Euro trip wrap up

I wrote this for an NHYC write up, but it brings to light a few interesting things we have picked up on. read below:

"We first sailed Kiel Week in mid June, an ISAF Grade 1 event in Northern Germany, where we battled with a tough 59 boat fleet. The event was mired with light airs and was a little disappointing that there was not as much sailing as hoped. Still, the first day was windy and we completed three windy races which was invaluable practice as our time in breeze is still limited and every race day in breeze moves us along on the learning curve. It was apparent that we were out of practice after our spring hiatus - to allow Jesse to graduate - but we are not worried about results at this early juncture, only learning and underlying performance. In this boat, racing is the best practice you can get! We ended up in Kiel, a very humbling 50th place, a reminder of how much work we have to do to get to the World Standard.

We then packed it all up (49er on top of the rental car) and headed 10 hrs east to Gdynia, the sailing capital of Poland for the 49er European Championship. The European Championship is arguably more competitive than the World Championship because the heart of the class lies in Europe and this championship is always very well attended. The Bro's had the same goals for the European Championships as for Kiel Week, to log focused hours in the boat and continue to keep on learning as much as possible. With our amount of time in the boat to date, results were not a priority. Yes, we wanted to do well and have our moments up in the fleet, but we were realistic about our chances with a fleet of professional sailors. We wanted to do well at everything we could control (ie. tactics, starts, etc), but were cognizant of the fact that their boat handling would let them down at times.

The 82 boat fleet was stacked: full of World Champions, Olympic Medalists, professional big boat sailors and top skiff sailors. We pretty much had every condition over the 6 days of racing: everything from puffy, offshore conditions, to big waves associated with a sea breeze, to light air - great practice for us, but also extremely tiring after 3 days straight of solid breeze. We had some good starts, some good first beats, some solid second beats, some fast mark roundings, some good upwind and downwind speed, but we never really had the consistentcy to put it together for a complete race. This we believe is a symptom of our lack of time in the boat relative to our competition. After the dust settled, we ended up in 68th place (14th in Bronze), once again a rather lowly position to find ourselves in, but you have to earn your place in this fleet and up until now we could not put the time in. However, it was great immersion training and has stoked our fires to train hard to move forward from here.

So yet again, we would argue the results do not our sailing performance justice, but that is the nature of this class and now that we are sailing full-time we hope to remedy it. It seemed like we were one or two "catastrophic" (in terms of the race) mistakes away from being way higher on the results. For example, in strong breeze, our tacks and gybes are pretty solid, but put us in a situation where it is pressurized (at marks, crossing with other boats, etc), we can't do them consistently and that quickly jeopardizes the race. It is frustrating because you will have battled all the way around the race course and then one mistake takes you out of the race. The other thing we are finding frustrating at this juncture is that our poor boat handling is at times inhibiting our level-headed tactics, something traditionally we have been very good at because we are not comfortable enough in the boat. On numerous occasions we will have found ourselves in tough situations where if we did not have our boat handling nagging us, we simply would not have been there. For example, it could be not having faith in making a tack in a breezy race to go back to the side that was favoured or not starting near favored end because we didn't want to tangled up on the line. This is something we can work on now, even with limited boat handling, for we can be aware of this problem and avoid the boat sailing us into places we do not want to be! The philosophy that we constantly preach in the boat: Don't let something bad/mistake (ie. our boat handling) snowball into a worse situation (ie. miss a windshift because of fear of tacking). Minimize the loss and move forward. Don't obsess over it, the boat affords no time to leave the "here and now".


Up next for us is the Olympic Test Event in Weymouth ("Sail for Gold") in August (9th-14th). We will have 5 days of practice before the event and then a training camp after the event to get us acquainted to the venue and to log more hours in the boat. The goal is to put together a "complete race" there and to keep on improving with the underlying performance. We will then be sailing in San Francisco this September/October to practice heavy air sailing with top Americana and Canadian teams.