Matthew and Ben, who are also the current North RYA Volvo Zone Champions and Scottish Mirror Champions, were surprised to claim the title, as crew Ben explains: “I don’t know how it feels [to win] really, we were quite surprised how well we did – we were probably expecting to come top three junior and tenth or fifteenth overall. Our plan was to try and get the kite set quick go the right way up he beat and get constant results really and that obviously worked!”
In the overall event there were 75 entries and they were 5th overall. They were improving all week ranking impressively well against the senior competition in the fleet. The last day was blown off due to too much wind but they won the last race sailed the day before so they may have finished even higher if racing on the last day had been held ? They were also the only non Irish boat to win a race ! Helm Matthew added: “We’re really, really pleased to win the junior title and come fifth overall. We’ve been working for this for a long time so it’s good all the works paid off training with the national squad over the winter. It was quite difficult and we had to work really hard to get the result all week. Training for a variety of conditions so we could be sure we could cope with anything that happened helped.”
RYA Mirror National Junior Squad coach Catherine Putt was bowled over their and a number of the young Zone and National Squad sailors performances, she said: “This has been a fantastic display of what great talent we have in our Junior and Zone squads. Matt and Ben did fantastically well – they have trained really hard over the winter and it’s all clicked together for them securing such a good results against some real adversities too which was great.”
This could, of course, end being quite costly for them (Well, at least for Peter and Heather !) as the next major event is the Mirror World Championships which take place just after Christmas in Albany, Australia !!!!!
Other Juniors from the Club did well also. Matthew, sailing with Ed from Beaver SC was 25th overall and Will, sailing with Oliver from Ripon SC were close behind in 26th place overall
A great series of results and well done to them all !
Photo of Ben and Matthew at the Prizegiving
with the first Junior girls Emma and Rachel from Beaver SC who were 13th overall
With thanks to Steve Wilkinson, the RYA and Yachts and Yachting.com for the quotes and photo
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