Earlybird crowned Swan 45 World Champions

14 September 2008

It was Hendrik Brandis and Christian Nagel’s Earlybird that was victorious at the Swan 45 World Championships, taking the prestigious Gold Cup back to Germany with them.

Earlybird, with Sten Mohr in the tactician’s role, went into the last day with a commanding lead, but the knowledge that a discard was about to come into play that might give advantage to the chasing pack if she failed to deliver on the racecourse. This was never likely. Earlybird had not been out of the top five all week and just to prove the point posted a crushing fourth in the first race that snuffed out all remaining hope for her rivals. In second place overnight, Atlantica Racing was already fourteen points behind and needed at least to do better than Earlybird to keep the rubber open. This was not to be. Atlantica chose the crucial race of the week to post her worst score of the week, a nineteenth. Worse was to follow for owner Carlo Perrone as Grant Gordon & Klaus Diederich’s Fever moved into second overall by winning the race. With Earlybird holding a six point lead over the now second-placed Fever, and her worst score a fifth, the German crew could sit out the final race in the series safe in the knowledge they had done more than enough.

Christian Nagel was ecstatic, “I feel great, absolutely great, you can’t feel better! I think everyone was a bit nervous this morning, but when we went out everything was fine because we felt good with the weather. We like strong winds, so once out there everything was fine.” Earlybird has threatened a result like this from early in the season. At Rolex Capri Sailing Week in May, she was sailing well but blotted her copybook with an inconsistent scoreline. This week, no such problems. Nagel admitted they had had to work hard to reach this level and had been improving steadily over the last two years, “we try to prepare as best as possible. Normally, we are practicing in the race area two to three days before the event starts. It’s our second season with this boat and we have made some changes to the crew, constantly trying to figure out where things could be optimized. Each event is treated as a new challenge. In this event we were able to amalgamate successfully the start sequences, boat speed and tactics.”

www.yccs.it