Lasers dominate at the RYA Spring Class e-Championships

Over the last two months, 788 sailors representing 26 classes have been battling it out on the virtual waters, in an attempt to represent their class in the national final of the RYA eSailing Spring Class Championship.

Getting through to the final is no easy feat, not only does it mean beating fellow class racers in a class championship, but it also means beating other class champions to stake claim to a place in the final.

In the case of the UKLA, our spring VR-Sport.tv and V-rigger.com Laser Lockdown Ladder series was used to select the e-sailors to represent our classes.  As noted in our May newsletter, our selection process came down to the wire, with Mike O’Donovan defeating our e-sailing national champion, Sam Whaley by one point to represent the Laser Standards. Max Steele, who won the RYA’s ET Junior National e-Championships, and silver at the RYA Youth National e-Championships achieved bronze in our Ladder series, and first Laser 4.7.  This was just two points ahead of Arthur Farley who was the first Laser Radial.   Sam Whaley also qualified to the RYA’s class e-championships through his performance in the Waszp class.

From the start, the UKLA sailors dominated the event. Mike O’Donovan won the top half of the semi-finals with Max Steele just a couple of points behind, but substantially ahead of the other class sailors. On the same day, Arthur Farley won the other half of the semi-finals, with Sam Whaley also qualifying to the finals. 

All four of our UKLA qualifying sailors therefore made it to the finals, together with sailors from RS Aeros, RC35’s, Miracle’s, Firefly’s, Lark’s, Merlin Rocket, Hornet’s, SB20’s, Waszp’s, GP14, RS Tera, and Scorpions.  Of note was the virtual-regatta #1 ranked UK e-sailor, Donnie Gillies, from the GP14 class.

The UKLA dominance continued in the final round, although it was much tighter when the two halves of the semi-finals came together.  Mike O’Donovan opened the event with a  bullet in the first race, but only narrowly defeating Sam Whaley into second. This was then reciprocated by Arthur Farley winning the second race, with Max Steele achieving third.  Mike and Sam then went on to achieve second placings in the third and fourth races respectively, putting them in strong podium positions going into the final race.     

However, with five races and two discards in the final round, it came down to the last race which lead to position changes on the podium. Arthur Farley pulled out the stops with a phenominal spinnaker reach start to win the final race and claim his spot on the podium, above Sam Whaley in third, but not enough to topple Mike from Gold. Max’s results were more uniform which meant that after discards he ended the event in 12th place overall and first junior, one place ahead of Isabelle Waha of the SB20 fleet, who was the first female.   

Mike’s comments:

“The whole event was very competitive and after a good start to the finals I had to work hard to defend an early lead. The racing was really close and my competitors pushed me right to the last race, with Sam right on my heels and Rory and Arthur not far behind. But I thankfully managed to recover from a bad start and I'm so glad I could come through leading a 1, 2 and (de-facto) 3 for the Laser Class. And thanks to my competitors for the great racing and thanks to the organisers and to the sponsors (VRsport and VRigger) for giving us something fun to do during this Lockdown!”