Meech And Maloney Climbed World Cup Standings

Molly Meech and Alex Maloney put aside their not so good experience of the first day of the race and climb at the leader board in the World Cup final of 49erFX taking place in Santander yesterday.

Meech and Maloney won the first race of two day race and sit in overall eighth and 37 points after backing it up with a seventh and fifth in the invitation-only regatta.

Leaders Saskia Tidey and Charlotte Dobson of Great Britain scored 16 points, but all the top six teams are within six points of each other.

The pair of Kiwi after Rio Olympic that happened last year is competing in their first major regatta. Both are really keen to continue their upward movement in the point’s ladder.

Meech said “Fleet racing is really exciting and we are left with only a few more days, so we have a number of races to race and we are looking forward to getting back out.”

“We started the event with a win which was not only cool, but also motivating to start the day. Not to forget, we had some up and down during the races and a few things did not go the way we calculated, but again this is called the game.”

Close to the shore, the skiff fleets competed in 8-12 knots wind along with some strong tides. This made the conditions tricky.

The crew of 49er of Trent Rippey and Josh Porebski had some of their own issues, in their day’s first race, they the traveler, but managed to collect a couple of good scores and the score helped them in keeping them in a good position.

Porebski said, “We were going perfectly in our first race, and then we witnessed breakage in our boat”. One side of the traveler got broke, that slowed us down on our track.”