T
he increasingly popular sport of Sailing took centre stage last week as the FOBISIA Sailing Championships took place at Royal Varuna Yacht Club in Pattaya. This year’s event saw teams entered from Bangkok Patana, Shrewsbury and Harrow. Despite being fewer schools competing this year than last, the competition has certainly developed and improved, which lead to an entertaining and challenging competition for all sailors. Sailing is a sport that holds a lower profile for many students compared to other sporting activities so here’s a little a competition guide for those of you wondering how it works… The competition is made up of three different events; Individual Optimist Sailing, Helm and Crew RS Vision Sailing and RS Quba Team Sailing. Each event has overall winners and the placing in each event then contributes to the overall scores to see who is crowned FOBISIA champions. Optimist boats are small, single-handed sailing dinghies with one sail. In this event sailors between 8 and 15 years of age compete against each other. Each placing counts as points and the aim is to have the lowest points at the end of ten races. For example, finishing first in all races has an overall score of 10—this would be the lowest score possible and therefore the sailor would finish in first overall. In this year’s Optimist sailing category, the Tigers’ fielded three students from very different Year groups: M.L. Weka Bhanubandh (Year 5), Christopher Marsh (Year 6) and Jade Gavin (9W). All of the Bangkok Patana sailors were very competitive and in the final few races of the event it became a close fight between our sailors for first, second and third placings. In the end, experience came through with Jade taking first overall in