Australian duo Will Cooley and Evie Haseldine will use the Nacra 15 Worlds in Barcelona next week as a valuable chance to hone their skills in the lead up to the Youth World Championships at Corpus Christi in July.

Cooley and Haseldine are one of five young crews representing Australia at the regatta and, though there is a strong sense of team unity, they realise their opportunity to experiment against the world’s best crews in the class less than three months out from the major event in Texas.

“Our main objective is to sail to the best of our ability - we’re unable to place ourselves in the fleet considering we’ve never competed against Nacra 15’s from around the globe,” Haseldine said.

“Every regatta is one you want to win. But, here, we want to go in and give it our best shot knowing that if something goes wrong we get another few opportunities this year to have another go.”

Cooley and Haseldine qualified for the Youth World Championships by becoming national youth champions in January. The other Aussie crews in action in Spain next week are Jake Liddell and Emma Jones, Ashleigh Swadling and Jed Fatches, Georgia Payne and Kai Colman, and Leopold McAllister and Kai-Lin Tan.

“We’re all training together,” Haseldine said.

“With our team coach, Mikael Lundh, we aim to be familiar with the venue before we race racing. Everything we discover about the conditions will be shared knowledge with the rest of the team.

“Most Australians have a very high team spirit standard but I think that standard will be raised with the great bunch of Australians in the Worlds team this year. At the end of the regatta we can hopefully all be proud for an Australian teammate to be standing on the podium waving the Australian flag.”