Europe’s best sailing league teams met on Lake Starnberg this weekend to fight for a place in the Sailing Champions League Final.
After finishing 2nd in the Swiss league, we arrived with one clear objective: secure a top-five finish and qualify for the final.
Lake Starnberg is famous for its light winds, so we expected long days of waiting around for breeze. Instead, we managed to get quite a bit of racing in. The conditions were absolutely crazy, with huge shifts and gusts constantly reshuffling the fleet. At least we had wind — which was already more than we had expected.
What we did not expect was just how cold it would be. We spent most of the regatta wearing our buffs pulled up over our faces. It probably looked quite ridiculous, but it was surprisingly effective.
While we definitely had opportunities to fight for the podium, we didn’t quite deliver when it mattered. But in the end, we achieved what we came for.
A top-five finish and qualification for the Sailing Champions League Final.
It was the absolute minimum we had set for ourselves, which leaves this result sitting somewhere between satisfaction and disappointment. Not entirely happy, not entirely sad.
Sometimes sport is like that. You achieve your goal, but you leave knowing there was more on the table.
SIMONSAILS 