Europeans Day 2

Gdynia showed her more Baltic face today, with a stormy, rain driven, 12-20kt breeze blowing right off the town. The direction made for big shifts, big blasts and relatively flat water: pretty much prime 49er sailing! For us, given our lack of breeze training, we always knew conditions like these would be challenging, but we were eager to head out and get practice with such world class competition.

To make the day even more difficult, the race committee decided to go for 4 races today because of the dubious long-term weather forecast, which made today our longest day of racing to date! We did 4 three lap races which each took roughly 40 mins each. Lets break that down from a boat handling perspective, that is: 12 spinnaker sets, 12 bear-aways, 8 douses (one of the hardest things to do in a 49er), roughly 48 gybes, and over 55 tacks. Great practice, but it takes a lot out of you, especially when you have not been doing these maneuvers much recently! We only flipped once during racing and that was in the last race in one of our final gybes in heavy traffic at the leeward gate.

Highlights from today:
- Had a couple of decent starts, our acceleration off the line is improving and we are moving closer to consistently getting off the line, full powered up.
- Hit a few shifts around boats. Its not rocket science out there, the top boats miss shifts and you can hang with them sometimes even if they are a little faster and more polished
- More comfortable getting low(powered up) and locked in the downwinds when breeze on
- All around great practice for us between going through the motions of tacks,gybes, roundings to tactics both up and downwind

Need to improve on:
-Tacks/Gybes in pressurized situations
-Laylines off the wind(this becomes very difficult when a 20kt puff hits after a initial 12kts and you have to fall off an extra 20 degrees and no longer lay the leeward mark. Add in some boats coming upwind and it gets a little hairy)
-Cutting losses (if we make a mistake, being able to recover and minimize the compounding of the loss).

Definitely an early night tonight, and with the forecast more of the same, we will need our rest. Hopefully we will be able to make some gains from our experiences today for tomorrows racing.