2013 Sail First Virtual ISAF Youth Worlds set to break records

Championship enters third & final stage today

70% of points still available over next 2 weeks if you start racing now! Over the past four weeks a real battle has raged on SailX for the 2013 'Sail First Virtual ISAF Youth Sailing World Championships'. With Stages 2 and 3 now complete, competitors have had the opportunity to win 30% of available points - but with 70% still in play, this final stage is where it really counts. Many of the top SailXer's have been quiet until now - just doing enough to keep in touch - but we expect to see them step up their efforts over the next two weeks, so now the real pressure will come on! We also expect a few hundred new entrants to join the fray at the last minute. If you are one of these, time is running out but if you get stuck in quickly you can still compete.

Click here to register and join the racing.

So far the 'Youth' contingent has been putting on a great show. Despite making up less than 20% of the total entrants, the 221 Youth competitors hold five slots in the Overall Ranking with 'NOR-428' lying an extremely close 2nd, 'markh' in 4th, 'hector1' in 5th, 'Yahooz' in 6th and 'Loading...' in 8th! The pattern was similar last year but in the end experience overcame youth for the top slot. It's going to be a big fight again this year so let's see what happens!

When it comes to the Nations Trophy there is an interesting story to tell - with the USA lying in top slot ahead of the traditionally stronger sailing nations of Australia (currently lying in 11th position overall), Spain (3rd) and Great Britain (2nd). To some extent this will be down to SailX's relatively high profile in the USA after winning the 'US Sailing One Design Creativity Award' in 2010, but with only the top-10 sailors from each country being counted towards their nations ranking score, what we are seeing here is some really talented sailors flying the US flag high against the rest of the world. Let's see if they can keep it up!

But whatever happens we already know that this event is going to be a record-breaker. Never before has there been an online inshore sailing regatta of this size and scale: in just the last four weeks SailX has hosted over 12,700+ hours or 1.5 years worth of user racing time between practice racing and the Official Virtual ISAF Youth Worlds regattas. Another way to look at this: SailX operates at an accelerated pace, encouraging users to make decisions approximately every 5 seconds while racing, so conservatively we are talking about 5 millions decisions here. If you consider that all of these decisions are based on the same strategies, tactics and rules involved in real-world sailing - that's a lot of opportunities to learn - and that's why some of the top sailors, coaches in the world play SailX.

Steve Hunt (S1D Coach of the Year) giving some quick coaching tips on SailX keys using SailX in 2D