Fortunately club members won't have long to make up for the weekend's closure and make a fuss of Mackay. The former Woodford House student arrives home tomorrow to study for some Auckland University exams.
Mackay, 20, is studying commerce on a Prime Minister's Scholarship.
"I'm sure she will find time to visit the club," her delighted father Hugh said last night.
He had spoken to his daughter earlier in the day and said she was "over the moon".
"They've been aiming for something like this for a while and they've done it with an event which was staged for the first time. They have spent a lot of time training together in boats and it has paid off," Mackay snr said, referring to the fact his daughter and Wilkinson, 20, have been travelling together to regattas for the past three years.
"This has to be a confidence booster in their quest to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020," Robinson said.
Mackay and Wilkinson have been racing in the Olympic Nacra 17 class for the past two years and are the world youth champions in the class where 5.5 metre (18 foot) long Flying Phantom foiling catamaran boats are raced. The class made its debut at the Rio Olympics and the Kiwi crew which qualified ahead of Mackay and Wilkinson finished fourth.
To qualify for Newport Mackay and Wilkinson won the Australasia/Oceania title in Auckland earlier this year. The weekend's regatta, which had only one other female competitor, was sailed on the water in front of the historic New York Yacht Club grounds where the America's Cup was bolted to a table in the clubhouse for 132 years from 1851 until 1983.
At the end of the round robin series on Day 1 the Kiwis were on top of the leaderboard with direct entry into yesterday's finals which were scheduled to be raced over a series of three races. This series was to feature the top four crews. The Swiss crew also qualified directly for day three and the Italian and French crews qualified for yesterday through a series of repechage races on Day 2.
Robinson, who has been a member of the Napier club since 1979, pointed out a lot of the other crews in Newport had been coached by America's Cup competitors. In sharp contrast the Kiwis are almost self-trained.
Red Bull Foiling Generation was conceived and developed by sports directors Roman Hagara and Hans Peter Steinacher, two-time Olympic champions from Austria, to introduce talented sailors aged 16-20 to the kind of leading-edge foiling technology used in the America's Cup.
Mackay's sailing career began in the Optimist class at the Napier club before blossoming into the 420 national champion in 2014 and '13. Wilkinson also started in Optimists as a youngster before progressing through a range of boats to find traction in the P class at 16 and by the following year he was flirting with catamarans.
Mackay and Wilkinson's next regatta will be Sail Melbourne from December 4-11 and they will also be in action at the Sail Auckland regatta during Waitangi Weekend.
