Northland women sail into world championship silver

Two Northland sailors won silver at the Yngling World Championships in Mondsee, Austria at the weekend.
Sharon Ferris and Raynor Smeal, who both hail from Northland, secured their place in the final race of the regatta on Saturday night, a success due partly to some hard training work they undertook along with crew mate Ashley Holtum in the Bay of Islands earlier this year.
Starting the tenth and final race of the championship, Ferris held a narrow two-point margin over the Russians while the Americans were nine points in front. But they had to perform in the final race to hold their silver medal position.
Ferris, Smeal and Holtum joined forces earlier this year and enlisted the help of two-time Olympic medallist Bruce Kendall for this campaign.
The World Championship medal is another milestone for Ferris who at 30 years of age has competed at two Olympic Games and been involved in a multitude of sailing campaigns including the Volvo Around the World in 2002. At the 1996 Olympics in the single-handed Europe dinghy, Ferris was fifth, later taking up the challenge of the three person Yngling keelboat after its inclusion in the Athens Olympic Games had been announced.
Earlier this year Ferris was crew on board Doha 2006, the winning yacht in the round the world event known as the Oryx Quest. This made her the first New Zealand woman ever to successfully circumnavigate the world, non-stop, and the first female sailor in history to compete in the Olympics and a non-stop world regatta within the space of a year.
Ferris has achieved before in the Yngling class with a bronze medal at the Open World Championships in 2003 and a win in the Rolex Miami OCR regatta in 2004. In Athens last year, sailing with Joanna White and Kylie Jameson, Ferris placed 7th at the 2004 Olympics. Her goal now is Olympic Gold in Beijing.
"We are on our way to Milan to leave the boat at Harken and then the flight home. Home for three weeks and then we head to the US for more racing," Ferris said.