All the young sailors competing in this weekend’s Caribbean Dinghy Championships pose on the Sint Maarten Yacht Club dock with their nation’s flags. (Robert Luckock photo)
SIMPSON BAY--Simpson Bay will be abuzz with sailboats from today and throughout the weekend as 47 young sailors from nine islands will be competing in the 2024 Caribbean Dinghy Championships. The competing islands are St. Maarten, French Saint-Martin, Antigua, Barbados, Saint-Barthelemy, Guadeloupe, Saint Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago. The teams were all individually presented last night. The sailors will be racing in six different categories of boats over the three days: RS Quest, RS Zest, Optimist, and ILCA which is the new name for the Laser. The latter has three different size sails; ILCA 4, ILC6 and ILCA 7.
The smallest sailors usually start with the smallest sail and as they get stronger they progress to the bigger sails. Five sailors are sailing the RS Quest, three for the RS Zest, 11 in the Optimist Class, six in the ILCA 7, seven in the ILCA 6, and seven in the ILCA 4. “We will have results and rankings for individual classes and then there is the much sought after Nations Cup and that goes to the country that achieves the best results overall in all the different classes,” explained organiser Sam Peeks at the opening ceremony in Sint Maarten Yacht Club. “The Nations Cup has a complicated points system attached to it.” Last year Antigua won the Nations Cup.
This year St. Maarten is hosting the Dinghy Championships for the second, the last time was in 2022. Peeks indicated that the turnout this year is better than the two previous years. “The idea is that the championships are hosted by a different country each year but this year no country wanted to host it, which is why we are hosting again. It is a lot of work to organise,” Sam added. The Race Officer is Paul Henriquez joined by a team of volunteers on the committee boat. There will be a prize giving daily after racing and the main awards ceremony takes place in the yacht Club restaurant on Sunday at 2:00pm.
