Text Box: International Junior Match Racing Championship GovernorŐs Cup 2008 Newport Beach, California A big thank you to Artemis for their generous sponsorship that enabled me and my match racing team to train and take part in this prestigious junior match racing event. My team was myself, helmsman, Andrew Shaw, bowman, Dan Schieber and middle man, George Yeoman. We have sailed to together as a team winning the youth Match Racing Championships in 2006 and know that we work well together. Before going to this event we fitted in some training in a recently developed Artemis 20, which had some similarity to the boats we were going to sail in California. We arrived A few days before the event was due to start; with the hope of being able to explore the venue and get to know the sailing area. Despite our early arrival our host was kind enough to accommodate us. Straight away we started doing some sailing on a variety of boats; giving an idea of the conditions during the event... large swell and not much wind!! The opening dinner at the yacht club, introduced us to the competition from a number of different countries, for most of the teams this was not their first International Match racing event; we where going to have to work hard to achieve a top result. The training day was fun, accompanied by a school of dolphins; we worked hard on our boat handling and speed. The boats were tough to sail in a swell and light conditions, boat speed was going to be hard to maintain. Day 1- The sailing area was 45min tow away from the harbour. Very light airs. Had a tough day, 2 wins 3 losses. Day 2- More wins than losses we were only just qualifying for the repachage. Day 3 – We finished with five wins and six losses in the first round robin, but our team was on a steep learning curve, coming back in the repachage to beat two teams with better round-robin records, we made the semi finals! The final Day – Close racing was had in all races, we lost the semi final against the eventual winner, this put us in the petit-final against an experienced Kiwi team. We needed to keep our cool and bring all that we had learnt during the week together. We beat them 2-0. Thank you Dan and George and to Artemis our sponsor; a good result, third in the GovernorŐs Cup! At the Prize giving we received The sportsmanship trophy, a little to large to bring back on the plane! See photo. Following this event I am hoping to continue to do further national and international events. Andrew Shaw