YACHTING - School students battle for place on the water

Alarmed Parua Bay residents may not have been ready for the scale of the invasion by more than 100 sailors yesterday for the start of the national secondary school teams' racing championships.
The teams of up to eight sailors, from 23 schools around the country and including a team from the Cook Islands, descended on Parua Bay yesterday for the first day of racing of a scheduled five, to find a new teams' racing champion.
One of the Whangarei-based organisers of the competition Mike Wright said the competition is one of the most established school-based sailing competitions in the country but has undergone a big makeover this year.
"This is the first time we've trialled an expanded format for the race and the big advantage of that is that teams can plan to go to a nationals rather than having to wait until they qualify," he said.
Formerly, only one team from each zone has qualified, meaning that teams from within the zone didn't like competing against each other in case they showed their racing strategies to their competitors too early in the piece.
"The other drawback was the difficulty of preparing for a nationals in April, when you don't know if you are going until late March and it's very hard to find the funding to attend these events as well but with the expanded format, that's no longer a problem," Wright said.
There's a lot of new things happening to make this a better, more interesting and competitive event for the sailors, Wright said.
The simplest way to describe teams racing, is one team of six sailors confronting another team of six in boats, using rules of sailing and tactics to outfox their opposition. The races are short, often less than 10 minutes in duration but full of drama.
The event was last held here in 2002, but there were only 13 teams, this year's 24 teams is a big step up from that but the organisers say preparations have gone fairly smoothly.
Most teams have arranged to stay in the Parua Bay area and Wright said the local community has been very supportive of the competition organisers.
Just to empahsise how important the event is to the schools participating - the defending champions, Tauranga Boys College, were expected to be joined by their top sailor Peter Burling last night.
Burling, who along with Carl Evans will represent New Zealand at the Olympics in the 470 Class, has just arrived back in the country after finishing third in the French Olympic Sailing Week in Hyeres.
But his tight schedule before the Olympics has allowed him the opportunity to win back the title the team won in Taranaki last year and if all goes according to plan he will be back in one of the team's three boats today.
Racing at the event continues through until Friday.