It's easy to imagine that being appointed as Chairman of Selectors for the Youth Worlds team could be tantamount to accepting a poisoned chalice. Chief executive of Selden Masts and top skiff sailor, Zeb Elliott, has just inherited the title from the previous incumbent Stuart Childerley. In fact Stuart was unable to attend the recent RYA Youth Trials in Weymouth and so it fell to Zeb to make the call as to who was going to go to the Volvo Youth Sailing ISAF World Championship, which also happen to be in Weymouth this July.

You could imagine selectors been threatened at safety-knife-point by pushy parents whose kids didn't make selection, but Zeb says he has experienced nothing of the sort. "No one threw anything at me when I was leaving, so I think it went OK," laughs Zeb. As it turned out, Zeb and his co-selectors Ben Oakley and John Derbyshire ended up selecting all those sailors who won their divisions, so it was effectively a first-past-the-post trials. "You'd have to have a good reason to do anything else," says Zeb. "The weather wasn't the best this year, but Rob Andrews [the regatta race manager] did a good job of getting a good amount of sailing in while also making sure that high standards of safety were observed - which is obviously a crucial part of any youth event."

So while selecting the candidates for the Worlds was relatively straightforward this year, Zeb still had to have a couple of difficult conversations with sailors who had been on youth funding but hadn't done enough to justify maintaining their status. "It's never easy having those conversations because you know how much it means to them, but the system is such that there are always ways back into the programme further down the line.

"That wasn't always the case, because back when I was going through the Youth Squad if you won the trials you were sorted but if you were second or lower then you were pretty much dropped and forgotten about. Obviously we can't support everybody - there has to be a cut-off - but there are a lot of good sailors that didn't get selected but which the RYA will still be keeping a close eye on for the future."

Hannah Mills and Peggy Webster are a case in point. Hannah has won the Optimist Nationals along with many other titles, and once told Tony Blair that he must win the London bid for the 2012 Olympics as she wanted to win a Gold on home waters. Go to her website, www.hannahmills.com, and you can see how high her ambitions lie, and yet at the recent trials Sophie Weguelin and Katrina Hughes dominated the girls' 420 class. There are some seriously talented young sailors around, and not all of them can represent their country at the Youth Worlds.

Zeb says he has noticed a much greater depth to the quality of the fleet this time round, particularly in the Laser. "We saw some real battles this year, whereas last year Giles Scott dominated the boys [and went on to win the Youth Worlds] and Alison Young did the same in the girls [and won Bronze at the Youth Worlds]. There were two definite talents that we saw then, but a big drop in quality after that. This time you could see a lot more potential throughout the fleet. It would be difficult to say who the next Ben Ainslie is going to be, but you can definitely see the base getting broader, and from there some of the real superstars will emerge."

Max Holloway led the boys' Laser division from start almost to finish. He was the only sailor to keep all his scores inside the top 10 and it all looked in the bag until the windward mark of the last race when a broach dropped him a few places and he posted a 6th place. Hardly a disaster, you might have thought, but meanwhile Sean Evans and Dyfrig Mon bounced back from a shaky start to the championships and managed to offload their worst scores with the two discards that were permitted. Evans ended up winning by just two points from Mon and Holloway tied for second, but with Mon taking silver on countback. When one tiny boathandling error can drop you from first to third in the blink of an eye, that's the sign of a hot fleet.

Zeb says the girls' Laser Radials caused perhaps the biggest selection dilemma, as Sarah Williams had been the form sailor going into the championships. "Sarah had a disastrous first day," says Zeb, "and Anna Dobson was leading. We were expecting Sarah to come good and Anna to fade, particularly in the strong breeze. But she didn't, it was a high pressure regatta and Anna held her nerve to win it. It was a pleasure to watch."

The highest quality racing was to be seen in the Lasers, according to Zeb, while the depth of talent was not so evident in the 420 class. James and Dan Ellis had a bad day during the fluky opening races of the regatta, while Richard Mason and Daniel Schieber had an OK day with two 6ths. From here on, however, both these teams kicked into gear although the Ellis brothers could never shake off that poor first day and Mason and Schieber took the regatta. Sophie Weguelin and Katrina Hughes were actually leading the 420 class outright for the first half of the regatta, and still finished on equal points with the Ellises, so these girls are a class act by any measure. They must surely be a hot medal prospect at the Youth Worlds this Summer.

Tom Phipps dominated the Hobies for the third year running, although his winning crew Sam Newton will be stepping aside for runner-up Richard Glover to join Phipps at the Worlds later this year. With the 29er not included in this year's Worlds, there wasn't quite so much at stake for the 29er fleet but Zeb says he was very impressed with the quality at the top of the fleet. He ranks the winners Dylan Fletcher and Rob Partridge good enough to win a medal at the senior level in the 29er Worlds, which take place in Weymouth the week after the ISAF Youth Worlds.

Now in its 36th year, the Youth Worlds have long been seen as the junior Olympics of sailing, and the regatta in Weymouth this July is shaping up to the biggest yet, with around 250 sailors from a record 62 nations entered for the event. The regatta is also receiving £365,000 of support from UK Sport's World Class Events Programme, which gives you some idea of the scale of the operation. Although a long way short of the Olympic Regatta itself, it will provide RYA Competitions Manager Rob Andrews and his team at the regatta centre with a good test run for the Olympics in Weymouth six years from now.

Barbados is set to compete in the Youth Worlds for the first time, with Gregory Douglas representing his country in the Laser class. He is one of 25 sailors from 17 countries who are receiving funding support from the ISAF Athlete Participation Programme. This will be only the second Youth Worlds for Colombia, El Salvador, Jamaica and Pakistan.

While the 29ers will be missing out on the glitz and glamour of the big event, they will at least have the company of the 49ers who are holding their European Championships alongside the 29er Worlds. While my main focus for the year remains crewing the International 14 with Martin Jones, the amount of home grown 49er competition this year has also tempted me back into helming the Olympic skiff. Before Chris Draper and Simon Hiscocks start quaking in their boots, I should point out that I've got no Olympic aspiration! But for good cheap, high-quality skiff racing you really can't beat the 49er. There are a number of non-Olympic aspirants who compete in the UK Association's Weekend Warriors series, with many-time RS400 National Champion Roger Gilbert a keen participant. Unlike some other Olympic classes I could mention - where you couldn't possibly imagine sailing the boat unless there was a medal somewhere over the horizon (regular Roll Tacks readers will know what I'm talking about!) - the 49er is a sheer joy to sail whether you've got Olympic dreams or not.

As I've said a few times before, if you want to improve your sailing at national class level, one of the fastest ways to improve is to throw yourself in at the deep end of an Olympic class. As well as Roger in the 49er, there are other good examples in the Finn class such as Jim Hunt and Nick Craig who between them have swept all three of the past OK World Championships. Would they have done that without their baptism of fire in the Finns, where on a good day they'll finish about mid-fleet in an international regatta? Maybe, because both Jim and Nick were top-notch sailors already, but then again maybe not. There's no doubt that putting themselves in the Finn is bringing new skills to their repertoire that otherwise might never have developed. When you're pitting yourself against the likes of Ben Ainslie, how can you fail to get better if you note just some of the things that he does?

And so getting back into the 49er for a few regattas this year seemed to make a lot of sense. You can buy a good secondhand boat at the beginning of the season and sell it at the end for pretty much what you paid for it. And this year in particular there is a lot of international-level sailing taking place on our doorstep, so travel is not a problem either. As well as our own incredibly high-standard 49er sailors there will be the Olympic Champions from Spain and Rodion Luka and George Leonchuk from the Ukraine, the Olympic Silver Medallists and the reigning World Champions from last year's event near Moscow. I have to admit that not having raced a 49er for three years the prospect is a little nerve-wracking. Will I make a fool of myself? Quite possibly. But will my sailing improve? Undoubtedly.