The Early Bird Catches the Worm

The email came today...

Place Offer for World Laser Masters Championship 2009

Immediate action is required, this offer is time limited to December 26, 2008

A place has been offered to you at World Laser Masters Championship 2009 if you would like to accept this place please follow the link below, if you cannot attend the event please follow the alternative link which will allow the place to be offered to another sailor.

Yooooo hoooooo. The powers-that-be think that Tillerman is qualified to represent the United States at a World Championship. What a hoot!

I wrote back in June in Unqualified about how the Laser class has implemented a new system to make it harder to qualify to sail in a World Masters Championship. One interpretation of the initiative would be that it's all an effort by the International Laser Class to keep back-of-the-fleet yahoos like me out of the Masters Worlds.

But a close reading of the so-called "ranking" system that the North American region adopted made me think that I might still have a chance to get in to the Masters Worlds in Nova Scotia next year. Basically all you needed to do to qualify was...

• Sail in a Worlds recently - check
• or sail in a major North American Masters regatta and not be close to DFL - check
• and make sure you get your entry in early. First come first served.
  

So, as I wrote in Don't You Know Who I Am?, I got up early on the day that entries opened in September, completed the on-line application, and then fired off an email to the North American class office detailing my somewhat meager (but good enough) qualifications for entry.

It worked.

At one point a few weeks ago the International Laser Class website showed me "ranked" as 10th among all the Master Laser Sailors in North America who had applied for a place at the Worlds. What a joke! Just to let you know how ridiculous this was, the current Great Grand Master World Champion was ranked 35th... 25 places behind a bozo like Tillerman. What it really meant was that among North American sailors who passed the (very low) bar for entry I was the tenth to get out of bed and fire up his computer on that morning in September.

Whatever. I'm in.

But things have changed since I applied.

My younger son and his girlfriend recently set the date for their wedding. First week of September 2009. Same time as the Masters Worlds. Of course I want to go for the wedding. So I am going to have to decline the generous offer from the class office to sail in the Worlds next year. No big deal. Some other old bird (who didn't get up as early as me) can have my worm. Family comes first.

But it was still kind of cool to catch the worm first.