Noakes Skipper Dawson Making Sacrifices for Substantial Silverware

Tom Dawson is making plenty of sacrifices on and off the water as he looks to turn a weekly four-hour roundtrip into some substantial silverware on this year’s 16s circuit.

The Lake Macquarie-based skipper is forgoing the post-work Friday beers at local building sites and rising early each Saturday morning to drive down to St George and hook up with crewmates Bryce Edwards and Jerome Watts aboard Noakes. The trio will contest all the major regattas this season, while using the competitive club racing on the weekend as tune-up.

It’s so far so good judging by Noakes’ win in the first heat of the 2024/25 Riley Fittings St George Sailing Club Championship on Saturday. In near benign conditions, which forced officials to condense the day’s racing to one heat instead of the planned two, Dawson positioned himself nicely at the start line.

“We had three attempted starts and the wind was shifting that much they were struggling to get a course set,” he said.

“The line ended up being pretty favoured to the pin end and the further down you were, the more it was setting up your whole race.

“We were lucky enough just to tack and get a little bit of tide relief away and get the first shift across the top side of the fleet.

“It was light and shifty and ended up being one of those races where we were really sailing the tide in the end.”

Once Noakes hit the lead they controlled the race as the wind dropped from 12 knots to five, leading to some surreal scenes of becalmed boats set against a leaden sky.

The Sail Media boys calling and shooting the race for the livestream will be hitting up their boss – newly-crowned Manly 16ft Skiff Club life member James Bury – for double time as they attempted to pad the airtime to fill in for the lack of action.

Dawson showed class and composure to eke out every breath of the wind while using the tide to his advantage, leading the fleet home by almost four minutes from Wichard Pacific (Ben Bradley) and Toogara (Tom Clout).

“Race officials did well to get a race away. It could have been a long day sitting around,” Dawson rightly noted.

And that would have hit the Noakes crew harder than most, given the skipper’s long commute and their need for quality time on the water together.

“It’s a two-hour drive down and two-hours back but it’s worth it,” Dawson said.

“We can’t really get a lot of training in, so we’ll chip away at the normal club racing.

“We try and piece together as many things as we can during our weekend racing and hopefully we can get a bit of training in before nationals and see what we can do.

“The other boys are great. They just tell me ‘whenever you here, you get here and let’s go sail’, which is nice.

“It’s a bit of a juggle but it’s all worth it.”