Report by Rod Hagerbols:
On August 14 - 15, Phil Chadwick and I raced in the King of Spain regatta held at California Yacht Club, Los Angeles. The trophy is the oldest trophy at the club and was donated to the yacht club back in 1929 by the then King of Spain.

A couple of months ago Phil and I spoke briefly about him coming over from Melbourne and doing the North Americans Championships 19th - 22nd Aug. Well after a lot discussion Phil made the trip over and we thought we'd do the King of Spain as a warm up event. We didn't really have high expectations for a couple of reasons.

* Phil has limited experience in Stars, the last time was 20 years ago and then only for a day.

* Phil flew in from Australia the morning of the first race, so he was a little jet lagged.

But on the other hand Phil is no slouch when it comes to yacht racing. As a crew he has won, 3 14ft skiff national titles and placed in several others. Growing up we raced against each other a lot in Fireballs, Flying Dutchman and skiffs. The rivalry between us was fierce and to have the chance to race with Phil was a treat to say the least.

So after picking Phil up early Saturday morning from LAX we arrived down at the Club to get ready for sailing. After a quick explanation of the systems on the boat it was time to throw Phil in the deep end and go racing against some great competition. There were 5 races scheduled in total, 3 Saturday and 2 on Sunday. The weather was overcast with the typical Santa Monica Bay marine layer which typically burns off after 12 or 1 o'clock. The wind for the whole regatta ranged between 5-13 knots. I thought the speed would be OK upwind but was unsure about the downwind which until now has been a weakness. It is something I have been working on with Marcus in San Francisco over the last few months. To my delight, the downwind speed has come good and now we have more of an all round speed package, NICE.

Having sorted the speed out downwind was the major reason why Phil and I did well on the weekend. Saturday we placed 8th, 2nd and 1st. Going into Sunday we were 2 points off the lead with a further 2 points to the boat lying in third place Ben Mitchell, who is by the way the other crew I sail with regularly on Vince Bruns' Etchells...... so its a small world.

We were a little nervous Sunday but we have seen this movie a few times before. Things started well with a good 4th race finishing in 2nd place. We started well and basically stayed clean and used our boat speed to consolidate on the fleet where we could. Going into the last race it was still close, we had a 20 deg port end bias which tempted me down towards the pin, unfortunately I didn't push hard enough and stunk up the start. We tacked out quickly and started on our recovery as soon as we could. We managed to recover a lot and as it turned out just enough to take the title by one point.