You are here: home > diary > july 2002

July 2002

We have recently returned from the ISAF World Sailing Games, held in Marseille, where we finished 12th. It was a slightly different championship to those that we normally compete in as all the equipment was provided and we had to swap boats each day. The idea is the winner would be the team with the best sailing skills nothing to do with the equipment used, the reality was it was very hard to get settled and put together a consistent series.

It was another disappointing result for us, not least because the leaders were very close to us yet a few simple mistakes let us down. So far this year we have been making a lot of mistakes in our racing, and we feel we can put this down to spending almost no time race training during our pre season training. Throughout last winter we spent a lot of time trying to develop our boat speed, this is a time consuming business for relatively small results, and although we have definitely improved on techniques that will make us faster and better 470 sailors long-term, short-term we could have done with competing in more regattas. With each event we do we are making less mistakes and our boat speed has improved, so everything is in place for a successful summer.

Our next event is the European championships in Tallinn, Estonia where we will be competing in our new boat 'Sexy Sadie' (keeping the tradition of naming the boat after Beatles songs). We have sailed the boat in training in England but not yet at a championship and feel the new design features of the Mackay hull will improve our upwind speed.

We have 3 championships to compete in this summer, The Europeans (Tallinn), Pre Olympics (Athens) and the World Championships (Sardinia). Of these the Worlds is our priority, but the Europeans is still important to us and whilst we are using the Pre Olympics for mainly training purposes, we will race hard for a good result.