Congratulations Southport Yacht Club Past Junior Commodore Joel Turner, winning the 2017 Australian 49er National Championships!
My last few months have been extremely exciting and exhausting as I have endeavoured on my new campaign with new team mate David Gilmour. We have been training in his home town Perth, as well as Sydney and Queensland. As I have moved to a crewing position I have a new role to learn which has been a great challenge and my learning curve is steep which is what every sailor looks for! We competed in Sail Melbourne World Cup Final where we finished 4th, then to Sail Sydney we finished 1st followed by a small amount of time at home for Christmas.
The Australian Summer has been a big one for myself on the 49er campaign and we finished off with a bang at the National Championships! We had a consistent start to our regatta, not being able to take a race win in the first two days but scored many 2nd places. By day three we had ironed out a few creases in our performance and managed to start making some good progress and take the overall lead in the regatta. After the 16 race regatta it came down to the very last race! We mathematically couldn’t lose 2nd overall in the last race so we went for it against our main competitors (and also training partners) and we came out on top! It was a very exciting end to a long regatta which seemed like a 5 day arm-wrestle. This is my first Nationals win as a 49er crew and we are happy with our progress as a team! We will now be training over the next few months in preparation for our European regattas later in the year. The hard work continues to chase the dream! See you all around soon!