Martin and Lowry Come Out on Top in the 5O5 World Championships

The 5O5 Worlds concluded on San Francisco Bay with 2019 World Champs and locals Mike Martin and Adam Lowry coming out on top yet again. Aside from some smoky air ahead of the first weekend, the combined Pre-Worlds/North Americans, followed by the Worlds, were held in idyllic performance-racing dinghy conditions, creating a rambunctious, memorable event for all 60 teams.

The 5O5 fleet is extremely competitive worldwide, though California remains a stronghold for 5O5 racing. California sailors took the top three positions, with Eric Anderson and Nic Baird, also from San Francisco and Martin and Lowry’s training partners, taking second, and Mike Holt and Carl Smith from Santa Cruz taking third. (Anderson and Baird actually led by two points going into the last race.)

Racing was held off Treasure Island and to the west of Alcatraz, where the race committee ran “rabbit starts” for the 60-boat fleet. A rabbit start is performed by having a single, designated 5O5 (the pathfinder) followed by a committee boat (the gate boat) port-tack cross the whole fleet with every other competitor crossing astern of both for an even starting opportunity. Unfortunately, two of these starts caused problems for Martin and Lowry. In one of the rabbit starts, they hit the “gatekeeper” after Anderson and Baird successfully “hooked” them just ahead of the start. Then, in Race 7, they were T-boned and holed while sitting on starboard waiting for the start. They managed a quick patch to complete Race 7 in lighter air, though they were slowed by their boat’s filling with water. After another on-the-water repair, they started the windier Race 8, but they were forced to retire after the boat started to sink on the downwind leg. With redress, those two races were scored as 2 points and 2.2 points.

Martin explained Chris Ray’s drone video of the Race 4 rabbit start below in more detail: “Adam and I left ourselves a little vulnerable; Anderson and Baird were able to hook us, so we ended up a little advanced at the start. We tagged the gatekeeper, but we were lucky; up until a rule change a few years ago, we would have had to drop out of the race. Now, you’re allowed to take your penalty and continue on. We ended up recovering pretty well, since one of the tricks if you end up in our situation in a big fleet like this is to take the long port tack behind everyone’s stern where you get an artificial lift because the wind is bent by all the starboard tackers. By the time we reached the last starboard-tack boat, we’d been lifted up to rejoin the fleet in pretty good shape. We ended up taking a fourth in the race.”

Despite the mishaps, the Martin/Lowry team made the repairs and stayed on their game, finishing the final race with a bullet. Mike Martin, now a five-time world champion, said, “The week could not have gone better for us in the end, but it was definitely a tough week. Our goal with our training partners is to push each other and to be duking it out for first and second in the last race of the Worlds, which we did.”

San Francisco Bay’s ability to put on spectacular conditions for world championships isn’t taken advantage of by enough of the world’s very competitive one-design classes. Seeing this caliber of fleet and racers putting their best performance on the Bay is extremely impressive. Sun, breeze and current combine for the kind of challenging conditions the world’s top fleets look for, and the Bay served it up once again.

We’ll have a full report on the 5O5 Championship in our November issue, where you’ll learn how you can win the 2024 World Championships in Varberg, Sweden, August 1-10, 2024. Complete results here

*Correction: apparently we misidentified the bottom 5O5 shot as Mike Martin and Adam Lowry.  

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