Mallorca Update

These past 2 weeks have been an exciting one. We have put together our new boat together in Mallorca, Spain and are gearing up for the first major World Cup Event of the European Season. Most of the major players of the fleet are here or showing up in the next week or so, thus making for great practice races every afternoon in de Bahia de Palma. The event starts here on April 2 and runs through April 7th and will serve as a great “dry-run” for the World Championships (Croatia – May 7-12), which will be our Olympic Qualifier.

Ramon, our coach will be here tonight for a week of training to help us continue to refine the new boat, improve our boat handling and analyze our practice races. Further, it will be good to have him here to start the mental preparation for Croatia and make sure we are approaching the event in the right way.

Back to the new boat! The early feedback on the boat is promising. The boat has come out of the box pretty ready to go and we were able to transfer our tuning numbers from our old rig. She feels immensely stiffer (less energy lost and able to hold rig tension) than the boat we were sailing in Miami and the new style wing construction makes for a more stable platform for boat handling operations. Lining up with top teams now, with correct rig tuning, we have confidence to hold our position. That is easier said than done, but if we can consistently stay on top of our tuning, our boat speed should put us in tremendous shape.

So over these next few weeks, we will continue to tweak the boat, but also focus on our boat handling and keep our sailing ‘tidy’ (to keep the speed through all turns) around the race course. This is vital to maintain the good positioning that our speedy boat has given us with the margin for error so minimal at the top of the fleet.

All in all, we are energized about this final stage in the qualification phase and are looking forward to making Bermuda proud over the next few months!

Thank you so much for your support which has gotten us to where we are today and please standby on our progress as we aim towards London this summer!!