Jacqui Bonnitcha proved herself to be one of the best skiff sailors in the world last summer when, with 18-foot skiff world champion Euan McNicol crewing, she beat a mixed fleet to win the 29er World Championships in San Francisco. She is also the only female skipper in Sydney Harbour's 18-foot skiff circuit, and has just completed her first Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race aboard Sean Langman's 92-foot Maxi called AAPT. Sean, an accomplished skiff sailor in his own right, describes Jacqui as one of the most talented sailors he has ever met. She went to sea for the first time just a fortnight before the Hobart race. She was horribly sea sick, and yet Sean said her skiff sailor's instincts made her an instant success on the wheel of AAPT: "I've met few people who can steer a boat through their feet as well as Jacqui. At night, with no instruments, she's got the right feel for the boat."
I got the chance to talk to Jacqui a few days before her voyage to Hobart. Just 20 years old, she is disarmingly modest for someone so talented, and yet quietly confident of her abilities. She is proving herself very successful in a man's world, despite her gender, her young age and sub-50kg frame. Asked if she saw women as being at any disadvantage in high-performance skiff sailing, she had this to say: "Definitely not on the 29er. The only disadvantages I see for girls are in terms of weight or strength. On the 29er I don't see this as a disadvantage at all. I see my weight as more as advantage, because don't have to diet. In other boats it can be a problem, but I think the disadvantages are overrated. The issue of not being heavy enough to sail the 18-footer - I don't think that's true."
Much of Jacqui's self-confidence appears to stem from a strong family upbringing where she was treated the same as her brothers. It probably also helped that her mother, Jenny, is a very good sailor in her own right. "I was brought up not to consider myself as being at a disadvantage to boys. My mum always said if I was worried about doing something, I should get over it and get out there and do it. Mum is very strong, very strong willed. She can clash with some people, but I find her inspirational.
"I was given an opportunity to do anything I wanted to do. I took up ballet at one point, but I was really bad at that, and so I started playing soccer. I was allowed to do anything I wanted to do. The other day, someone asked me and my brother what it was like to be a girl in the family, and we looked at each other like, it's just not an issue, it's not a division that we have. When the barriers aren't set there, it doesn't even occur to you that have anything to conquer."
hile she appears to have no hang-ups about racing men on equal terms, she can still understand why other girls might have a problem. "People talk about girls not being mentally tough, and I guess if you get told something often enough then you start to believe it. I think growing up in an environment where it's assumed you have a disadvantage and you are among males and you have no female role models, then it's easy to how it could be accepted rather than challenged.
"But I think once you have the right support and the right role models, then I think we could even have advantages. After all, women are supposed to be able to multitask, which has to be helpful on a boat!" She also wonders if some boys get a bit too psyched up for their own good. "I've sailed with a lot of boys who get worked up and aren't able to step back and analyse a situation. They can be quite fiery sometimes. Then again, maybe some girls are like that too, so I don't know whether I can claim that as a characteristic of one particular gender!"
Growing up in a sailing family, Jacqui got involved from an early age, although she didn't necessarily like it from the word go. "I got into sailing when I was about five, because everyone else was sailing on a Sunday, so there wasn't anything else to do. So I came down to the club and started sailing. But I didn't enjoy it first of all, I found it quite scary. It's a bit confronting at such an early age."
Nevertheless, a few years later Jacqui was beginning to make a name for herself in the Sabot class, Australia's equivalent of the Optimist. "It was good fun - lots of competition, big national championships where you go in your team uniforms and have a big opening ceremony," says Jacqui, who got close to winning the nationals without ever quite managing it. In her early teens she spent some time in the Flying 11, akin to a mini-420, before taking up sailboarding on the Mistral.
At the age of 14, she was Australia's Mistral representative in the ISAF Youth Worlds. "I didn't do so well, I came 9th, and there weren't so many of us. I hadn't done much windsurfing at that stage, but the aim was to start early, aged 14 and just qualify, and maybe do two or three more Youth Worlds. But actually I quit windsurfing soon after that, because of an injury to my shoulder and because I wasn't really enjoying it. I wanted to sail with somebody else again. It was a bit lonely on the board."
At this point Jacqui got back into doublehanded sailing, this time in the 29er skiff with her friend Sarah Clark. Jacqui had clearly found her forte. They raced in the 29er Worlds in Sydney and won the women's category. This surely made them a good bet for winning the ISAF Youth Worlds in 2002, which was due to be contested in 29ers in Canada. However, the Australian youth trials were to be held in the 420, a boat that the girls had never sailed before.
So first, there was the small matter of getting to grips with a slower, and conventionally-spinnakered boat. Jacqui and Sarah put a month's hard practice in the 420 and then contested the trials. They sailed well, but not quite well enough. They finished runners-up in the trials by a single point. It still hurts Jacqui to talk about it now. "Even though we'd won the women's division at the 29er Worlds, and we only just missed winning the qualifiers in the 420 which we'd sailed for less than a month, they sent a team who had never sailed a 29er, which was really frustrating."
Not that the selected team Elise Rechichi and Rayshelle Martin did badly - they took the silver medal behind Team GBR's Pippa Wilson and Jenny Marks. And nor does Jacqui have a problem with her rivals. "They didn't disgrace themselves," she concedes. "They worked really hard to get good in the 29er, but it was just really frustrating from our perspective. We nearly beat them in a class that they'd been sailing for ages and that we'd literally only just stepped into. We were really happy with the effort that we made. Except for getting selected, we felt we'd done really well. We wanted to show the Australian Yachting Federation that this was the most ridiculous selection process."
Whatever her frustrations with the youth trials, Jacqui's talents did not go unnoticed as she was soon invited to helm her own boat on the competitive 18-foot skiff circuit on Sydney Harbour. "That was a dream come true," says Jacqui, who with team mates George Snow and Kevin Gilroy, is beginning to give some of the experienced teams a good run for their money. "I'll never be big enough to race the 49er competitively, so the 18 was a good alternative." That said, Jacqui is barely big enough to do her share of carrying the 18 to the water. "It's a bugger of a boat to lift! I can lift the bowsprit with a bit of a struggle, and lots of wincing, but I usually get someone to help me."
Out on the water, however, Jacqui's diminutive stature is less of a problem. As Adrienne Cahalan proved a decade ago, talented women can compete in equal terms at the top of 18-foot skiff fleet. Jacqui has been pleased with progress so far. "We're not getting as much time training as we'd like but we're mixing it with the guys in the middle of the pack, who have been doing it for a long time. We're proud of ourselves when we can match them for performance, and now the key is to improve more than they do."
Her victory at the 29er Worlds in San Francisco has certainly proved Jacqui's ability in high-speed skiffs, and perhaps she will go on to become the first female 18-foot skiff champion. But surely the next logical step would be to embark on an Olympic campaign. "I'm waiting for them to bring in a doublehanded skiff for girls into the Olympics, and then I'll have a plan. But at the moment I'm really enjoying the 18-foot skiff and seeing where I get with that."
Julian Bethwaite is currently developing a souped-up twin-trapeze version of the 29er, called the 29erXX, which he would like to see become the women's Olympic answer to the 49er. But knowing how long it takes ISAF to introduce new boats to the Olympics, Jacqui could be waiting a long time for that doublehanded skiff to arrive. What about campaigning one of the existing Olympic classes? "No, I've tried the 470 and I didn't enjoy it. And also, I don't personally have the funds for an Olympic programme. It's difficult to get support for sailing in Australia compared with other countries. It's a big time commitment, and at the moment I'm not prepared to make that commitment.
"I really want to get through my whole university course. I want to do lots of things, and right now that doesn't include an Olympic programme. That might change if the boat was right and if I had a sailing partner that I really felt I could work well with at that level. People say that Olympic campaigning is like a marriage, that you spend so much time together and you have to have the same ideas and have complementary skills."
It will be Australia's loss if Jacqui doesn't follow the Olympic trail, but at the moment the boats just don't excite her enough to want to get involved. I just don't understand it. I mean, there's always the Yngling. After all, how much excitement can a girl stand?
