Championnat Mondial 2011

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The J22 World Championship for 2011 was sailed at Southern Yacht Club in Louisiana. For those of you who haven’t sailed there, the yacht club is located on Lake Pontchartrain, in Metairie LA, which is a suburb of New Orleans, about 12 km from downtown New Orleans. The lake is very shallow and notorious for its chop. There were 64 boats competing with boats from Canada, Cayman Islands, Germany and the USA.

Most of the racing was sailed in 4-6 knots of breeze, with only one day, Thursday starting with winds of around 12 knots which died to around 5 knots throughout the day.  Saturday, the last day of racing, there were big waves and whitecaps when we arrived at the club, and we thought we were going to have great conditions. It turned out that we only had about 5 knots of wind, and in the big waves, it was really tough to get the boats to  move. Lots of boats changed positions on that last day. Rob Johnston started the last day with 62 points to 48 for Jimmy Barnash, and after the 11^th race, Jimmy was still leading by 2 points. Rob turned in a 5^th place finish in the last race to Jimmy’s 13^th to win the overall regatta.

Two boats attended from Canada – Jazz, CAN 1610 with Ron Harris, Pete Amos and John Marten, and Alternative Girlfriend, CAN 341 with Trevor Collins, Doug Mair, Alexandra Leus, and Lauren Laventure (all  newcomers to the class)– both boats from Hudson, Québec. Jazz finished 11^th overall, and won the Masters’ trophy. Alternative Girlfriend finished 56^th, which was a great finish for a team new to the J22 and sailing in their first regatta on the boat. For full results, see http://www.j22worlds.com/index.php/the-event/results/.

The race committee was led by Hank Stuart from Rochester. He and his team did a great job to get off 12 races in the very challenging conditions we faced, with the predominantly light air. The event was very well  organized and the Southern Yacht Club did an outstanding job of running the regatta and hosting all the competitors. They set a very high standard for a regatta that will be hard to beat.

A propos Ron Harris

Ron is the president of the Canadian J/22 Class Association and a member of the Husdon Yacht Club.