F18 Argentina: Power Crew at Texel 2011

Photo: Thom Touw

Photo by:© Laurens Morel

They are sailing against Professionals that have been racing cats all their life. They are racing on a rented 2007 Infusion with the MKII upgrades, Simon Northrop, finally 12th, is racing with a 2006.
Cruz Gonzalez Smith has been sailing F18 (or cats for that matter) with one of the first Racecat series since 2008 and Mariano Heuser some months later. One with a good club Laser campaign and the other coming from Windsurf-Kite kite scene.

At the Nacra Worlds they had several issues and breakages, but they were fast as the races finished were some 3,4,7,8, 9 all top ten.
Now at the Texel Dutch Open they couldn´t start the two first races scoring a double 91.
But then, they stopped the bad luck with a high performance show:
(91), 91, 6, 8, 7, 4, 3, 6 for a 9th Overall , you can add a 10th? and discard the 91 and they could have easily been top 5 or even top 3, as none in front of them has two 91s to discard. (check results below)

This after 3 bow sprit breakages, plus a boom, and several others cracks on the hulls due to collisions, and also a really bad news for Mariano, as he was informed just before racing yesterday that his home at BA was emptied by some ‘uninvited guess’ wtf!? truly sorry for him.

It seems the last races they were sailing 1 on 1 with Mischa-Bastian and Coen-Thijs, two of the most talented crews… but to have a perfect end of a powerfull and rough week, they provided the Texel crowd with one of the most incredible wipeouts captured on film ever! breaking a great part of the Infusion.

Good sign also for the level of the local fleet, just 3+ years of F18 racing (no other cat racing fleet here before, just some Ts brought by Lange years ago) , so watch out with the Argies, cause we have more like them here, and we are preparing ourselves to host a Worlds in Buenos Aires…

Congrats to Cruz and Mariano for showing high guts all week, even after some bad vibes from all over, as they did in last Arg championship where they dropped mast, missing two races, and coming back for the last one to take the 2011 Championship . Best of luck to both for the Worlds. Hope they can stay, Cruz was 23rd at Erquy, lets see what they can do at Lake Balaton.

Mariano repairing one of the several crashes on their boat.
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– More info and great images from Thom Touw at www.roundtexel.com– Full Results Texel Dutch Open here