We’ve planned, trained, prepared, flown, driven, and sailed countless hours over the past two and a half years in anticipation of this day. Now it is here. The first half of the winner take all US Olympic Team Trials begins on Monday. I know I’ve said it before, but I couldn’t be more certain of it; we are ready to punch our ticket. The past few days here in Weymouth have been all about the final preparations. We went on the water two days purely to feel comfortable in the boat. They were easy, “feel good” sessions...
We had to wait around for the sea breeze to fill before getting on the water at about 1:00 PM. The level of sailing in gold fleet here is incredibly high. It’s been many months since we have been in a fleet of this high caliber. We posted a 12-23-2 in the three races. While the second race was frustrating, we learned from it and once again were able to turn around the day and end on a positive note. Gold fleet racing is so tight that upwind lanes can sometimes seem to vanish into thin air. That is what happened to us in race 2. We...
We sailed a near perfect day today, posting a 3-2-3 on the water. However, we were over the line early in the final race, giving us an OCS and a new drop race. We now have to carry the 14th we got when we capsized in yesterday’s race. While we are frustrated with the OCS, we know we sailed very well today. We found our boatspeed today, both upwind and downwind. The Race Committee postponed this morning to allow a front to pass through before we hit the water. While there was no significant weather on Biscayne Bay once we were racing, ther...
The first day is always important to get off on the right foot. It can never be stated too many times that the regatta cannot be won on the first day, but it can be lost. We didn’t lose it! We had a 5-4-4 in the puffy, shifty conditions, which was good enough to put us in fourth place overall. While our boatspeed was not spectacular, we played the course well. We had two fair starts and one poor start. Most importantly, we did a good job of closing out our windward beats. The very top of the course is a place where many points can be won ...
We've made it to the end of qualifying racing in medal position. We are sitting in third place, eight points up on fourth, with no racing left save for the medal race. Today was another exciting day of sailboat racing in extremely varied conditions. The first race got underway after a short postponement so that the windsurfers could finish their second race. We got off the line well near the boat and took the first small shift out right. We were looking great up the beat, and we hooked into a puff to come back near the starboard tack layline. I...
As we are used to doing, the World Cup fleet waited ashore for hours for the wind to fill and the regatta to get under way. We finally went on the water near 4:00 PM and the RC managed to get one race off around 5:00. We scored a 4th in the very light three-lap race, which is certainly a keeper. Our focus for this event is to continue with some of the decision making and communication adjustments we began in Perth. Today was a good start, both in the results and in our emphasis on the aforementioned aspects of our game. We made a solid game pla...
The offshore breeze lasted just long enough for our race committee to get three races in before noon today. We scored a 9-4-16 in the shifty, up and down breeze. We are making good decisions around the course, having mostly good starts, and we have good boatspeed. We can’t seem to avoid the one bigger mistake in the final race of the day. We found ourselves on the wrong side of a shift on the first downwind in the third race. After that happened, there seemed to be very few opportunities to come back again in the small fleet. In the prev...
We’ve had a highly productive week of training here in Australia! We’ve fine-tuned our new boat, revisited some of our big breeze boat handling, and discovered some of the intricacies of racing in the waters off of Fremantle. All in all, we are ready for racing to begin on Wednesday. We have trained for the past week in a group of four boats, including our German and Finnish training partners we have been with for some time, and a new team, the Swedish. The group works together very effectively and shares many of the same skill-spec...
Well, we’ve made it. It took a great deal of logistical planning, immense forethought, and finally a fair bit of travel. Now we’re ready to get down to work. The next month and a half has the potential to make the difference in our campaign. This will very likely be the longest trip we make in the final two years before the Olympic Games. We are very excited to make the most of it. We began by taking delivery of the boat that will get us through the Trials, to be held in June and December 2011. The new boat was built in New Zealand ...
What a Day! We went on the water in the afternoon for just two races. We developed a game plan, got off the starting line, and followed our strategy. Our upwind boat-speed was great again, and we put it good use! We scored an 8 in the first race and won the second one! The nine-point day was good enough to put us in 17th overall and into gold fleet! In the first race we had a fair start, but we were forced to tack out sooner that we had hoped. We took a clearing tack, but we stayed true to our game plan and tacked back to the left soon thereaft...
