The Australian Women’s Match Racing Team crew of Nicky Souter, Jessica Eastwell and Katie Spithill has had an ideal start to the Perth 2011 ISAF Sailing World Championships with four wins from four races.The Women’s Match Racers kicked off competition at Perth 2011 with Souter and crew getting off to a perfect start, winning their first race against Rita Goncalves of Portugal.
The trio’s win against the Portugese was their closest of the day, by just 10 seconds, before taking the points against Canada’s Sharon Ferris, Argentina’s Martina Silva and finally against Ru Wang of China.
“Four wins from four races, a perfect scorecard is a pretty good way to kick things off,” said Souter. “I might have made things in the first race a bit interesting and exciting for the spectators and the girls as we only got the lead right at the finish, it was pretty close.
“Overall we’re very happy with the day, we had very shifty winds, pretty much everything, breeze, breeze shutting down, breeze shifting around each race, it was pretty exciting,” she said.
The four wins for Souter, Eastwell and Spithill gave them a share of the lead after day one of racing, with the Women’s Match Racing competition taking place close to shore in Fremantle Harbour.
“It was quite a difficult course to sail,” said Eastwell. “You had to have eyes out of the boat the whole time and keep onto every single wind shift which we did really well today.”
The Australians will hit the water again on Monday and still have a number of the top ranked crews to face, but day one was promising for such a new combination.
“We’re so happy to have the first day done,” said Spithill. “With all of the nerves and anxiety it was great to have a strong first day here as a team.”
Temperatures in the high 30s tested all of the crews with fellow Australian’s Olivia Price, Nina Curtis and Lucinda Whitty taking the chance to spend some time on the dock and get a feel for what they’ll face on Sunday.
“Our preparation has been really good, we feel like we’re spent enough time studying the course area and have done enough practice to execute what we need to do for the area,” said Price. “We can’t wait for racing tomorrow, we’re so excited to finally get back into racing, it’s always such a different feeling to race rather than train.”
Price, Curtis and Whitty will get their chance to go racing on Sunday morning, with the Match Racing competition set to begin at 10am.
For full results, live tracking, event blog and radio coverage visit www.perth2011.com.
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