There has been a dream start for Scottish-Irish skiff pair Charlotte Dobson and Saskia Tidey from the Royal Irish Yacht Club in the 49erFX taking the first race of their campaign by a clear margin on the rest of the fleet.
The pair backed it up with another race win and a sixth-place to consolidate top spot on the leaderboard.
As regular Afloat readers will know, Tidey was forced to quit Team Ireland after Rio 2016 because she could find no further means of progressing her Olympic ambitions and has since risen to the top of women's world skiff sailing.
It's a remarkable start to the Tokyo Olympics where Irish skiff sailors are at the front of both the men's and women's 49er fleets.
The 49erFX opened with a dramatic race that fully showcased just how challenging and unpredictable these skiffs can be. Early on it was the gold and silver medallist teams from Rio 2016 who took the lead.
Rio silver medallists Alex Maloney and Molly Meech (NZL) led around the first mark. The reigning Olympic Champions from Brazil, Martine Grael and Kahena Kunze also had a go in the lead, but they couldn’t keep the British behind them.
After a slow start, Charlotte Dobson and Saskia Tidey (GBR) put the hammer down, moved into the lead and were unstoppable. Behind them all kinds of unforced errors were striking other teams. The Kiwis capsized, the Brazilians were lying in second down the final run to the finish but their gennaker sheet got jammed and they couldn’t clear the problem, watching almost the whole fleet sail past as they finished in 15th.
That whacky race set the tone for an afternoon of highly entertaining FX competition. After three weeks of training in light winds, the strong, gusty breeze blowing off the shore created chaos and unpredictability for pretty much everyone. The British have taken the lead with scores of 1,1,6 ahead of Steph Roble & Maggie Shea (USA) who scored 3,2,14. After the disaster of the first race, the Brazilians recovered their composure to win the last race of the session, scoring 15,5,1 for third overall.
Dobson was thankful to have come through the day unscathed, downplaying any excitement about winning her two opening races. "I think if someone had told us a week ago that we’d get these results on day one, we’d have bitten their arm off." She said it was about keeping things simple, or "boring" as she described it. "We just wanted to be boring and then be brave when we saw the opportunity. And I think that's kind of what we did a little bit today."
WHAT THEY SAID:
49erFX
Charlotte Dobson, 35, from Rhu, Scotland, said:
“It was a great day. I think if someone had told us we would have those results on day one yesterday we would have grabbed their hand off. Today was about being a bit boring but brave if we saw an opportunity, and that’s what we did a little bit today.
“It is really tricky sailing these boats in shifty conditions were there is such differences in pressure. You’re in the middle of a manoeuvre and you get a massive wind shift it doesn’t make you look great when you capsize in an event like this but it’s so easy to do. I’m grateful that we avoided it today and I hope it’s not our turn tomorrow.
“There’s a range of results and I think that is the nature of puffy, windy racing, certainly in Japan. We have seen this in preparations over the last couple of years so I think, you know, the boring things, it’s going to be a long series and just try and stay out of trouble. We will try and put together a series, it’s not very exciting, it’s boring, but if we can have as many boring days as possible then that is great.
“The lead up to this regatta has been less than seven knots, and then you have these conditions. I don’t think everyone is dialled in to the conditions yet but we have been racing these types of conditions here for the last four years. You just have to get the notebook out and try to remember the tempo of those days and how those days feel.
“Sometimes it was fast and sometimes it was slow today. I don’t think it was much of a boat speed day. I think it was the type of day that Sas does really well which is make the boat quiet and she’s all over making the boat go well so I can get my head out of the boat and look around so we have on maximum focus on where we should be.”
Saskia Tidey, 28, from Sandycove, Dun Laoghaire on Dublin Bay, said:
“It was a super tricky day and a day where you have to have teamwork involved. My job as crew is keep the boat fast in the water and not create any noise or distraction and Charlotte is head out of the boat and see where the next gains are coming from. It was up and down with wind strength today so super, super hard, but we had a good one.
“What’s important for us is not to do anything that surprises us or anyone else, with the conditions out there we just need to keep it consistent and back each other to deliver what we already know.”
