F18 St Barth Catacup 2024: Volker & Polimeni #1

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All images Pierrick Contin / Catacup 2024. Galleries here

St Barth Catacup 2024 Final day

The Last day of the 2024 Catacup more wind finally came in and the fleet could complete the main round the Island race after a week of 7-10 patchy racing.
Gavin Colby & Kai Colman won this one, the Aussies sailing a new platform already were nailing the Nacra Evo speed. Bad luck first day when they missed two races on a failing tack line.

The beauty of the F18 is you can swap boat & sails and if you are a good sailor, your performance wont be affected, more with current design lineup alternatives. Colby & Colman couldn’t attend 2024 Worlds but they will be targeting 2025 at NED and 2026 at Western Aus defending Nacra colors.

Overall Winners

Second place in the round the Island race went to Argies Pablo Volker & Fede Polimeni, who were crowned overall winners after 6 races. This second place included some swim time for Fede getting stuck twice, once with a fishing line and the other a trap line out.
Clinching this regatta marked a perfect record for them , winning 2024 French & Spanish Nats regattas, 2024 Worlds at Costa Brava and now St Barth Catacup. Their weapon of choice? The mighty fast Goodall Akurra.

Great year for both, betting hard on targeting what they have finally achieved, Congrats and worth the efforts and resources & time invested.

These two were untouchable in Europe & the Caribbean in 2024, but they have one pending task, which is winning a regatta in our local fleet! They managed to race one event at Mar del Plata in February 2024, and Pablo had a hard time switching crews every single local Ag regatta last two years, but as I told him, having to maximize every situation prepared the way for the success they had with Fede.

New Exploder prototype

New hulls designed by Gonzalo Redondo did pretty well for such a rapid and short time frame delivery, first regatta out Ruben Booth & Joan Costa scored bullet and 3rd and top 14s places to round an 8th overall position. Plenty stuff pending for this platform but Jakub can rest at ease that his new project had a good start.

Only good news for the Class builders continue to deliver new investments, and we will have yet another yard launching one pretty soon, stay tuned.

Top ten results, complete list here