Mark Campbell-James shot to outright second place on the all-time winners list claiming a fourth RYA National Match Racing Championship title at Queen Mary Sailing Club this weekend (9-11 October).

Stepping ahead of ISAF World Match Racing Champion Ian Williams, who now holds third place on the champions list, 29-year-old Campbell-James of Haslemere secured his fourth title in fine style at the exceptionally competitive and riveting three-day event.

Having not match raced since last year’s final it took Campbell-James, and his crew at the event, Andy Clark, David Mason and Simon Hamilton, a couple of races to find their winning rhythm losing races to Ali Hall and Lucy Macgregor in the early flights of the round-robin. However, once they found their pace they powered through the second and third days of the event winning every one of their races.    

Campbell-James knocked out Ian Dobson in the quarter-finals, then the event top ranked skipper Ali Hall in the semi-finals, finding himself in a re-run of last year’s final facing 2006 and 2007 champion Nick Cherry again. With all to play for, tensions were running high between the two top skippers and the final races were tight.

The first encounter was the closest with a tacking duel all the way up the first beat, but Campbell-James just edged ahead on the downwind leg and once Cherry picked up a penalty for not keeping clear rounding the leeward mark, Campbell-James was able to streak ahead to victory. The second was a more convincing win for Campbell-James who despite having to perform a  turn after picking up a penalty in the starting sequence, opened the gap between the boats all the way from the start sailing away to glory and his fourth championship title.         

A delighted Campbell-James said: “It feels good to have won again. I’m surprised we beat Nick two-nil though as he’s been doing a lot more sailing than us this year.”

“In the first race Nick was ahead but we managed to just slip inside him on the run and we gave him a penalty at the mark which was probably quite tight really but good. On the second one we got a penalty on the start but we were ahead at the line and just pulled away and extended our lead and the race was ours” he explained.

The event saw a real hike in standard this year with the quality of sailing in the round-robin stages evidently higher throwing up a real mix of results between sailors.      

“I was really impress with the girls sailing actually they’ve been working hard at it this year and we were pretty nervous about sailing against them in the finals but other people knocked them out for us so we didn’t have to race them! With the competition so tough all the way through the event we’re really pleased to have won” Campbell-James concluded.

The petit final saw young skipper Sam Goodchild take on Ali Hall. Goodchild put up a good fight but Hall pulled rank and swept up two consecutive wins taking third place for himself and leaving Goodchild to pick up fourth.

With a full schedule of races sailed in the round-robin stage and knock out rounds, the event was hailed a great success and the most competitive yet.

Ellie Williamson 

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Last Updated ( Monday, 12 October 2009 )