Blog
These are the hardest reports to write: the ones when you have to give “bad news.” There is no worse feeling than when you look back at an event, and know you simply underperformed- especially when the regatta was an important one. We ended up 38th overall, by far our worst performance in a while. So what the heck happened? Tactics? Fitness? Equipment? Luckily, it was not one facet of our campaign that brought us down. And I say luckily because in our minds if it were one thing that got the best of us, it would mean that we were un...
The last three days we have been doing battle with 77 other 470s, split into two fleets to determine the Gold/Silver grouping. It was a grueling six races for us, but in the end we skimmed our way into the Gold Fleet to keep ourselves in the game. The first day was kicked off with a lengthy postponement due to a lack of breeze- a fairly uncommon condition for Weymouth. Luckily though the wind filled in by 1pm and we ended up getting two races in eight knots of fresh westerly breeze. We sailed okay on the day- scoring an 18-23. &nbs...
During the long drive from the South of France up to Weymouth, England we had a lot of time to reflect on our last event, Semaine Olympic Francaise also known as Hyeres Regatta. It was the fourth ISAF World Cup stop of the season and definitely the most competitive event that was a non-World or European Championship. Now that we are closing in on a just a year before the Games, everyone has come to play making for some awesome racing. ...
Last week we competed in the third stop for the ISAF Sailing World Cup, and first regatta to kick off our "Euro" tour. Overall, it was a regatta full of highs and lows and in the end a 20th place finish. The first day of the event brought on a breezy 20-25 knots, a condition we have not seen in competition since being down in Perth, Australia. Regardless of our few month hiatus from getting even splashed while sailing, we were right into our form and had great speed. In the first race of the event, the race committee had skewed th...
The last couple months have included lots of training down here in Miami. Nothing of which was of much interest until last thursday in a training session off the South Beach coastline. Going into the day we knew that a cold front would be passing, and we would probably be getting rained on. None of the wind models predicted much of an increase in wind, so we decided to head out to the ocean and just see out the front and continue training once it had passed. To us the worst case scenario was that we would have to purposely flip fo...
Over the last ten days we have had five days of training-followed by a day of rest-before we participated in a four day regatta called the Perth Olympic Cup. After the POC, we loaded the boat into a container to be shipped vi train across Australia to Melbourne. In Melbourne, we will sail the first ISAF World Cup of the season, Sail Melbourne, starting on the 12th of December. Before coming down here, all we could think about was that famous poster of Dennis Conner in the 87’ America’s Cup plowing upwind in a his blue 12 meter...
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 jus...
The month of October brought us great training in Miami. We saw most of the conditions, not to mention the weather was just about perfect for sailing. The water temperature felt like bathwater and the air temperature just about matched it at 85 degrees. Our decision to reside and train in Miami has certainly allowed us to make the most of our campaign, as we have only missed a total of four days of training due to weather in the entire year we have been here. None of which came last October! We have just made the extensive journey down to Pert...
It has now been about a month since we finished up the Sail for Gold regatta in Weymouth, England. Our “time off” has been very busy doing other sailing outside of the 470, making for some really fun experiences. I (Adam) started with sailing in the NYYC team race, where I teamed up with friends Baker Potts and Matt Duggan. Although the finish position was worse than our expectations, big laughs and good times were largely at hand. Especially when my boat nearly sank due to faulty auto bailers! Next I spent some time in San Diego wh...
We have just completed the qualifying series here in Weymouth, and the final series starts tomorrow. So far the racing has been amazing, with wind ranging from 5 to 25 knots, sunshine, rain, warm and cold. There is no mystery why it was selected as the future 2012 Olympic games venue. To make the sailing even more important, this regatta next year is one of our trials events. Needless to say, racing here is precious practice and preparation for the future! Our scores for the qualifying series were (20)-6-11-11-9-16, which was good enough to la...