After months of focused training and preparation, Daniel Links and Keizo Tomishima travelled to Copenhagen for the 2025 49er Junior World Championships.
49er Junior Worlds 2025 by Daniel Links
On the 13th of July I travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark with Keizo Tomishima to compete at the 49er Worlds Championships. We were very enthusiastic to perform at this event as we were very confident in our abilities due to months of fine tuning skills and preparation. Our key areas to improvement was to focus on speed and our initial game plan learnt from analysing the prior regatta in Hyeres, France.
Our first 2 weeks at the Royal Danish Yacht Club was filled with an organised training schedule where we firstly trained solo to make sure our European boat felt right then went on to group racing and speed line ups to revise tactics and strategy with local knowledge. Pre regatta was a balance between efficient time on the water whilst staying healthy and full of energy. It has always been important to us of being as disciplined as we can of the water by keeping up practised routines including gym, diet, and rest.
Leading into the regatta we were very confident and had achieved all our goals of pre-event. We had received conditions of 2-14 knots so on the light side and had a lot of fun with the flat water compared to Sydney Harbour. We were very happy with our speed and our collection of local knowledge had gone very well especially with our coach Harry Morton to help. In the pre Regatta racing we had some very strong results in the top 3 in numerous races. Boat maintenance was also a very crucial part of this pre-regatta especially on a boat we hadn’t used since our last regatta in Europe, we learnt this critical lesson especially during our trip to Keil Week last year when we had multiple breakages.
Whilst the lead in was light conditions the weather changed up for the race days, we received 18-25 knots on the first two days of the Junior World Championships. It was very challenging conditions for us but we found that our once weakness was nearly a strength. We had very good speed and a large standout was our starts where we really highlighted our hard work over the past few months. Although we had these new strengths we found that a few strategic errors led to not getting the results we knew were possible. Getting to the top mark in top 5 positions with the ability to win were held back by these damaging mistakes and our ability was not shown through the numbers on the board.
Unfortunately the weather made a turn for the worse and we had two days of no wind with extremely strong currents from the Baltic Sea. The waiting game was disappointing as we were very eager to get back on the water and work on our prior mistakes from the first two days. After 2 days of waiting we were finally hit with a storm for the final day of racing. We headed out eager for some good quality racing and managed to finish a race in 18-25 knots. We were going extremely well coming top 8 the whole race in challenging conditions until coming into the finish line we hit an unavoidable wave which sent us into a pitchpole.
Overall, we were extremely happy with how the regatta turned out. We made Gold fleet which was the top 25 boats out of the 53 boat high quality fleet. While the results didn’t fully reflect our potential, the experience provided a massive learning curve that will be invaluable for our development moving forward. Competing against some of the best young teams in the world really highlighted both our strengths and the areas we need to keep improving. We gained confidence in our speed and starting ability, and it was rewarding to see progress in areas we’ve worked hard on. At the same time, we identified key mistakes that we can now address with more clarity. This trip to Copenhagen was a huge step forward for us, and we’re leaving even more motivated for the next stage of our campaign.
We are now back training hard again and will compete in the Open 49er World Championships in Cagliari Italy in approximately 1 months time. Thankyou to the support from RPAYC and Vaikobi.
