Australia to date has been quite an amazing experience. The sailing can be absolutely amazing, but we have found that this time of year the legendary Fremantle sea breeze (a.k.a. “The Doctor“) is not as dependable as later in the summer time. We came down and were presented with a full week of awesome SW sea breeze ranging from 18 to 30 knots. However when it came time to have a regatta, the wind became fickle and only allowed us to complete four races in five days!
Pre-event training
The Perth International Regatta was luckily just a tune-up event. With most of the top 20 teams here, the regatta shaped up to be a smaller fleet (26 boats) but one of the most challenging. The only problem was the 100 degree weather that encroached itself upon the five day event, turning the Fremantle Doctor into a med-student and thus no wind came at all. The first day of the event gave us two solid races, both of which we were clearly shaking the rust off. We scored a 17-16 on the water, but came on shore only to see a DPI penalty (2 points) for not properly checking in at the beginning of the day. After a rough day on the water, that is about the only way it could get worse, or so we thought!
The next day we had one of the most crazy races we have ever done in a dying and very shifty southerly breeze. Our risk-management should have been set on “high alert” but instead we lost a lot on the first upwind leg tying to get too much leverage, and were unable to come back, scoring a 16th in the race. We had to sit on that score for two days of no racing. On the fourth day of the event, we finally got a start off in a crazy storm breeze, which died to nothing by the top mark, and the race was abandoned. However, there was more bad news as we found out that we were black-flagged in the start (scored a DNS in the results for some reason), which means we are automatically out of the race. The racing was then abandoned for the day, so we would have to try for the fourth race on the final day of the regatta. We could not race the fourth race because of the black flag, but we were ready and waiting for the fifth race once they had completed the fourth. As you can guess, our luck stayed consistent, and they cancelled the race- leaving us no redemption opportunity.
We were certainly bummed to only get in four of the ten scheduled races, but sometimes that is just how it goes! Full results can be found here.
Our training has resumed here in Perth, and not surprisingly we have had perfect breeze1 The Perth International Regatta five-day window appears that it was perfectly ill-timed, with great wind right before and right after the event. We are currently three days into a five day stretch of training before we break one day. Then there is a “coaches regatta” where all the teams here for training (about 25 from all different countries) will get together and run a semi-formal regatta for training. The coaches regatta will last five days, then we will load our boat into a container to be shipped via train to Melbourne for the first ISAF World Cup event of the season, Sail Melbourne.
If you were curious, they do luckily sell turkeys down here and combined with foreigners with no Thanksgiving experience and a few other Americans down here training we had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, just minus our families.
To all of our fans, we are so thankful for your support. We would never be able to live out our dream of an Olympic Medal without you!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Adam and Nick