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Squadron Member, Guido Belgiorno-Nettis, writes “What a privilege it was to represent the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron at the Rolex NYYC Invitational Cup.

Our team thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality of the NYYC and the professionalism in the way the club managed and ran the regatta. It was truly impressive and I would venture, one of the best if not the best regatta of its type. Thank you for letting us participate again this year. Firstly, whatever our score, the whole RSYS team enjoyed sailing on the Newport Rhode Island waters as part of this very special regatta.

Our team would like to congratulate the San Diego Yacht Club on their win this year, having lost to us in 2019 and to the Southern Yacht Club in 2021. It was only appropriate that San Diego should win – they just had the consistency to deliver the result across the whole regatta – even though the regatta was cut short by one day and only 8 of the 12 races sailed. Newport was threatened by Hurricane Lee in the last two days of the regatta.

On the competitive front, our team knew that this 2023 Invitational would be much tougher for the RSYS team than previous ones. The IC37 boat is a very agile sports boat that has attracted the interest of younger sailors to come and sail them in this regatta. We saw the talent, vitality, consistency and tremendous skills of younger crews across the fleet. Our next competitive challenge was that our RSYS has not sailed any boat together since 2019 and we noted that many teams had a lot of time on the IC37 over the last four years.



I am sorry to report that your helmsman was not up to his usual skills (making a few too many mistakes at the start line) while our team admitted that we were just rusty! Placing
12th was our final placing – but we were in good company with other previous Invitational Cup winners (Canada 10th, Southern 16th)!

It was a tough regatta and generally conditions were not to our liking – very light conditions and a few lotteries in races that should have been binned. In fairness to the NYYC race committee, they knew in advance that the hurricane was going to cut the regatta short – so they were quite determined to get in as many races as they could with the conditions they had.

On the positive side, we did pull ourselves out of many deep holes in this regatta with Mike Dunstan applying his tactical magic to see us recovering from last to finishing mid-fleet for at least half the races we sailed! We were fast uphill and always making up places downhill and particularly at the bottom rounding marks. Our crew work was almost faultless, and I would like to congratulate the RSYS Invitational crew for their tireless enthusiasm and hard work in every race.

Of course, when it was clear that this was not our regatta, we just sailed to enjoy ourselves and what a spectacle it was to see the good guys fighting it out in front of us. Congratulations to all the crews in this Invitational Cup and I hope the RSYS will front a team for the 2025 Rolex NYYC Invitational Cup regatta.”