2023 49erFX World Championships
August 10-18, 2023 — Den Haag, Netherlands
The World Championship was sailed just three short weeks after we finished the Olympic Test Event. We arrived at The Hague to find a logistically complicated boat park and racecourses much farther offshore than usual for our fleet (one was six miles!). In addition, the Hague has semi-diurnal tide cycles, meaning two low tide times and two high times per day, i.e. the strength and direction of the current changed almost every hour and therefore played a larger part than usual in our race strategy. Interestingly, the water movement generated by the current and its resulting effect on the apparent wind created a totally new sensation onboard for the steering and trimming. For most of the event, we saw 10-16 knots of wind speed with big waves, which was a welcome opportunity for us to work on our speed and settings in a condition that is challenging for us.
The competition was stiff. All the top sailors who raced at the Olympic Test Event were joined by the second and third-ranked teams from their country, and the fleet of sixty-five boats was nearly double the size of last year’s World Championship. Throughout the week, we placed in the top nine finishers in ten out of the fifteen races, and we won three races in total! Over the past six months, we worked on taking more tactical risks at the right time in order to convert our fifth through seventh-place positions to top-three finishes. We are pleased by our progress toward this performance metric, which is a necessary stepping stone to the podium.
We raced hard all week and came into the final day of gold fleet racing in third place overall. Unfortunately, we picked up a black flag scoring penalty on the last day of Gold Fleet racing, which put us in seventh overall going into the medal race. Only ten points separated places fourth through eighth and we were looking forward to making up lost ground in the medal race. However, due to no wind, the medal race was canceled. While we were disappointed not to have a medal race, we were thrilled that we accomplished what we came to do: secure the Olympic berth for a US 49erFX team.
