Sevenoaks sent three teams to compete at the RYA Youth and Junior championships held at Farmoor reservoir near Oxford on 16-17 October.

The event has two categories, U19 and U16, and attracts all the top school, club and national squad sailors. Sevenoaks were looking to improve on their 4th place finish in the U19 from the previous year. We entered two teams in the U19 and one in the U16 competition.

There were 24 teams in each division and the format was a round robin to seed the teams, with knockout racing at the end to find the winner. In the U19 Sevenoaks A had a great first day dropping just one race to finish the day ranked 2nd, with Sevenoaks B lying in 10th.

Day 2, however, saw a distinct lack of wind and therefore only a few races. This meant it was not possible to go to the knockout stages and results had to be taken from the incomplete round robin on percentage wins; this resulted in Sevenoaks A finishing 3rd overall despite only having one loss. Unfortunately they didn’t get to race the top two ranked teams.

Sevenoaks B finished 10th. The Juniors (many of whom were experiencing their first team racing event racing against older and more experienced sailors) finished 18th in their division.

Despite the disappointment of not being able to race knockouts it was still a good result and Sevenoaks was by far the top performing school.

Sevenoaks A:
Laurence Gibbons & Emily McEachern
Henry Forward & Victoria Moynes
Nick Ashton & Imogen Palmer

Sevenoaks B:
Harrison Hodgkins & Ed Broadhead
Rob Laurenson & Fred Best
Jacob Rainbow & Lara Bryan

Sevenoaks Juniors:
Isla Stevens & Olly Webster
Ben Moverley Smith & Alex Bullock
Ed Haynes & Henry Bowers