Final Day, First Race:
The starting gun fired, and twenty-eight 470 bows leapt forward as if suddenly jolted with electricity. The boats began smoothly cutting through chocolate brown waves on their way upwind, seven-tenths of a mile to the weather mark.
As the first seconds of the race ticked by at the 1999 470 National Championship Regatta, two teams had yet to cross the starting line: Morgan Reeser's USA 1705, and Paul Foerster's USA 1722. Reeser and crew, Kevin Burnham, strategically pinned Foerster and Bob Merrick off to one side behind the starting line two minutes before the start. "Since Morgan had me pinned before the start, I decided to just sit and wait for the gun, knowing he would have to start the race and I could follow. But when the gun went off, he just sat there--determined to hold us back. We finally maneuvered around him, but we were late. Fortunately, that start was a general recall and everyone came back," commented Paul after the regatta was over.
While Reeser's scores at that point were not good enough to win the event, he may have hoped to prevent Foerster and Merrick from becoming the '99 National Champions, but his attempts were to no avail. Foerster and Merrick's scores, much like theirs in the recent French Olympic Sail Week Regatta, proved unstoppable: five first place finishes out of nine races sailed, with other scores being 4, DNF, 2 and 3.
The National Championships determined a couple of significant factors for the 470 men's and women's teams. First and foremost, it established each team's ranking for the year among others on the US Sailing team. Male and female winners of that regatta are now ranked first on their respective teams. Secondly, winning the 1999 National Championships allows Foerster and Merrick to compete in the Pre-Olympic Regatta to be hosted in Sydney later this year, just prior to the US Olympic Trials. Tracy Haley and Louise VanVoorhiss will be the female 470 team representing the USA in this event. The Pre-Olympic Regatta will be a final opportunity for top ranking American teams to hone their skills against the best sailors in the world before returning home to battle domestic competition for the Olympic berth.
During the next three months, Team CompuCom/Kitty Hawk will train at the
following events:
May 14-16, French National Championships - Brest, France
May 25-30, SPA - Medemblick, Holland
June 3-6, Danish Spring Cup - Copenhagen, Denmark
June 23-27, KIEL - Kiel, Germany
July 10-14, International 470 French Cup - Hourtin, France
July 21-25, Travemunde - Travemunde, Germany
Please see the Team 2000 web page for more information and additional regattas: www.rcyc.org/Team_2000