1998 New Zealand Freshwater Championships, Lake Taupo

Lake Taupo, February 06.-08.

Report by Alistair Deaves

Twenty four OKs gathered on the beautiful Lake Taupo over the Waitangi weekend to contest the Freshwater Championships. Freshwater sailing in New Zealand is rare and everyone was taking the opportunity not to take the event very seriously. It was good to see a wide selection of juniors there, three from Auckland and five from Napier. Also competing were four Europeans. Birke Taufenbach from Germany, Thomas Hanson-Mild from Sweden and Alistair Deaves and Rodney Thorne from England.

Memories of this event are not too clear now, suffice to say that the wind was shifty and variable. A high placing in any race was never certain until you crossed the line. Ben Morrison sailed from first to tenth during the last beat of one race, while Graham Lambert came from nowhere and almost won.

On the only day that we had a decent breeze, the racing was postponed as we had to watch speedboats hammer around the lake with mind numbing repetition doing some sort of race thing. By the time they got bored (or finished their race or whatever they were doing) all the wind had gone again and we were left with a patchy shifty mess. Birke tried her own method of trying to overcome the conditions by distracting the fleet by sailing around in her underpants. This didn’t work either, although she swears blind that she thought no-one would notice.

The racing then was dominated by the juniors. Russell Wood and Daniel Bush had there customary duel, with Ben Morrison seperating them in the final standings. Napier’s Fenwick brothers Hamish and Chris sailed extremely well, winning three of the six races between them. Top European was Thomas, after a close battle with Alistair.

The main events of the weekend were the evening activities involving beer and boats and policemen, and several embarrassed juniors being presented with torches at the prizegiving. To sum up the weekend though, Joe Porebski arrived at the start line for the last race, with his son Josh, on board a jet-ski – the only sure way to arrive at the windward mark first.