2026 ILCA Masters Worlds — The Spark Still Burns (and So Do the Quads)

This June, the Nautical Club of Kalamaki hosted back-to-back ILCA (aka Laser) Masters World Championships in Athens, Greece: the ILCA 6 Worlds (May 30 to June 7) with 159 sailors from 24 countries, followed by the ILCA 7 Worlds (June 8 to 16) with 86 sailors from 20 nations. A strong Northern California contingent made the trip, and several came home with top-10 world finishes.

Athens served up the full menu. Most days, a southerly sea breeze of 5 to 12 knots built through the afternoon over chop, rewarding patient, shifty-water sailing. But the Meltemi, the region’s northerly, occasionally picked a fight with the sea breeze, producing shifts of up to 45 degrees. The ILCA 6 fleet lost a race to a mid-race wind swing on day four and sat ashore windless on the final day, ending that regatta at 10 races. The ILCA 7s had a race day cut short by thunderstorms, then made it up with a triple-race Sunday to complete all 12.

In the ILCA 6 event, St. Francis YC’s Jon Andron finished sixth of 18 in the Legends division (75 to 84), in a fleet dominated by American Bill Symes, who won eight of 10 races. Toshi Takayanagi of Richmond YC placed 10th of 47 Grand Masters and won race nine outright. In the 51-boat Great Grand Masters fleet, Chris Raab (a SoCal sailor and St. Francis member) took 10th, and Walt Spevak finished 30th. Occasional D24 regatta participant Robert Hallawell from the East Coast won the Grand Masters world title with a dominant 10-race series.

The ILCA 7 Worlds brought more Northern Californians into the fight. In the 33-boat Grand Masters fleet, arguably the deepest of the regatta, three of the top five finishers were past Masters world champions. Class president Mark Lyttle (GBR) won, Hallawell doubled up with silver, and Andrew Holdsworth, until recently a two-decade Bay Area fixture and now racing under the British flag, took fifth. In a neat bit of symmetry, Holdsworth had also finished fifth in the ILCA 6 Grand Masters the week before.

Al Sargent finished seventh, second American, two points out of sixth, with a race-two second among his keepers. His series featured everything Athens had to offer: trench-warfare starts, a light-air race where one bad beat cost a handful of places, and a final-day downwind where the breeze filled on the other side of the course and turned a fifth into an 11th in four minutes. As Al put it afterward, the fleet was simply that good; consistency, not speed, separated the podium from the pack.

In the ILCA 7 Great Grand Masters, Emilio Castelli was the early star, leading the division after day two before finishing eighth. Interviewed ashore after thunderstorms halted day three, he noted that the competition was stacked with past world champions and that “the spark still burns within us.” Raab, pulling double duty for the second straight week, finished seventh in the same fleet, one spot and three points ahead of Castelli.

Beyond the results, the reviews were consistent: fair courses, an on-time race committee, warm hospitality, and enough pasta to ballast the charter fleet. Canada’s Allan Clark won the ILCA 7 Great Grand Masters, Greece’s Adonis Bougiouris took a seventh career gold in Masters, and the new Legends and Super Legends divisions proved the boat really is a whole-life class.

Next up: the 2027 ILCA 6 and ILCA 7 Masters Worlds in Vilamoura, Portugal, starting in late September.