YACHTING - Tauranga pip Mahurangi - second for a third year

After a week's racing, the New Zealand Secondary School teams racing title came down to just one race - with Tauranga Boys' College narrowly beating Mahurangi College to win the title for the second successive year.
The race was a fitting climax to a great week of racing at Parua Bay and Tauranga Boys' manager Richard Burling said it was a tense way to win anything.
"The boys are really, really happy about it because we don't do a lot of teams racing so we've built up our skills over about five years and then we finally got good enough to win - twice," he added.
In a tight and tense final day, Westlake Boys' High School led the four finalists out on to the water but their luck quickly deserted them against the more experienced sailors from the other top schools.
Westlake soon found themselves sailing against Auckland's Macleans College for third as the other two teams battled it out for the title.
Each of the four teams raced each other three times to decide the winner and Tauranga Boys' took the first head-to-head match with Mahurangi.
The Warkworth college won the second race convincingly to set up a final thriller and when the course officials called a halt to racing just before 2pm because the wind was too strong, it looked as though they may have done enough to win the title.
Instead the weather gods favoured the Bay of Plenty team and when racing got started again just before the cut-off of 3pm, Tauranga won the final race in the closest of finishes.
For Mahurangi there was only despair - once again they were the bridesmaids. The college has finished second in the competition for three years in a row.
Tauranga finished with seven wins to Mahurangi's six. Macleans College were third with four wins, ahead of the luckless Westlake Boys' College, who won just one race on the final day.
Mike Wright, one of the organisers of the Whangarei Cruising Club that hosted the test event, said that the first expanded competition had been a success.
"At the managers meeting on Thursday night everyone decided that we would go ahead with the same larger format in the future."
The plan is, like this year, to be able to enter the national competition directly rather than qualifying through regional regattas.
Wright said that for the organisers, the week had gone pretty quickly.
"It's been great, we've had a lot of people having a good time together but it's been a lot of work and most of that has been done by the volunteers and people in the teams that have helped out, so that's all contributed to the good time everyone's had.
"We have had down time because of the weather ... but really with the weird weather around the country this week, we were fortunate with the weather - it could have been a lot worse."
Most of this week's rain has been at night, so the biggest talking point - weather-wise anyway - during the week was the light conditions in the regatta's first three days.
The breezes allowed some of the less fancied teams to make it into the gold medal fleet at the expense of others, mainly with the heavier boats struggling.
Auckland Grammar beat the Cook Islands team, to win the Silver Fleet honours with New Plymouth Boys' High School and St Kentigerns third equal.