapted these skills into faster processes required in the 49erFX.
Great progress was made and the goal for the regatta was to place consistently and avoid taking significant risks. This regatta had a complete mix of weather conditions and the team performed exceptionally across all conditions. Managing risk is one of the most crucial aspects of racing at this level and with their worst race (6th place) being dropped, Tess and Jamie’s scoreline was a newts set of 1sts, 2nds and 3rds.
The reason you can’t see Tess and Jamie in the clip is that they spotted the ability to hold the kite on that reach, went a bit wider through the gate and sailed with the kite up through the finish line in first place.
We caught up with AST team mate and Olympic Gold medalist, Matt Belcher who was thrilled for the pair. “The work they did on consistency and risk management in the lead in training block really came together in this regatta. This is just the beginning for this team.”
Click here to view the carnage at the finish line.
