OCR wrap up

The regatta is over and now time to reflect on the past five days. We had 4-14kt Northwester to finish things off today, which was extremely shifty as the puffs dropped down from the Miami Skyline. Ask Jesse and I our favorite conditions to race a sailboat in and these would probably be them; fun shifts to keep us on our toes and still enough breeze to be moving along nicely. No one side is favored, no pre-race strategy other than keep your head out of the boat and stay in phase!

We had a pretty good day going before the last start...a 10th in the 1st one and a 12th in the second one is pretty much all we can ask from ol' Murphy (3rd oldest boat in 29 boat fleet). She is soft, has trouble accelerating in puffs and feels lower in the water than a normal boat. Not to mention the deck is soft and the wings sag (doesn't make boat handling any easier!).

We look back on that first race and we pretty much sailed a great race. We got off the line, had a lane in the first shift and stayed in phase to the top. Erik/Trevor won the race and they were with us (behind us for the 1st half of the beat) on the left and were able to boatspeed around us as we hitched up the left middle. We rounded in 12th then had a great downwind by holding starboard gybe and sailing into nice pressure and were in 8th at the leeward gate - we even passed a two Brits! We held on the second beat by connecting the puffs and then hitting the left winder at the top. The breeze got a little lighter and flukier on the final run and we lost two top boats (a Brit and the top Canadian) who seemed to carry better speed than us. Still it was a great race, where we interacted with many of 'the players' in the regatta.

The 10th does not give it justice at all, in fact, it helps to make our point that we are in a slow boat, for even in shifty, flatwater conditions (speed should be largely trumped by angle and pressure), where we sailed very well, a 10th was all we could manage. Not being able to accelerate when the puffs came down was critical. I feel bad for blaming alot of this on the boat, but it really did feel/seem that different than the newer boats. 10 years is close to a lifetime in the fast paced 49er and far too old to ask it to be competitive with a new boat. But in the end we will have to wait for the next World Cup Event in Palma, where we are sailing our new boat to showcase our point. This is good because it will be more competitive and deeper and we will need to be maximizing our potential to finish where we want to.

The 12th was also a good race, where after falling behind because of a large left shift early on (we were stuck in the middle doing 4 while the boats who hit the left were doing 9), we rallied by staying in phase and ended up having our second best race in the event.

Going into the last race, we were feeling good and confident that we had one more good race in us, to cap the event off. The points were all close and 15th was in striking distance. We knew we wanted the left and so a pin start was decided. Everything was going to plan until the final 8 secs, when we released too early and were OCS and hit the starting pin. After the spinning and clearing ourselves, we were DEEP (couple hundred yards behind), but we didn't give up and fought our way back to a semi-respectable 17th place. This was a frustrating way to end the event because we seemed to have the conditions dialed in and the error was completely unforced. We were happy with our rig setting all day and will save that for similar conditions.

Overall Regatta Overview:

- It was both a blessing and a curse to sail that newer boat a week before the event, for it was great to see what we could do after all this training against our training partners when we were into a similar boat, but at the same time it made it that much tougher to jump back into 646 for the regatta. It's all good though because that speed we had in the other boat has given us an inner strength to get through these tough times.

- Jesse and I, both economists by degree and avid followers of the market, see our campaign at the moment, in traderspeak, as a 'great buy'. There is tons of upside potential because the numbers (OCR results) don't give our sailing its fair market value. That is fine for us and our supporters who can trade on this insider information and be well positioned to the future. Please hold the faith, we have not had more confidence in our mission for London 2012, even as we come off one of the more disappointing weeks of sailing...

- The most exciting part of this week, was seeing our training partners (who we have sailed for months together in Miami and California), in new boats, excel in the event. Alex Bishop/Val Smith are in 8th, The Mexican Bro's are in 10th and Johnny and Charlie finished 11th. This shows the guys we spar with everyday are some of the faster teams out there.

- If we could do it again, we would have bought the new rig earlier because it took some days to stretch the shrouds (during racing in the first couple of days, the bend was off) and get used to the newest mast. Initially, we wanted to wait until Europe to buy the new rig, but when it became apparent that the old rig was not going to be reliable, we had to opt for the last minute purchase (and we are thankful we did!). It was different (a good thing) than our old one and took a little adjusting to, which may not have been the greatest for this event, but in the long-run was the right move. We look forward to putting it up on 1108 in Palma in March!

- A constant reality in any skiff sailing program, our boat handling needs more work...These boats are tough to sail and the brain and body can always use more conditioning. On top of our priority list at the moment will be tacks and gybes, so simple, yet so hard to master. We had a couple of tough tacks at tight moments which cost us. We also flipped on a gybe in the big puff of day 3...

- The last observation from the regatta is that the legs were longer and the laps were less than any other World Cup Event we have ever done. This put more of an emphasis on speed than usual and allowed faster teams with poor lanes off the line to claw themselves back in the race by drag racing around the course. In Europe, we found starts and hitting the first shift off the line were ultra critical as the legs were short, as we did 4 lappers. So you can imagine, on these longer legs, with our sluggish boat, it made hanging with the top guys very difficult. Often in this regatta, we were looking real good in the first half of the 1st beat, only to be reeled in by our competition and left with lackluster lanes, battling with in the middle of the pack. Our results show this with our abundance of finishes in the teens.

-Zander