Sam Goodchild Sailing

We had a very windy first day to The Natinoal Bank International Youth Match Racing Championships, and unfortunately a dissappointing one aswell. Not helped by being over the start line, therefore having to return for two races along with and a few other penalties picked up in the pre-start. Even though we only came out with one win, we are not too downbeat as we know why and how we lost most of our races and also know that we are still capable of winning if we can elmeinate a few of the errors we made.

Even though the boats have keels, they act very much like a dinghy and are very weight sensitive, and as we are 35kilos under the weight limit we are having to work very hard to get the best out of the boats. Despite that, we are managing to keep up with most of the other teams and as a result are have some good races, just never quite doing as well as we could do. 

Well, hopefully we will get less wind over the next few days and be able to come back with some better results. 

Sam

We all finally arrived in Auckland on Saturday morning, and spent the weekend adjusting our body clocks and watching a bit of the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series. We had a chance over the last two days to go sailing on the Elliott 6’s as to get a bit of practise on the boats before we start racing. Tomorrow is registration, followed by a final practise session before we start racing on Thursday.

Luckily, we were able to get the last years winner of the event to come out with us today and show us of few of the tricks with the boat. Unfortunately, we are the only team competing that have not sailed the Elliott 6’s before. But, the three of us are now fairly confident about our crew work and think that after another days training we will be up to a level where we can give it our best shot. 

Sam

Last day of Training before New Zealand

We have now completed our last day of training before we leave for New Zealand on Wednesday. This weekend, we had another match racing team come to Oxford Sailing Club for some training. We mainly focused on our Pre-start but also did some other general tactics on situations that may come up. With this final productive weekend, we are now ready to go to New Zealand and give it our best shot and hopefully return with an acceptable result.

Also in the last couple weeks, we got some more training on the SB3’s at Farmoor Reservoir to improve our crew work. Also, after doing my sextant sightings on my last Atlantic crossing I did my Yachtmaster Ocean exam and fortunately passed.

The whole crew will have arrived in Auckland by the morning of Saturday 7th February, and then have the weekend to acclimatise and recover from the flight as much as possible. We are going to go sail the Elliot 6’s on Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday there is a pre-event training day and then the event runs from Thursday 12th February to Sunday 15th February.

Once in New Zealand I will up date this Blog as regularly as possible and keep you updated on our training and results.

Sam