Event: Sunfish Junior National Championships 2012 Event recap from Lori Lowe

Event: Sunfish Junior National Championships 2012
Event recap from Lori Lowe

Bahamian Youth Sailors, both boys and girls, with some as young 11 and weighing as little as 70 pounds competed in Montagu Bay on Saturday and Sunday past for the title of Bahamas Junior National Sunfish Champion.Saturday brought a south breeze of 4 to 12 knots coming over New Providence making for shifty and variable conditions with the occasional shift in excess of 90 degrees.  Sunday brought slightly more consistent conditions.    
The conditions kept the young sailors on their toes avoiding the potential disasters of auto tacks and flipping their boats.  Some reaped the benefits of the huge shifts leaping past many competitors while others were left in the back after finding themselves on the wrong side of a shift through no fault of their own.  The variable winds definitely made for an interesting regatta.

The overall winner with four first place finishes in the six race series was Paul de Souza recently returned from the Youth Worlds in another and smaller sailboat, the Optimist.  Paul showed the fleet that the race isn't over until you cross the finish line improving his position in one race by 5 places during the course of the race and nipping another competitor who thought he had won a race within a boat length of the finish in another.  First place in the remaining two races were taken by Tyler Cartwright of Long Island and Devaughn Williamson a member of the Bahamas National Soccer Team for his age group.Second and third places overall were taken by the other Bahamian representatives at the Optimist World Championship earlier this summer, Alande Forbes and Spencer Cartwright, who showed the benefits of their training regime.Worth mentioning is that after day one Daniel Gibson, a former National Champion in the Optimist, held second place but was unfortunately unable to attend on Sunday and protect that position.Top female was Paloma Cartwright from Long Island who recently represented The Bahamas at the Scripts National Spelling Bee in the United States.All the competitors sailed well and should be proud of their accomplishments.

Bahamian Sailors battle it out at the 2012 Junior Nationals!

 (Photo: Robert Dunkley)