The MAIOR regatta over 28 April - 1 May marked the start of the ORC racing season in Germany, attracting 31 entries from Denmark and Germany divided into three classes to race on courses laid in the Kieler Buche by the Kieler YC. The long weekend featured a wide variety of weather, from light winds to fresh, giving PRO Stefan Kunstmann and his race management team a challenge to work around the constraints of space available to avoid the busy shipping lanes and still have good race courses. The brisk 20-30 knot conditions of Sunday forced the RC at one stage to consider setting courses in the adjacent area of the Strander Bucht.

Nonetheless, seven windward-leeward races were completed, with Dennis Gehrlein's Evento 42 Hispaniola at the top of the scoreboard in Class 0/1. The 2011 ORCi European Champion won all but two races with an impressive 9 point lead over runner-up One4All, Thomas Ross's J/V 49.

Class 2 was won by Sonke Meier-Sawatski's X-35 NiRaMo x-treme, in a close-fought contest with runner-up Torsten Bastiansen's XP 38 Veolia, who was only one point behind.

Class 3/4 was won by Max Gurgel's X-332 RubiX by 5 points over runner up Varuna Express, Kai Haupthoff's X-332 Sport, who in turn won a tie break with Johann Friedrichsen's X-332 Chinook.

Ecky van der Mosel, head of Offshore Sailing at KYC and Kieler Woche, commented "It was a great start to the season. As always, we had partly too much, and partly too little wind, but there was a lot of red faces: from the sun and from the efforts on the water!"

A contributing factor for the teams that did well at the MAIOR was the previous weekend's Go 4 Speed training seminar, also held in Kiel, where two days of onboard coaching with drills in starts, mark roundings, as well as a photo and video debrief each day, and short courses helped break off the rust from the long winter.