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Orlando reports on the Asian & Oceanian Optimist Championship

Asian & Oceanian Optimist Championship 29 December 2024 – 5 January 2025

Our flight left at midnight, Christmas night to head to the Asian & Oceanic Championship being held  in Hong Kong.  We finally landed, it took an hour to drive to the to the hotel which was located on the Island.   All the competitors and officials were staying at the Nina Hotel South for the duration of the regatta. 

To kick off the 3 training days, I set up my boat adding on all my gear to replicate the feel of my boat at home as much as I could.   All the boats provided had been custom made specifically for this regatta in a very short time frame.   We were really lucky to have all new spars to use.  The sailing area at the Clearwater Bay Golf & Marine Club was surrounded by mountainous terrain. The conditions where I was sailing was like nothing like I had experienced before, massive swell, light to medium winds and back wash with massive shifts from all the land around the sailing area.   The Club was located in a pretty amazing location!

On one of our training days we had 100 boats on the start line, we had almost every country joining in team Australia’s racing. This was by far the biggest racing of my life and I even got a couple of good results in the top 20 boats of the fleet. Fortunately, the starts during the regatta weren’t quite as chaotic as they were during these practice races. 

Back at the hotel my roommate and I settled in nicely and we were getting along really well. We made heaps of friends with the sailors from the other countries competing and had lots of company throughout the regatta.   One notable night we hosted a massive uno game with 15 people and 4 countries being represented!

Day one was one of the biggest days for me. It was a really hot and calm day with very little wind, it was a massive learning curve and my biggest challenge was to not be intimidated by the other competitors and to follow your own plan.     We were able to complete a couple of races every day, my qualifying rank placed me at the top of silver fleet, just missing out on gold by a couple of points.  I can see the areas that I could have improved,  a lot of this was relating to big fleet sailing which we don’t get to do very often.

I really enjoyed this regatta even though I didn’t get the results I wished for and made lots of friends and caught up with sailors from the AODS program that I had competed with last year.   I have had an amazing experience of what it’s like to sail in a big international regatta. I would even say my roommate Paddy and I had one of the best, funniest and most amazing regatta experiences ever.

There is so much to learn and grow from being able to compete at events like this.  A huge thank you to the Ron Tough Yachting Foundation and Royal Perth Yacht Club for supporting me on this amazing journey to Hong Kong, I am incredibly grateful for all your support. 

Orlando Ligovich


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