Gazprom Dragon Europeans at Yacht Club of Saint-Petersburg - Day 2
by Ivan Bidzilya 20 Jul 2016 07:56 BST
18-22 July 2016
On the second day at the Gazprom Dragon European Championship, 19th July, the tricky North winds produced some dramatic changes in the leaderboard. Having 3 races scored in two days the leaders Anatoly Loginov and Markus Wieser are now tied at 11 points with Marcus Brenneke only 2 points behind. Further down the leaderboard some really astonishing drops and comebacks have happened.
Given the tricky nature of the Northerly wind that has now established itself in the river Nieva mouth – eastern part of the Gulf of Finland – it's not surprise that almost each team have scored some good and bad results today. Consistency was the key to success and this is exactly what yesterday's leader UAE7 Markus Wieser managed to achieve in these conditions with two fifth finishes. Generally speaking, despite acting Russian champion Anatoly Loginov has won the first race, the day belonged to the Germans. In both races the Germans were either first or in the top-three.
The second race was dominated by UAE9 Hendrick Witzmann and this result helped him to climb from the 20th to the 10th place.
Marcus Brennecke has showed good understanding of the race course gained at the pre Europeans Open Russian Championship where he finished second overall. His GER11 with second and third today lifted from eighth to third place. Just behind him, but nine points adrift is GER1162 with Stephan Link on the helm and Frank Butzmann calling tactics with sixth and second finishes. And finally, GER1175 of Jan Woortman managed to be third in the first race that lifted him from 23rd to 18th.
On the other hand, 2013 European Champion Jose Mattoso experienced a quite disappointing drop with four times Olympian Gustavo Lima calling the shots. Yesterday they were fourth and today dropped down to ninth. "We managed to finish ninth in the first race but the second race was a disaster – we lost position on the start and we were forced to stay on the left way longer than we planned", - says Lima.
But so far the regatta is really disappointing for 2015 Gold Cup runner-up and ex-Russian champion Dmitriy Samokhin. Yesterday his RUS76 was black flagged and today wasn't much better. With 20th and 8th finishes Strange Little Girl sits far away from the place they were planning – 25th so far.
The same might be said about Team Transbunker's acting European and World champion Evgeniy Braslavets (UAE8) who is 23rd with OCS today. So far the 470 Olympian gold medalist didn't manage to score any top-10 results that is very unusual for him and his experienced and well fit crew.
On Wednesday the first race is scheduled for midday.
Full results at dragoneuro2016.ru/results
Detailed schedule at dragoneuro2016.ru/schedule