THERE’S nothing like training at home. Just ask Paul de Souza, the reigning champion of the International Laser Class Association (ILCA) Bahamas Open Senior Nationals.

Over the weekend in Lyford Cay, de Souza got to taste some international competition and he fared very well at the Bahamas Sailing Association’s national championships in Lyford Cay, placing second behind visiting Portugal Olympian Eduardo Marques. 

In the process, de Souza held off local arch-rival Joshua Higgins in their first head-to-head clash as they both are preparing to claim the one spot for the Bahamas for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California.

After making his return to competition after just three months of training, de Souza admitted that it’s a whole different ball game. 

“I know I’ve really gotten started, but it’s been good. In the past three months,” he said. “I started training and so far it’s been good. I hope to do the Olympic campaign in this cycle.”

Unlike Higgins, who has been training around the world training and competing, de Souza has only returned to competitive competition over the last three months as been able to do all of his training right here at home.

“I want to see how good I can get. In the next several months,” de Spouza said. “If I feel like I am in a position where I feel like I can continue the campaign, I will continue,

“But I’m playing it by ear seeing how my fitness progresses and how my sailing progresses.”

As he competed for his third straight national title this weekend, he said he surprised himself by his performance.

“I may have underestimated my base knowledge that I had in sailing or over estimated the amount of technical work that I had to do in the boat to catch up with modern technology,” he pointed out. 

“Not what I was using was too far away. It was only about ten years ago., but it’s been awhile since I competed at that level and obviously there are some new things that people buy and so wearing some of the new stuff that I have to get used too, I think I did pretty well against the guys who are doing this full time.”

At the nationals, de Souza only lost out to Marques, a Portugal Olympian, who took advantage of his training session in the Bahamas. But he beat out Higgins, whose training base has been in Europe over the past two years.

“This is the first time that I competed against Joshua. We trained once or twice before, but I’m hoping this summer when he returns to train here a little more, we can traini a little more and bounce off each other;s ideas,” de Soua said. 

“We’re pretty good on both ends of the spectrum. There’s some things that he’s pretty good at tht I am not good at and there are some things that I’m good at that he’s not. I think if we are able to train together, we will be able to compliment each other.”

With only one spot on the team, once the Bahamas qualifies, de Souzq said he and de Soua will have to wait on the BSA to make the final decision on who will go once they have a ssil off.

“I’ve been doing a lot of coaching for the past two years, but I ended up doing an office job recently and that was when I decided to go back out and start training gin.

“I wanted to be able to match the physicality of the other sailors, training at least four days a week to spend some time in the boat,” said de Spuza, who still assists with the youth sailing program as a coach.

“This summer, I plan to go to the Olympic Class Regatta in Long Beach, California, which should be good because a lot of the youth sailors have to go there to compete in the North American Youth Championships at the same time.

“So it would be nice to see them on the water and myself on the water as we push ourselves to see how much we have learnt over the past few months. So it should be fun.”

de Souza expressed his gratitude to the Nassau Sailing School for allowing him to train as much as he can and to the Lyford Cay Club coach Niels Broekhuizen for taking the time out to train him

“Coming into the nationals, I didn’t know what to expect, competing against the visiting Olympian and even Josh,” de Souza said. “So it was a bit nerve wrecking going into the event.

“When you are sailing at home, you don’t really know what to expect at the international level, so I was very pleased with my performance. I just need to get some more training and some competition overseas and I should be okay.”

The former student of St Andrew’s School, who started competing at the age of ten and has represented the Bahamas in numerous international competitions, went on to complete his studies at the College of Charleston where he majored in international business with a minor in French.

Now that he’s back in competitive form, he thanked his deceased aunt, Joanne ‘Joei’ Arana, for leaving him with financial support to go along with the support from his parents Dr Kathryn and Dr Pablo de Souza.