WE MADE IT Round!

Exhausting blast around Bermuda! No time to break, just a moment under the lee of St. David's Head to drink some water as we got ready for the mission up the South Shore. We blasted off the starting line at Spanish Point and cruised down the North Shore with great pace, thanks to the breezy conditions and the relatively flat water. We made it to St. David's Head in 45 minutes from Spanish Point. The South Shore was a brutal 15 mile upwind leg, as jumped swells with the flying fish. We came inside the reef at Elbow Beach and did a close 'fly by' for the beach goers. Once we got to Sonesta, we were able to speed up as we bore away from the breeze. In no time we were ripping across Whale Bay and into the West End. By the end, the breeze had built some and we were just trying to hold it together. We were both really tired, but just remained focused on finishing. It was freaky sailing over the reefs of the West End at such high speeds, it would not have been possible at a lower tide.

Special thanks to all our supporters who guessed our circumnavigation time. Winner was St. David's Islander, Duncan Frith. We finished in 3hrs 47 mins and 10 Secs, he was only 10 secs off with his guess of 3hr 47 mins! Also many thanks to our escorts around the Island. Spanish Point - Ft. St. Catherine (Jonny Kempe and Andrew Masters), Fort St. Catherines - Tuckerstown (Mark Soares), Tuckerstown - Sonesta (Barry Bridges and Malcolm Kirkland) and the last leg Sonesta to Spanish Point (Alan Burland and Raymond Lambert).

We think was a great event and want to improve on our time! It was a great way for us to showcase the speeds that this boat can achieve. The 49er is the fastest Olympic Sailboat and is one of the main focal points for media coverage on the ISAF World Cup Tour. Just imagine a whole fleet of these boats racing and you can understand racing these boats on the World Stage!

Round 'De Rock'

How long will it take them?

The Kirkland Brothers, in a bid to raise public awareness of their Olympic dreams and help fund raise their sailing campaign, are set to sail around Bermuda this week. They envisage it being a two-fold challenge, one for themselves to sail the “bronco” around the 36-mile circumference of the island in good time and lastly, for the public to try and estimate their circumnavigation time. Neither of them is an easy task, for the sailing is going to be draining over that type of a distance and the rubric to figure out their time is equally daunting because of the abundance of variables in a sailboat speed run.

$10 buy-in to get your estimate on the books. The winner will be receiving gift vouchers to AS Coopers, Butterfield and Vallis and the Olympic Club. The cash pool raised goes to support their run-up to next summer’s Olympics in London. Their six figure budget over the next year is dominated by world-class coaching expenses as they attack the important nuances of sailing the boat. Call 236-0383 to log your bet or drop it by Mailboxes in town. You can do it electronically by emailing zankirkland@hotmail.com and then paying by bank transfer, with the time in the memo. This is another example (Roy Allen’s “Dash for Cash”) of ‘cash strapped’ BOA Elite athletes getting imaginative to raise money for their Olympic aspirations.

Hints for everyone to base their estimate around. Their clockwise circumnavigation attempt will start and finish at Hogfish Beacon off Spanish Point. The highest speeds (in excess of 20 kts) of the trip, should be on the North Shore, where they will have their giant spinnaker up and minimal big waves to slow them down. Their speed will drop when they attack the wind on the South Shore and also have to manage the swell outside the reefs. Total distance around is estimated to be just over 36 nautical miles.

Stay up-to-date (for exact start time) electronically by following the campaign’s Facebook page “Kirkland Brothers 49er Sailing”. Also they will try and get airtime on the local radio stations to keep everyone abreast of their progress around. Tenative start-time is 11am this coming Thursday, starting time from Hogfish. They will have a GPS onboard to record the actual distance sailed and the top speed of the sail.

With the wind out of the South-West, the South Shore will be a great place to view the boat jumping in the waves. They are planning on coming inside the reef near Elbow Beach for a fly-by. Other good places to view the Brothers in action would be: Crawl Hill, Ferry Reach, Fort St. Catherines, St. David’s Head, Spittal Pond, Horshoe Bay, Church Bay, Whale Bay, Somerset Long Bay, and Commissioner’s House as they head for the finish!

They welcome any other challengers with a sail to take them on and are interested to hear about any past performances. Windsurfers currently hold the outright speed record for the circumnavigation by a sailing craft, but they want to have the fastest sailboat time on the books.

The Brothers are home for two more weeks to fundraise (by this event and painting houses) and then are off to California for the Fall to compete in the Pacific Coast Championships and the North American Championships. They will be racing with top North American and European sailors as everyone preps for the 2011 World Championships, which are this December in Perth, Australia.

Euro trip # 2 - Reflection

Reflecting into the Scandinavian midnight twilight on the Ferry to Stockholm

Waiting for our flight home at Gatwick, after a very productive trip to Northern Europe over the course of the last 2 months, we feel excited about our sailing and where it is going. The trip has been our best foray to Europe yet, with a 25th place at the Grade 1 Delta Lloyd Event and consistent good moments at the ultra competitive Sail for Gold and the European regattas. We were also blessed with great wind for most of these events and were really able to up our comfort level in racing these boats at high speeds. The other major positive aspect of this trip, has been our increased knowledge of how to manage the rig settings, largely through talking with our faster friends and figuring out things by trial/error.

A full year into sailing this boat full-time and we are miles ahead of where we were last year. Hopefully we can continue this trend. We seem to be doing a lot of the hard things well (starting, lane management off the line, and boat handling) and when we can polish up the rest of our game and fire on all cylinders, we are going to be pleased with our results.

Even through this trip, we noticed better boat handling and speed in breeze, thanks to 20 days of sailing (majority under race conditions) in this trip where it was windy. This meant tens of mark roundings, bear-aways, starts and the ability to tweak our rig settings. Over 18kts, we are pretty happy with rig and have found that we have good speed with the fleet (in the windiest race of Sail For Gold, we rounded the 1st weather mark in 7th). Our breeze competency also was enhanced by our “boat-handling week” in Weymouth before going to Finland. We did tons of tacks, gybes and mark roundings at the Olympic venue. It is never easy training by yourself, but we made the most of it and felt the results in Finland.

We are excited to be heading to Santa Cruz and San Francisco in early August to continue our breeze practice because we really want to make a point of being competent BREEZE sailors in the class. There very few venues in the world, which are better to focus on windy 49er sailing than Coastal Central California and we will have an international crew (FIN, CAN, USA, MEX, DEN and maybe GBR) of training partners to sail with. We will continue to focus on sharpening our boat handling, dialing in our rig and learning how to push the boat more in the waves with the kite up. It is a real art for the crew to trim the kite and avoid putting the bow into the wave and causing a dramatic pitch-pole. The boat really needs a longer pole in those conditions to pull the bow up more, but there is a technique that we need to master to mitigate the constant danger of pitching it – basically trapeze really hard out and back and let the break the kite before rogue waves suck the bow in.

Also over the past 2 months, I noticed my fitness improve from all that breeze sailing. Towards the end of the trip, even after 4 races (with 3 laps each), I found I still had energy in the tank to deal with the spinnaker sets, douses and keeping the boat going top speed upwind. Of course, it can always be better and I will be working towards that, but it was refreshing to see my body adapt to all the sailing. It also shows that the gym training, which I do between events, could be pushed harder. It really seems like the best fitness training for the boat is just sailing the boat because it is such a complex blend of strength, agility and endurance. I am going to continue to focus on high rep training to work on shoulder, back and arm grip strength. Also mixed in cardio on the bike and the rowing machine. Jesse and I’s weight (154kg) is good for the boat and no real change is necessary, we just need to continue to get stronger, so we can avoid tiring and stay focused on sailing fast and smart.

Come to RBYC at 6pm on Thursday, July 21st to see us present our current state of the campaign! We feel we are at an exciting stage and want to share that with everyone.


- Zander

Euros - Helsinki

Front Row, race 4


Front Row, race 2


FLAT and FAST!!!

We have had three days of racing in progressively better conditions each day, with the highlight being today’s fresh 13-16knots- though there was a nasty short chop. The first day was in a really soft and fluky 3-6 knots, and yesterday was a solid 7-12 knots. After nine races, we are lying in 47th place, but only 20ish points out of a mid fleet. The conditions have been really shifty with the course tucked up right under the shore of Helsinki leaving the fleet very close. With half our races still to come, we have the room to make a good jump up the leaderboard.

The course that we were put on for our races has been very difficult and unpredictable leaving the tactics and strategy that much more tricky. However, one thing that we can pride ourselves on for most of this event is our starting. We have had some really good starts in the middle of the line allowing us to be a little more conservative with the oscillating breeze. Our downwind speed and tactics, and leeward mark rounding’s are constantly improving as our boat handling and confidence improves. Another big part of the racing so far has been to manage the risk/reward trade-off. Since it is such a shifty venue with massive pressure differences throughout the course, understanding when to take the risk and leverage out on the fleet is critical.

We had been making gains with our rig in our most problematic area(essentially what we have raced in), though on the second day we really lacked speed. Today saw a much better look in our speed, and we look to continue that into tomorrow and beyond. So, the frustration and annoyance at our speed in the 7-14 knots is still present, though addressing our biggest weaknesses now only make us stronger down the road.

With three days of sailing left, there is still much to fight for in this event. We hope to continue our good starting and rig settings to put together some results. We are getting close!

-Jesse

Training in Weymouth

After 2 and half weeks of full-time sailing between the Delta Lloyd Regatta and the Sail for Gold, Zander and Jesse took a needed hiatus from the 49er. Zander headed to Ireland and scored some good surf while Jesse went to Greece and Turkey in search of that rare GBR thing of warm weather. Since we did not want to be out of the boat for more than two weeks, following our “separation”, we planned a training week in Weymouth before our departure for the Europeans in Finland.

The weather cooperated for our week, leaving us with good breeze and, surprisingly, sunshine! Training-wise, it was certainly a success as we were very productive with our time for the five days with a couple of double sessions crammed in there. Though we were sailing by ourselves, we were busy working on boat handling (never gets old in the 49er!) and testing some rig settings. For example, we did gybe set after gybe set and leeward mark rounding after leeward mark rounding; essentially trying to engrave the motions into our mind. We also did the basics, like figure 8 drill repetitively in the beginning of the session to get our mechanics down.

Rig-wise, we were testing out some settings in our most problematic condition of 8-12 knots. Thankfully the breeze for the majority of the week was this condition! You can only do so much with rig tune by yourself, but it was amazing the changes we could feel tinkering with the rig (playing with bend, cap shroud tension, primary shroud tension, etc). Hopefully this help us as we go into the ultra competitive European Champs (2nd only to the Worlds in terms of competition) and get our speed dialed in whatever conditions we get.

So, onto Finland tomorrow with a British team. The long drive of nearly 30 hrs will be segmented by two ferry rides seeing us arrive sometime Monday evening. We will no doubt need some rest after the drive! However, given our time frame, we will have plenty of time to get rested and train a couple times before the European Championship begins on Friday the 8th. Stay posted!

Sail For Gold Wrap-Up

After a couple days to gain some perspective we are able to better analyze the event. We were disappointed with our overall position of 50th out of 68. We finally had found some confidence in our sailing following the Delta Lloyd Regatta, and felt prepared to put forth a great event. Unfortunately, some things happened in the racing- some our fault, others not, that saw us finish below our potential. We felt misfortune found us at every corner. For instance, the first DNF was a 6th at the first windward mark before a peculiar situation developed in a fickle 2-6 knots, and absolutely owned us.

But have faith! We remain optimistic about our chances in the 49er. We broke down all the qualifying races (before Gold and Silver split), and realized that we were in the top 15 (two top 10) in every race. Our goal remains to finish off our strong starts to the races. Seeing the points that we gave away throughout the event leaves us wondering with the what ifs…

Our speed overall is getting better. In both <7 and >18 we feel confident with our speed (Our best roundings were in both these conditions). Our problem remains in the mid-range where we just lack the wheels of the top boats. Our goal is to focus hard on this wind-range and hopefully with some advice from some friends in the fleet we can get going well.

Tactically speaking, we did not sail our best regatta, but certainly well enough to be mid fleet. This, despite the FULL-ON conditions we saw for 90% of the event (the other 10% was in 0-6 from the land in our first two races). Moving forward, our goal to refine our speed in the 8-14knots remains Number 1.

After a couple weeks off to recharge the battery will are heading up to Finland to compete in the European Championships. No doubt there will be some long days that far north!

Sail For Gold Update

We have completed six races over the three days of racing in the two extremes of wind conditions(really light and extremely windy). Our first two races were raced in a light and variable offshore 2-6 knots with our final race seeing a 180 degree wind shift! Over the last two days, we have seen 18-25knots with higher gusts in some of the waviest and gnarly sailing to date. Our hands have certainly been full!

Our results are not impressive, and we feel quite bummed about them. However, beneath the scores, we have had some brilliant moments throughout the two extreme conditions. First off, our speed all around has been a positive that has us feeling quite good. Secondly, our confidence on the starting line has improved, which has not surprisingly led to us having more consistent starts. Thirdly, we have been in the top 15(two in top 10) at the first mark in all of our races.

We have said it before, but I will say it again. We are still trying to put the whole race together. Throughout the races, we have been plagued by a few mishaps between mechanical issues, tactical conundrums and some boat set-up issues. Sailing in these tough extreme conditions has definitely made it a lot more difficult. But, regardless of the dissatisfaction of the racing thus far, we are still upbeat about the final two days of racing.

So, onto Silver Fleet tomorrow. With our confidence still there, we hope to finally crank out a few good finishes with six races remaining. Keep posted as the breeze is meant to cooperate!