Hillcrest’s budding sailor sails into World Champs
Upper highway sailor makes SA team to compete in Poland.
Calum Gaughran of Hillcrest (14) will compete in the 2015 World Optimist Sailing Championships to be held in Dziwnów, Poland from 25 August to 5 September.
The Grade 8 Kearsney College youngster had a highly successful KZN Youth Provincials, held at the beginning of July, offshore of Durban. He tallied up three wins over the two days of racing.
The Point Yacht Club member will join Durban North’s Liam Fennessy, Western Cape’s Alexander Brooks and Matt Inglis from Gauteng to represent South Africa in the upcoming world champs.
Gaughran began sailing at the tender age of eight, with his greatest achievement and one of his main highlights travelling to Morocco to race at the Optimist African champs in 2014.
Coming from a highly competitive sailing family, Gaughran has ventured extensively throughout South Africa to places not many people have heard of or gotten to visit to compete in sailing events.
He is the youngest of three boys. All of them are impressively notching up sailing accolades. Older brother, Matthew (19), travelled to participate in the African champs in Kenya in 2010, while middle child, Ross (16), competed in the same event down in Mykanos in the Western Cape.
“I totally enjoy sailing and being offshore especially. Being near the marine life, recently I had a close encounter with a shark gliding past my boat. It was scarily awesome seeing it so close to me, about an arm’s length away.”
Asked what sailing has taught him, the budding sailor said, “It has taught me to persevere. Also I have learned to have confidence when dealing with challenging tasks. I am really happy to be heading over to Europe to compete, this would have to be another highlight in my life and hopefully I can learn lots there.”
His goal is to become a Volvo ocean sailor and compete in the epic Round the World Race.
The 53rd edition of the Optimist world champs hosted in the north-west of Poland, Dziwnów is situated on the Baltic Sea in a town renowned for sailing. Due to the huge international interest in this event, the racing has been moved to a recently-built marina that can accommodate the expected 300 boats.
