SFYC Takes Second at Youth Sailing Champions League
From November 7 through 9, the San Francisco Yacht Club (SFYC) became the first American team to compete in the final of the Youth Sailing Champions League, sailed at Club Náutico Altea in Spain. The SFYC team qualified by winning the Sears Cup back in August, and raced against 23 other yacht-club youth teams, all from around Europe. The group from SFYC made the final four of the flighted regatta, and ended up finishing second behind the Norddeutscher Regatta Verein (Northern German Regatta Club, NRV) from Hamburg, Germany.
Mark Xu had skippered the SFYC team to the Sears Cup victory, but was unable to make the trip across the Atlantic. In his place, Nick Sessions, a recent graduate of the Hobart and William Smith Colleges sailing team, stepped in. The rest of the team was Julian Levash, Elsie Schroeder, Aaron Ziegler, and Rhett Krawitt, most of whom had been a part of the team that won the Sears Cup.
“It was awesome to jump in with a team that already worked really well together,” Sessions tells Latitude. “Their boat handling was great all weekend, and it showed. All the credit goes to [Mark Xu] and the team; obviously we wouldn’t have made it here without the team’s hard work.”
The format of Sailing Champions League regattas is not your typical fleet racing. Races are done in flights, with a set number of boats racing at a time. The top four teams qualify for the finals, with the first team to two race wins winning the event. The top team from qualifying enters the finals with one win already to their name. The NRV was the top team coming out of qualifiers, having won seven out of their nine qualifying races. SFYC posted two wins in qualifying and had consistent top-half finishes to book the final spot. Also qualifying for the final four were Segelclub Stäfa of Switzerland and Nesodden Seilforening of Norway.
“Our goal going into it was just get top threes,” Sessions said of the team’s approach. “[The format] made the racing very strategic and tactical, because they were only 10-minute races. It was kind of a return to the college style of racing… If you can have good boat speed, and get off the line clean and hold, freedom to tack was huge. Our strategy for the regatta was to start at the boat half of the line, since there were only six boats to manage at a time.”
In the finals, team SFYC won the first race to put them, along with the NRV team, one win away from winning the whole thing, but the NRV took the win in the second race of the finals to win the event.
“The high point was winning that first race of the finals,” Sessions tells Latitude. “We had an amazing first race. A bit pin-favored off the line. The Norwegians won off the pin and had great boat speed. We had great speed off the middle of the line. We sandwiched the Germans between us.… We tacked on the Germans once they tacked to make sure they wouldn’t win. The middle lane worked the best on that upwind, and we were able to lee-bow the Swiss coming out of the right, and the Norwegians should have tacked on us but they overstood the layline.”
“I think it’s a really cool format, and just thinking about how similar this is to college sailing,” Sessions tells us of his desire to have more of this type of racing in the US. “This was my first time really doing short-course keelboat stuff. It would be amazing to have some sort of regional format and then national championship, and I could really see it taking off in the US. I think it would be a great step for former college sailors getting out on the water because you have provided boats.… We could easily do a California series and use SFYC’s RS21s, StFYC’s J/22s, and SDYC’s J/22s. It would be such an easy format. You can do it with six boats, eight boats or 10 boats and bang out 20 short-course races in a weekend. It’s totally feasible.”