Ryan Palk

Well the worlds are over, even though it doesn’t feel as though they ever occurred. It was quite a weird regatta with only 8 races being completed which was a bit disappointing.  I had a poor last day to drop off to 20^th overall, so still top 20 in the world but not that great…Beno had a poor day to drop back a few to 32^nd while Klade had an awesome race on the last day posting a 2^nd to jump from 40 something to 25^th! Good effort I say.  Also Tom, had some awesome races in the Silver fleet to finish 8^th.  So we all had our ups and downs.  Even though it is easy for us to say it was a crappy regatta and just forget about, I think it is important to use this regatta as a lesson for a lot of our sailing.  Struggling to get into the racing on the first few days, I lacked the intensity of the rest of the fleet from race 1, not wise in a regatta with only 8 races…  Another lesson I learnt this regatta is that this was a smart sailors regatta, not necessarily a fast sailors one.  With massive tides, massively tight mark roundings and fickle winds, the sailors who took calculated risks, putting there boats in the right places, and executed them properly were the ones to come up with the win.  I think I sailed too conservatively, not taking enough risks, or backing my judgement enough.  The one race where I was happy with my sailing was the last race.  Even though I was hammered off the start by a sailor who was OCS, and decided to come down on me, with his boom getting caught onto my boat, we both stopped behind the fleet at the start, in other words last off the line by a long way.  I sailed my ass off that race, taking risks I thought would pay and they did, passing 40 boats up to 19^th. I think if I raced like that the whole regatta I could’ve secured a top 5, but that’s another lesson learnt for next time…

Overall, this worlds wasn’t as satisfying as last year’s, but I haven’t learnt any less.  The racing was tight, and in some of those mark rounding’s I really feared for my fingers as 40 boats tried to get around a mark at the same time! The winner Ben Paton, sailed an awesome regatta as well as fellow Aussie James who took out 5^th, good work James! So all in all, I still had fun, the off-water side of the event was really well organised, and the after party fun! I can take the lessons and other experiences from this regatta and use them in the future.  Now, it is time for a little break in Europe, get rested up, and return to
Australia, to resume Uni, start bulking up for full rig! And start training for Teams racing worlds in September in
Spain.  The potential is intact, I still have to exploit it!!!

good sailing

cheers

Ryan

Top mark rounding

Burman riding through a fountain haha