This weekend the Bahamas Sailing School (BSS) and the Bahamas Olympic Committee (BOC) hosted the first ever Bahamas Youth Olympic Regatta at Montagu Bay.
The races were in the Optimist Dinghy Class, Laser Class and Sunfish Class. All of the top junior sailors were on hand for the historic event. They also divided the racers into fleets; each fleet represented the various skill levels of the sailors. The gold fleet was made up of advanced sailors, or sailors with more experience; silver featured intermediate sailors and the green fleet was for those who are new to the sport.
In the laser class, Spencer Cartwright finished first, followed by Alande Forbes in second. Branden Sands finished third while Paul Desouza finished fourth. Ryan Mender finished in fifth, while Nathaniel Burnside rounded out the competition in sixth.
Tahj Ramirez finished first in the gold fleet, while Cochise Burrows finished second. Ben Derbshire came in third with Tristan Eldon in fourth; Blake Roberts finished in fifth.
Maclean Goodfellow finished first in the silver class, while Joshua Higgins finished in second. Isaac Fox came in third with Robbie Carey finishing fourth. Jason Scott finished in fifth position.
In the Optimist Dinghy green class Alvin Lewis finished first, while George Delafe finished second. Delaney Goodfellow came in third, and PJ Carusi finished fourth, with Jonathan Weech rounding out the top five.
In the Sunfish class Paloma Cartwright finished in first, and Luke Browning took second. Daisy Tinkler finished in third and Kaylen Davis in fourth, while Antoine Dean rounded out the top five.
Of the 60 participants, 21 of them were from Harbour Island, Robert Dunkley, president of the BSS, was pleased with the number of participants from the island and would like to get more of the outer islands to participate in the future.
"I want to give thanks to The Bahamas Olympic Committee for providing us with some funding for s to host the first Bahamas Olympic Youth Regatta and hopefully we can have this every year," said Dunkley.
"Grand Bahama would normally be here but they have just went through the process of changing their program, the person that ran their program for them recently left and there is a new instructor, but it's just a matter of getting them organized and I think for future events that we have we will be seeing a pretty large contingent from Grand Bahama. This is the first of these and hopefully the Olympic committee will sponsor us again, but if even if they don't we are still going to have it because every three months we have a major event like this which brings in sailors from the other islands."
The weather was a major factor leading up to the weekend, it had been raining heavily throughout the week but cleared up in enough time to allow the event to go off without a hitch.
"I think we were very lucky we had a lot of rain this week and then it was just perfect on the weekend. We had 1 knots of wind on Saturday morning and then 18 in the afternoon so all-great conditions with blue skies. We had 60 boats which was a good turn out for us, we offer a major thank you to the Olympic Committee who came along and assisted us with this one, it's the first time they sponsored us with this and I think the turnout is a show of support for them too," said Richard Browning, CEO of Palm Cay Marina.
"We think that sailing is based in Nassau. But it's good to know that the Family Islands not only have their own clubs but they do come across and support these events. Twenty one sailors out of 60 coming from Harbor Island is absolutely magnificent. We went to Abaco last year and tried to set up a little club but it really takes a lot of dedication from someone on the island, Mr. Dunkley spends nearly full time with organization, chasing people and putting things together and now its time for the individual islands to find some as Mr. Dunkley to go ahead and do that."
The attendance shows that there is great interest when it comes to sailing in The Bahamas and this event serves as an incentive to bring the sport to the forefront and introduce more kids to it.
"We had great breeze this morning and it was quite challenging for us and the kids, we had a great turn out from Harbor Island which is a really good show of the sailing going on around the nation. It was very well attended and both the Olympic association and the sailing association will be pleased with the event," said race organizer Fernando De Cardenas.

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