A love affair with the Laser and Largs.
There is one sailor here racing in the Women's Laser Radial fleet for whom Largs has very special memories. She is the only competitor who actually raced here nearly 20 years ago when the ISAF Youth Sailing World Championships were hosted here in 1991.
She was just a wide-eyed youngster then but her enduring love affair with the Laser Radial dinghy has stood the test of time and she is loving being back on the Clyde, wind and the odd spot of rain, and the chilly weather which is a contrast to the dry heat of her home city of Athens.
Maria Vlachou (GRE) finished sixth at the ISAF youth worlds here and has stayed in the sport ever since, and is still just as enthusiastic about her racing:
" I remember fog, the wind - we had light winds, we had very storng winds and we had big waves. I finished sixth and had three first places. At that time we got prizes for every race and I still have three little prizes at home. It was nice and traditional. I remember we all stayed up at the national sports centre together and that was great fun.
I remember the prizegiving at the end of the regatta which was great fun too." she recalls.
After nearly a couple of decades some details fade from the memory banks, but some stand out for ever:
" Also, at that time they were giving great importance to anti-doping control, and at the end of one race I had been waiting all day to go to the toilet and when I got to the end of the race I was just starting to unzip my dry suit in the boat and the anti-doping people arrived on a motor boat and told me not to, I had to go back with the motor boat and spend half an hour driving with them before I was finally allowed to go!"
" I have sailed off and on in the class since then. I did two Olympic campaigns in the Europe one 2000 and one for 2004 and went to Sydney and finished 18th."
" To tell you the truth I never liked the Europe class, my body really never adapted to it. I stopped for a year or so and when they decided to put the Laser Radial class into the Olympic Games I thought OK I'll start with the Radial again and it has been great. I love to sail the Laser. It is good for my body because I feel like it grew up into the boat.
I have sailed the Laser Radial from 1988 to 1992 and then I stopped and started again in 2005."
She is still as keen on the Laser as when she first sailed it:
" I love it. I sail out of Athens and am totally in love with the Laser. But it was a big, big disappointment not to sail at home in Athens at the Olympics there.
"But it was a great regatta here then with good sailors, Robert Scheidt, Dean Barker, Caroline Brouwer.....Sabina Schuemann was here, I remember Katrina Percy winning a medal. But unfortunately a few who were here who have stopped."
Her return here has been like a very pleasant deja vu, but the class and the sport has evolved a lot:
" I am excited to be here again. This regatta has so little to do with what it was like 20 years ago. The fleet is a lot, lot bigger. Then we sailed with 20 boats and now we have 120 and the sailors are much, much better prepared. They are sailing all the time, World Cup regattas and so on."
" I am not full time, I used to work as a coach, but this year I am taking a year off. I am in the army, in the same year in 1991 when I came back from Scotland, we had the Women's World Championships in Greece and I won it. From that win I worked for the army."
"I love it here. You have so much green and it is so different."
And another little memory she shares, meeting one of the local seals during a downwind leg:
" I remember in one race there was a seal when I was going downwind. I sailed by it and thought it was a dog and went near it, then I thought it was a diver, and then wehn I put my hand out it dived and I realised it was a seal!"
11/7/2010 14:27
