Racing at the Master's Cup in Portorož ground to a near-halt on day three, with sailors waiting out two separate storm cells before a single race could be squeezed in.
The fleet had been due to start at 1.30pm, but the forecast had been causing headaches well before that. Race Officer Bojan Gale said his team had been poring over the weather charts the night before, aware two thunderstorms were due to sweep through Portorož that morning.
"I think we managed to get the timing quite right," Gale said. "We were scheduled to have the first warning at 13:30, and at one o'clock we were able to go out, so we missed it a little bit. After going out, we were expecting some north-easterly wind and we had everything except north-easterly today."
The wind stayed unpredictable once boats were on the water. A first attempt to set the course fell apart when it swung 60 degrees without warning, forcing officials to abandon the effort and wait. Fifteen or twenty minutes later they tried again, and this time it stuck, allowing one race to get away for the day.
It was not an easy one. Big shifts punished crews who read the course wrong and rewarded those who didn't.
"It was a really, really tricky race," Gale said. "Probably some crews were very happy, and probably some were really unhappy if they missed the shifts. On the second wind shift, it was really painful for them. But this is sailing."
Marko Kocijančič and Željko Planinšič took the win, a result good enough to lift them to seventh overall in the 470 Open European Trophy and Master's Cup standings. Italy's Ivica Bonacin and Luca Falcioni crossed second, a result that pushed them up to third overall in the European Trophy classification.
At the top of the leaderboard, nothing has changed. Switzerland's Julian Flessati and Stephan Ammann finished fourth in the day's lone race and remain in the overall lead, holding a 10-point buffer over Slovenia's father-son pairing of Dušan and Matjaž Puh. Dušan Puh is among the oldest sailors in the fleet.
The Swiss crew also lead the Apprentice Masters division. Bonacin and Falcioni head the Grand Grand Masters, the Puhs top the Grand Masters, and Miran Gustin and Ela Žagar lead the Masters category.
Friday is a lay day, giving both sailors and the race committee some breathing room before Saturday's finale.
Given how much the weather has shaped this regatta already, nobody in Portorož expects a straightforward finish.
