Volvo

“ Another pretty disappointing day on the water here at Skandia Sail for Gold, we seem intent on continuing the theme of one good race one bad!! We actually had the best start out of all the fleet today, but instead of cashing in on it and tracking off to the right like most the fleet, we tried to go up the middle of the course and unfortunately it didn’t work out.  A 32^nd finish was a tough start to the day but we made sure we improved upon that in the second race, we started well again but made better use of our position and finished 7^th.

It’s been a long week with plenty of racing but physically we feel good and its definitely one of our major strengths as a team. Even though Sarah hasn’t sailed the 470 for long and it uses a lot of different muscles, she’s adapted to life in a 470 really well and I am always confident we can finish a regatta in strong physical shape.

Tonight I am really looking forward to meeting up with my parents who have sailed their boat round from Mersea to come and see me. That’s another great advantage of sailing here as our home comforts, as well as friends and family are never too far away. We also have a drinks reception for supporters of Skandia Team GBR here at the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy. I will go along and say hello to some people be strictly on the fruit juice and head in for an early night! We have potentially two more days of racing and if we put in some good performances then we may muscle our way into the top 10 and landing a spot in the medal race on Saturday.

Whatever happens this week though we’ll be a bit disappointed with the results. We have worked hard to get a decent result in one race, then due to a bit of bad luck or misjudgement we find ourselves in the middle of the fleet and finish lower down the leader board then we’d like. I guess it’s not surprising that we are where we are since the team is still fairly new, but we set ourselves high standards to succeed whenever we go out on the water.  But we’ve discovered plenty of things we want to concentrate on and will build on it as we work towards coming back to Weymouth and Portland and competing in the Games in two years time.”

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