Participating in the J24 World Championships began as a pipe dream when we heard it was being held in Seattle for the first time. Never before had this world class event been held so close to Vancouver and gradually with a lot of effort and the help of some good friends the dream became a reality. A big motivator was the opportunity to experience this event with two of my sons Jason and Benjamin, my grandson Ryan and two incredible junior member brothers, Andre and Gustav Deseau. The boat BLURRRR has been in the family since 1998 and is part of our DNA. I had not attended a major J24 regatta with BLURRRR since 2010 and she needed some work if we wanted to compete at this level. A big shout out to Clint Currie and the team at Currie Yachts for all their help in getting the boat together.
We had only sailed together as a team in one Wednesday Evening race, so we arrived five days early to get in some much need practice. This required us to disrupt the lives of the Samano’s, Alex, Chelsea and Sebastian who is a junior member of our club for billeting us for a lengthy time without hesitation for which we are eternally grateful.
It became evident after a couple of days of tuning up with Greek, Italian and Argentinian teams that we were off the pace, but our crew work was really coming together.
I was lucky enough to run into Keith Whittemore, accidentally on purpose who is a two-time World Champion, North American, European and Italian Champion, whom I had known since 2005 when we held the Canadian J24 Nationals at West Vancouver Yacht Club. Keith agreed to step on to BLURRRR and give us some tuning tips. He then emailed me his own personal tuning guide. What a guy. Needless to say, we started keeping pace with other boats a lot better after that.
We now felt we could compete without embarrassing ourselves to much and looked forward to five days of racing with the best J24 sailors in the world representing eleven nations. Its hard to describe the adrenaline and chaos experienced when trying to get of the start line with a lane in clean air while competing for space with fifty-five other J24’s. Andre did a great job of getting us around the course as tactician and we managed to finish twenty sixth in the first race even with my bad start. That was our best finish of the day, and we peaked on the third day finishing with a sixteenth and an eighth. At that point we were twenty-eighth overall and certainly exceeding my expectations. A couple of deep races on the last two days dropped us down to thirty fifth overall for the event but I am extremely proud of our team, and this was an experience we will never forget. Corinthian Yacht Club of Seattle was an amazing host club and organized every aspect of the Championship very well. To quote the Beetles,” I get by with a little help from my friends.” I would do it again in a heart-beat.
Graham Kirby
