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May 2005
We have been back training now for four weeks,
it was great to be back in the boat. We both felt really fresh
and ready to train hard. We started off sailing on our own
for six days, in some conditions we eased straight back into
it whilst in others we were slightly rusty. We were lucky
with the conditions experiencing a full range, so we could
have a go and see where we were at and what we needed to work
on in each condition.
After the six days we joined in with some
other boats to train and we seemed to be sailing well, our
racing was slightly rusty occasionally making mistakes at
the start or on the first shift, but on the whole we were
not a million miles away from where we needed to be, a big
relief as our first event was a 'national ranking event' the
following weekend in Hayling Island.
Our main motivation to do the national ranker was to gain
some race experience before the European championships, the
result was not that important. The first day was a shifty
15 knot, offshore wind a condition that we had seemed to slip
back into quite well. Our starting wasn't great but our tactics
and downwind speed was good. We rounded the first weather
mark 2nd in each race managing to overhaul the leaders on
a later leg to finish the day with 1st, 1st, 1st. The following
day the wind was much steadier and much lighter, we made a
mistake with the setup in the first race and finished 3rd,
but then retuned and corrected our mistake and scored two
1st's in the last two races. It was nice to win our first
event back counting straight 1st's especially as there are
now some very strong committed sailors in the UK class. We
have since done another weeks training and in a few days fly
out to Poland early to do another four days training before
our European championships start.
We are definitely not back to the standard we were at last
summer but we are well prepared and focused and looking forward
to trying to defend our title!
Racing starts on the 8th June with the final day on the
14th. There is a link to the event website on www.sailing.org
where you can find results.
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