Race 2 of the 2017 Europeans gets underway in Thun, after a long wait ashore…
A 6kt afternoon thermal wind eventually arrived in Thun much to the delight of the 62 International teams who had been waiting at the club since 7.30am! Unfortunately, the early morning mountain breeze did not materialise as predicted so patience was the name of the game.
Shortly after the start most of the fleet tacked onto port to head towards the favoured right hand side. Although the far left boats looked “higher” on port tack, there seemed to be a current advantage towards the top of the first beat the closer you got to the shore. So the best gains were made by the early leaders into the right who judged the starboard tack “lay-line” to perfection.
Winners of Race 2 GER 1170 Markus Brenneke, Jochen Schumann & Ingo Borowski.
Making the most of this strategy was Germany’s Markus Brenneke who has multiple Olympic Medallist Jochen Schumann calling the shots. This team eventually went on to win the race and now lead the competition overall on just 3 points after finishing in 2nd place the previous day.
Not only did it pay to keep right up the beat but there also seemed to be more pressure on that side for the downwind legs. Two of the teams that certainly made full advantage of this fact was RUS 27 Anatoly Loginov and GBR 375 Ivan Bradbury.
2nd in Race 2 was RUS 27, Anatoly Loginov, Vadim Statsenko & Alexander Shalagin.
In the end it was RUS 27 who just managed to finish ahead of GBR 375, so Anatoly is now 2nd overall on 7pts after scoring a 5th place in race 1. Meanwhile Ivan Bradbury will be delighted with his 3rd place which gets his European Championship back on track after recording a 38th in race 1.
3rd in race 2 GBR 375 “Blue Haze”, Ivan Bradbury, Lars Hendriksen & George Leonchuk.
Leading the “Corinthian” challenge is GER 1186 helmed by Tanja Jacobsohn, crewed by her husband Bernhard & Jan Scharfetter. Tanja and her team are currently on 26 points after recording a 20th in race 1 followed by an excellent 6th place in race 2.
Leading Corinthian overall after 2 races in GER 1186 Tanja Jacobsohn.
A 3rd race was started later in the afternoon, which saw UAE 9 lead around the top mark followed by RUS 76 and GBR 789. However, as the breeze started to die away the Race Officer Bruno Barthlome’ decided to stop the race as conditions were not giving the fleet a “fair” race. And that my friends is the way the Cookie Crumbles 🙂
With another early start planned for today (8.30am) to catch the mountain breeze from Interlaken, it’s hoped to complete a further 2 races, for sure we need some wind….
Higher, Faster, Longer……. Stavros. (GBR 789).
Thanks once again to Elena Razina for these excellent photo’s….