After two days travelling we have finally arrived back in the UK. Thank You very much to everyone who helped with our trip to this event, especially my crew, Tom Altmann and Nick Wilkinson who with out, this wouldn’t have been possible.
We have learnt a lot from this trip and now know what we have to improve on for the upcoming events through the year. We will now get strait back into training for the British Qualifiers and the Governors cup and hopefully some events in mainland Europe.
Over the weekend I completed my RYA Sea Survival Course, this now means along with a medical I can commercially endorse my Yacht Master Ocean as well is it is one of the Qualifications I needed for competing in the Mini Transat Class.
There is still more work to do with the Match racing Boats based at Farmoor so we can get the best out of training on them, then we are going go through our options for the events we can do this year.
Sam
14 Feb 2009 /
Match Racing
Finally for the third day we had some lighter, but shifty, wind, which much more suited our light weight crew. Today the Play-Offs and the Semi-finals were completed. Unfortunately we missed out on the 5th-6th Play-offs by one point and were forced to sail in the 7th-8th play off. Where we managed a comfortable 2-0 win over the other team.
The event has now come to an end for us, despite a disappointing result, of 7th place, we were fairly happy with our performance, especially in the second half of the event. Unfortunately we only became competitive too late in the to make a significant difference to our result, but we have learnt some very valuable lessons that we can now take forward to get some better results in the future.
The three of us would like to say thank you very much to all the support we have received from everyone, both financially and morally. Also good luck to the finalists for tomorrows racing.
Sam
13 Feb 2009 /
Match Racing
Day 2 ending up being another very windy day of racing with, winds regularly reaching over 25knots. Through the morning we had quite a few successful pre-starts but then seemed to loose our advantage on the upwind legs and unfortunately lost some more races. After Race four, we racked our brains on how we could improve our upwind speed and, with a few pointers from the local coach, we managed to sort this out and fortunately managed to win all of our 3 races in the afternoon.
Disappointingly for us all we found this groove a little late in the event, for a boat we had previously not sailed before, and have missed the semi-finals but, are confident we have a good shot at battling the others for our best possible result.
Well, with only the weekend left of racing, hopefully it will bring good races and results.
Sam
