PETER Bromby and Bill McNiven are currently lying in 23rd place at the Star World Championships being staged off the coast of Cascais, Portugal.Bromby is attempting to qualify for the Beijing Olympics next year — his fifth Olympics — and after six races of the 11-race regatta he is on 62 points.

Bromby and McNiven finished in 16th place in the opening race but followed that up with a 20th place. But the duo got back on track in the third and forth race finishing in ninth place both times but were set back a bit with a 24th place in the fifth race yesterday morning. But yesterday afternoon they came back again and finished in eighth place.

Leading the Star fleet, which is composed of nearly 90 boats, is Brazil’s Robert Scheidt and Bruno Prada.

Their two first-place finishes in yesterday’s fifth and sixth race saw them jump ahead of France’s Xavier Rohart and Pascal Rambeau. The French duo, who are the 2003 and 2005 Star World Champions, are in second place with the Great Britain team of Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson in third.

The conditions this week have seen sunny skies, a four to five-foot short swell, chop and a shifty winds over the race course.

The Brazilians are a force to be reckoned with as they have not had a finish out of the top three since the 2006 Miami Olympic Classes Regatta — over a year and a half ago. At last year’s Star Worlds in San Francisco, the Brazlians finished second and with the French duo third behind New Zealanders Hamish Pepper and Carl Williams. The Kiwis are in sixth place currently.