British Freestyle Championships - Animal Poole Windfest

After a windy season in Vass it was time to head back to the UK and test my skills against Britain’s best windsurfers in the National Championships.  My girlfriend Jo and I arrived on the Sunday flight in to Gatwick where we picked up our nice new Boardwise van that they had kindly lent us and had also filled it with new goodies - nice!

We stayed at Jo’s sisters for a couple of days and then drove down to Poole on Wednesday where we met Club Vass team mates Simon Hurrey and Colin Dixon who had both been in the UK competing at Bigbury which unfortunately had no wind…

Thursday and registration day arrived with more wind then was expected and suddenly there was a bit more of a buzz in the air.  Once we had registered we started to rig up and by then it was perfect 5.2 weather.  We had about an hour of practicing before the competition got underway.  It gave everybody the chance to get used to the conditions and fine tune their equipment.  Also it gave the people the chance to check out the other sailors and see what they had learnt over the summer!

The heats started and from the first heat you could already see how high the standard of sailing was.  Switch stance moves have always been a bit rare on the UK circuit but not anymore with most of the fleet doing esliders, punetas and switch chachoos.

The Club Vass boys whizzed through their first heats but by the time you got to the quarter finals the standard was super high.  New boy to the competition scene was Colin Dixon who although was sailing very well had to bow down to an on form and more experienced John Skye.

Simon and I managed to keep going through the quarterfinals in to the semi where Simon came up against Phil Horrocks and Chris Audsley.  Now, when Simon is on form he could tear everybody apart but a bad sail choice left him wallowing around not planing whilst Phil and Chris spent the heat spinning and sliding around, so naturally they went through to the losers final.

In the previous heat to that I had beaten Chris Audsley so I advanced in to the final against Ben Profitt.  Phil Horrocks and Chris Audsley had to fight it out against each other for 3rd and 4th.  The final between Profitt and me was super close with both of us having good runs and bad.  I had a couple of nice combo moves that linked up nicely, which is what clinched it for me I think.

On Friday the wind had swung round to the North and never really blew consistently enough to run a proper competition.  The organisers did however try and run some super x but again not enough wind.
In the afternoon we went on to the harbour to run a 15 minute expression session with the ultimate move winning.  I managed to pull a Cana Brava out of the bag, which clinched it for me.  Keep checking the video section of the site for an explanation of this latest move.

So that was that no more wind for the rest of the sunny weekend.  So we put on a few fun shows involving Jet Ski towing and racing with the youth fleet.  The mountain bikers from animal put on an awesome show and kept the crowd going so fair play to them.

I couldn’t really believe that I had won the British Freestyle Championships until I was on the podium and was asked to give a speech at which point nothing really came out of my mouth!!

This is was I should have said - Thanks to Animal for the prizes and awesome shows, Trevor Funnel and the UKWA for organising and running the event, Mark and Ally for putting us up and feeding us spaghetti Bolognese! And to everyone that came down and supported the event.

Final Results:

1st Andy Bubble Chambers
2nd Ben Profitt
3rd Phil Horrocks
4th Chris Audsley
5th Simon Hurrey / John Skye
7th Colin Dixon