In early June my team and I had the fantastic opportunity to compete in the United States
Youth Match Racing Championship in San Diego. This regatta was a tough event with the
strongest list of competitors the event has ever seen. Among this list of fierce competitors was David Wood, Porter Killian, Cameron Feves, and Ansgar Jordan, all very qualified match racers in their own right. This event was in J-22’s at San Diego Yacht Club, and was sailed four up with three males and one female. My crew was Max Brennan (BYC) on the main and kite, Scott Mais (NHYC) on the bow, and Gray Hemans (BYC) on the jib and pit.
My team and I sailed an outstanding event, coming back from a terrible start at 4 wins 5 losses in the round robin, skating into the quarterfinals in 6th place. We chugged through to the semis winning the quarterfinal series 3-1 against Jack Egan. Unfortunately we were edged out of the semi-finals by Cameron Feves who would go on to win the event.
This pitted us against fellow BYC Team David Wood to race in the most important petit-final series in all of youth match racing, as the winner earns the spot into the Governor’s Cup. David got the better of us and edged the win settling us into fourth for the event. This event was a huge success for the team even though we missed out on our main goal, by showing us that we can come back from a deficit and that we can sail well and hard against people of the same age group. Huge congrats to Cameron and his team for a great event and to David and his team, for earning the Gov Cup spot, both teams will represent us well.
A huge thank you to BYC’s MSSF for supporting our endeavors in this event and to our sponsors of Helly Hansen, Newport Sailing Outfitters, and Harken Derm for supporting our training and racing efforts.