Boating is part of Nikki’s DNA

In the late afternoon glow of an autumn day, the competitors in the RNZYS Three Kings race head out on their 500-mile passage. – Ivor Wilkins photo

With the 2021-22 summer season now at an end, it has been great to get in a packed summer of racing after last year’s lockdowns. We have managed to reschedule most of the RNZYS events into a tighter six months of sailing. This has put a lot of pressure on staff and volunteers, but was important for the members and sailors to get the racing in.

Some of the highlights this season have been the recently finished Three Kings Race. This is the first time that the RNZYS has run this race since 1978 and it received a lot of interest. In the end, 20 boats started and five withdrew due to gear failures. Titanium sailed a fantastic race to take out the two-handed division on line and handicap, with Wired taking out the overall line and handicap win.

Another new event this year is the CBRE Club Championships Final. This is where all club champions from each division get the chance to race off against each other in the MRXs, both for bragging rights and the opportunity to compete for the chance to represent the RNZYS at the Seawanahaka Cup in California.

We had some great club racing through the season and big congratulations to all the series winners. It was fantastic to see the new MRX Sprints Series so well attended – congratulations to Harry Dodson and team for convincingly taking out the series.

The Harken Secondary Schools regatta was another well-attended event with 20 teams competing. Westlake Boys defended their title from last year. This is a great feeder event for the RNZYS Mastercard Youth Training Programme, which is looking at having a great 2022-23 season with more than 40 young sailors signed up for the next season.

Also, really good to see Nick Egnot-Johnson and his Performance Programme team take out the RNZYS Etchells Club championships with a win in the Auckland Championships, and 2nd in the post-Christmas series. Nick was sailing the RNZYS boat Bobby’s Girl, which was donated to the club by Alex Webster.

As always, we have a fantastic group of Race Management volunteers at the RNZYS, and they have really stepped up again this year, running all the racing in a tighter time frame. I can attest to the high standard of the weeknight race management – I am really enjoying the racing in the Etchells fleet.

One thing we are looking to improve on this winter is increasing the standard of the prizes for our major events. We are also looking for ways to improve the speed of results processing.

One of the issues we have is boats entering late, or not entering at all. This is an issue as the boat won’t have a handicap assigned and won’t be in the Top Yacht results system, which slows the whole process for getting the results out. For the Doyle Sails Winter Series, we have kept the same entry fee as the past few years, but added in late fees to encourage boats to enter earlier for these reasons.

We are looking forward to a series to come this winter!

Laurie Jury, Sailing Director