News
Women dominate in 2019 Arafura Games
Published Thu 16 May 2019
The event kicked off with a coaching clinic by Karyn Gojnich in which had 17 participants with almost a 50% split of male to female sailors setting the scene for the week to come.8 teams competed from across Australia and overseas including 2 all-female crews from India & NZL.
Uncharacteristically for sailing the female sailors outweighed the men in the final count on registration day, something that none of us expected!
Day 1 saw some curve balls as the rudder stock on one of the boats snapped clean off on the way to the first race. With some quick thinking, coordination and rallying of help the boat was able to be relaunched within 24hrs with a borrowed rudder from CYC in Sydney & personally flown in at late notice – not a bad effort. Day 2 had light winds stop racing for a few hours with one of the races abandoned twice as the breeze struggled to arrive and crews took to swimming in order to cool off from the heat.
At the end of the round robins both all-female crews were well placed in the top 4, the last 2 days of racing were great sailing with plenty of breeze. In the end QLD skippered by James Hodgson took out the gold medal with a clean sweep of the event from the NZL all girls team skippered by Megan Thompson. Bronze was won by the Indian team skippered by Tara Marawade, another all girls team. An impressive medal ceremony was conducted at DSC on Friday afternoon with an amazing 10 of the 13 crew that received medals being female.
The games officially wrapped up with the closing ceremony on Saturday evening and the 2021 dates announced with many teams threatening to return. Feedback was that the social aspect of the event was great and something I am sure was contributed to via a more even ratio of male to female sailors.
Special thanks to the volunteers and umpires for the fantastic job they did to make it all happen so smoothly. Some other statistics to note after it was all done and dusted was that females made up 35% of the volunteer numbers for the mid-week event.
Racing was live streamed via the DSC YouTube channel each day with fantastic feedback, a great way to make our sport more spectator friendly. Racing and medal ceremonies can be watched via the below links.
- QLD James Hodgson
CREW: Stuart Kennedy, James Beveridge, India Howard & Emily McGregor
- NZL Megan Thompson
CREW: Serena Woodall, Brittany Clark & Lisa Dartnall
- India Tara Matiwade
CREW: Issi Decklerk, Anna Reid & Sarah Parker
- ADF Bryson Carew
CREW: Jack Barber, Alexis Chabrol, Daniel Rotenstein & Lilian Minifie
- NT Youth Finn Niemeier
CREW: Kyle Bonney, Ben Doran, Natalie Lynch & Rachelle Van Den Herik
- NT Open Greame Sergeant
CREW: Katie Cannon, Emma Sandford, Fiona McManus & Jennifer Telfer
- Singapore Joe Howe
CREW: Aden McGrath, Sam Brownscombe & Rick Telfer
- NSW Tom Vincent
CREW: Lisa Denvir, Angus Musgrove & Padd
y Bannon
