Dragon g Andrey Kirilyuk and Kasper Harsberg claimed first blood in the opening light airs race and also took victory in race 3. Pedro Andrade, crewed by Star Class legend Afonso Domingos and former World Sailing President Kim Andersen, who is thoroughly enjoying being back in the Dragon Class after his four years of service in World Sailing, won the second race, while Bernardo Freitas, Martin Westerdahl and Diogo Pereira sailing Sophie Racing won races four and six.
the opportunity to stay on and sail a ‘Finals’ series for the sheer joy of racing their Dragons in a year when so little sailing had been possible. Over the course of five days the Portuguese Grand Prix was raced in a great mix of conditions from light airs to strong winds and
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big waves. What the fleet lacked in size it more than made up for in quality and the racing was cutthroat and utterly thrilling to watch with constant place changing and four different race winners across the six-race series. Dmitry Samokhin sailing RUS76 Rocknrolla with
SUI 318 Helm Wolf Waschkuhn summed up the feelings of the fleet when he described the racing on the final day, “We had a fantastic day, even though race 6 was stopped before we reached the windward mark due to a substantial shift in variable 5 to 8 knot of wind from around 150 degrees whilst we were in second place. Then on the second attempt we rounded the top mark fourth behind TUR 1212 [Andy Beasworth], SUI 311 [Bernardo Freitas] and RUS 76 [Dmitry Samokhin] in 7 to 8 knots of building wind. By the second beat the wind had increased to 13/15 knots TUR 1212 fell back so at the top mark second time we were right behind SUI 311 and RUS 76 all very close as the wind increased above 15 knots. It was a
