Qingdao DCAS WC Exchange Programme

The SA team recently returned from the 12th Qingdao International Sailing Week and Qingdao International Marine Festival 2019. This is their report from a successful event...

To encourage fairness and transparency, an invitation was presented to the Chairperson of WC Optimist Association who in turn invited all of the WC members to participate by submitting a short CV.The submissions were sent to the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport who made the selection of the team.

The selected team was Isabella Keytel –ZVYC, Jean Paul Buys –GLYC, Kashief Davids –MAC, Max Celliers–ZVYC, Theodor Scheder-Bieschin–ZVYC and Thomas Slater –ZVYC.

The team fared really well in thelight sailing conditions and despite losing three days of sailing because of the threat of a typhoon (which just missed the event) causing rough seas, they all placed in the top 20 in a fleet of 30 boats.

The team made friends with the New Zealand and Australian teams, playing numerous games of tag and Uno during the three lay days.

Overall the exchange was a great success with all our SA sailors being excellent ambassadors for their country. They were polite and on their best behaviour throughout. The SAteam was the only team invited to participate in a moon cake-making session at a local bakery. Moon cakes are traditional Chinese cakes made for their autumn festival. They thoroughly enjoyed it and most of their efforts were eaten before even boarding the bus back to their hotel.The return to SA was quite an adventure. The flight from Qingdao to Beijing was delayed by four hours which caused them to miss their connecting flight to Doha. This resulted in them having to spend the day in a hotel in Beijing, travel to Doha in the early hours of the morning and spend the next day in 40-degree heat in Doha. Thank goodness for anair-conditioned hotel. The team arrived back in Cape Town 24 hours later than originally planned, exhausted but happy to be back home.

Thanks to our:

PARTNERS: South African Sailing Western Cape (SASailingWC), the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport of the Western Cape Provincial Government (DCAS), the Sports Bureau of Shandong Province (Shandong)SPONSORS: DCAS and SA Sailing WC.