Luke and I have just finished up racing in Hyeres this week. It is a small town between Marseille and Nice that hosts a World Cup event every year. Coming back this year was quite a different experience to last year where we had just done a couple of months in the 470 and had a very trying time in our 470 campaign. It was quite interesting being back as it reminded me of the perseverance we had to get us through that difficult stage.

Fortunately, racing for us went quite well this year as we consolidated a lot of gains we have made over the past few months and surprised ourselves a few times with some good moments and races. We are starting to see these great moments more and more frequently which is fantastic and even putting entire races together as we won our first grade one race in a 470. We ended up finishing 21st overall.

While Luke and I are really positive with the direction we are heading as it was one of our best results, we still feel like we were capable of much more as we made a number of avoidable mistakes during the racing which held us back in the overall standings. We are really excited to keep pushing forward as we both feel like we are on the cusp of another big jump in performance.

We are now heading up to London for a few days off before flying back into Hyeres, picking up our rig and driving to Barcelona for our next training and racing block. We are both really looking forward to a couple of days off as it has been a very busy schedule over the past couple of months. Once we get to Barcelona, we’ll have ten days of training before the World Championships starts on May 13th.

Palma, wow what a place, the scenery, the wind, the waves, the history of the city and the island all in one place with great people with all our Canadian Teammates and coaches around. Why the perfect event? While our results could have been better in so many ways this event delivered exactly what we needed, light and steady winds with big sloppy waves: by far our most challenging condition. While it didn’t provide the most glorious sailing, we were able to make huge strides of improvement, which is exactly what we need going into the Worlds and Olympic Qualifiers in May.

Our big training priority going into this event were our downwinds and our boat handling, a really great couple weeks of training with Nigel really bumped us up a level and these skills translated clearly in racing, for the first time at an event we went well into the ‘positive’ (number of boats gained) downwind, and our boathandling was right up with the fleet standard in many ways… with the exception of a tight, reach to reach, bottom mark rounding in the second last race in Gold Fleet which sent us from 4^th to 9^th. In addition to having the opportunity to work on our toughest condition we also identified where we wanted to move the program forward in the next few months and we are really excited to get started again in France in 5 days.

Next on the list for us is the Spring Cup in Toulon, which is a 5 day mixed 470 event with usually 60-70 entries and good competition. The regatta site is here: http://www.ycsablettes.org/index.php/resultats-350.html and results will be posted daily on our Facebook Page.

Mike and I are in our final preparations for the 2012 Princess Sophia Regatta, the third stop on the World Cup Tour so far this year. We have been here for 2 and a half weeks already and the time has flown by. Once again we have Nigel here coaching us pushing us, day in and day out, to help us make big strides forward.

Coming into this block our biggest focus has been increasing our boat handling, which can be surprisingly hard to work on in such a performance driven environment. Most other top teams have been competing for years in the 470 and place more emphasis on boatspeed tuning and racing skills, so it is often difficult to find a good training partner who wants to go out and push themselves, and their gear to the limit doing boathandling. This means that over the past few weeks we have been teaming up with a variety of different countries, and have spent some time on our own working through Nigel’s different drills, which include the upwind pushing drill, the tack and duck drill, the downwind “hooking drill” and our personal favorite Nigel’s famous “torture chamber”, just to name a few.
Over this past week the other Canadians men’s team, Jacob and Graeme Chaplin-Saunders have arrived and have been great sparing partners for many of these drills. They are both up and coming sailors from Chester, Nova Scotia, and are super keen and great to work with.

On Friday we finally got to break out some new sails and do some practice racing, it was fantastic, we got good breeze, and some nice waves and it gave us a chance to tune up with the other teams. The training races got us really excited about the upcoming event and with the boat now all set up for Monday all that is left to do is have the weekend off and prepare mentally for the 5 (hopefully 6!) days of racing in front of us.
Today Brenda, myself, Tyler Myerick, the women’s 470 team from Victoria BC: Hanna and Erin, as well as the rest of the Canadian Finn and Radial sailors took the opportunity of a day off to drive to the other side of the island, play some disk, have a delicious lunch and do some swimming. It is nice to have a bit of time off after such an intense training session from the past few weeks.

Luke and I arrived in Palma a week ago and have been quick to get into our training. Palma is where most of the European teams spend their winter training as the temperature and wind makes it an ideal training venue. We will be spending a total of one month here training and racing against the best 470 teams in the world. Since arriving, we have spent a couple of days setting up our boat, followed by a couple of training days which led into our first European event of the season.

I might as well start off with the racing as that is the fun bit and we have some good news to report. The event was a training regatta run by the local club held over four days. It has attracted a number of top teams and a total of 42 boats. Luke and I put together a strong series finishing the event in third overall. We were really pleased with our progress since Miami OCR and the training we have done with our coach Nigel over that time. The training camp in Miami with the US team in February also really lifted our skill set and we are really excited to continue pushing forward. This week has demonstrated the big gains in our boathandling and downwind speed, but we still have so much more potential to improve in these areas. Our focus for this block is to improve our boathandling as it is one of our biggest limiting factors.

Nigel has been working his magic and arranged some top training partners for the next two weeks leading into the third World Cup regatta of the season. We are hoping to continue our blistering improvement rate that we had in Miami and see some more large improvements going into this next regatta. Luke and I also need to say a big thank you to CST coach Erik Stibbe who provided valuable insight while working triple duty coaching us, the lasers, and 470 women for the past few days before Nigel arrived.

Luke and I have just finished up our latest training camp in Miami where we trained with the US Olympic 470 teams. It was fantastic to be able to train with such top teams, and I think all teams made some good gains during the camp. Luke and I feel we made some really big jumps in our ability and are both looking forward to getting to Europe to confirm the gains. The camp was divided into two parts: the first few days of training inside the bay, and the remainder out in the ocean. It was great to have a few days inside to continue working on some things we had started on during the OCR, and even better to head offshore as it was the first time we have really sailed the 470 in big waves.

Our focus for this camp was to improve our downwind speed. Since starting out in the class one year ago, we have struggled for downwind speed and for us to have any big success in the 470 class, we know it needs to be improved. We were very fortunate to have some fast downwind sparing partners as a benchmark, and through technical/comparative analysis we were able to isolate certain techniques/trim that inhibited our speed. Our coach Nigel also brought in a guest expert, Dave Hughes, to help with some crewing techniques. Dave was a past top level crew in the class so it was great to get his feedback on how I could trim and move better in the boat. We also got him in the boat sailing with Luke which allowed me to watch and visualize how/what he was doing and provided Luke with some insight into what the boat felt like with a top crew. Additionally, we also traded crews with Stu and Graham, the US Olympic representatives, which allowed us to compare the differences between the teams. While we still have a lot more work to do to become the fastest team in the world downwind, we made some great gains during the camp and look forward to pushing this forward once we start training in Palma.

Luke and I now have about a week off before we meet up in Weymouth to start our European tour and final push heading into the Olympic qualification. It is amazing how quickly this program has unfolded as it was only a year ago that Luke and I first started training in the 470 together and officially made the switch. We know that to have the best possible result at the games, we must use our time as efficiently as it is our most limited resource. However, the urgency to train and improve is quite refreshing which provides a very unique challenge. Exciting times are ahead!

Mike and I arrived down to Miami early this month after a few weeks of time spent with our families over Christmas. It has been very interesting to re-visit the place where just one year ago we were both sailing lasers and Miami is also the place where the discussion about the potential of making the switch to a new class.

We started of the month by competing in the North American Championships, a 3 daylong event which was a perfect tune up for the upcoming Miami Olympic Class Regatta. We saw a tricky offshore breeze for all 3 days of the event and with a full international field we were able to finish 7^th overall and 2^nd North American team.

After the North Americans we began working with Nigel Cochrane, a past Olympian and top level 470 coach from our hometown. We also joined up with the South Africans and did an extremely intense week of what we have now come to call ‘skill development’, which is a combination of dynamic drills, designed by Nigel, which are aimed at increasing our boat handling, accelerations, and close quarter situations. This was exactly the type of things we needed and really got us excited about our program going forward.

For the event itself we had a great mixed bag of conditions, from flat offshore light wind, to some moderate to strong seabreeze with some aggressive short chop. It was a very interesting field as many of the top medal contenders were in attendance, including the 1^st, 2^nd and 4^th place competitors from the worlds just a few months ago. We decided to make this event about improving on specific targets, like acceleration, upwind trim, and living in tight lanes; walking away from the week we are extremely happy with the things we learned. It felt great to put in the work of the long days, being the first to arrive at the boat park in the morning and often the last to leave, and feel a significant improvement on our targets from day to day. Over the course of the event we fought for every inch and finished 15^th overall, just one place behind the team that finished 2^nd at the worlds.

Mike and I are now headed back to Vancouver, where we will spend some time catching up with family, working on our fitness and getting prepped for our next training camp here in Miami, and long block in Europe, leading up the worlds in May.

Since finishing up the World Championships we have had some time to break down and reflect on our performance. It was an exciting lead up and week of racing which saw a range of weather conditions, a race courses, and emotions from sailors around the globe all competing for the World Title. For Mike and I coming into the event we were very happy with our progress since our last major international competition: The Olympic Test Event; progress which started with a re-assessment of our program as a whole and spurred a new sense of direction and urgency to ‘the next 90 days’. This progress started with a direct goal: improve our downwind speed and fleet management, as well as refining a few specific boat handling manoeuvres.

 

When we arrived in Perth, we had just come off a good performance at Sail Melbourne and we were really happy with the way things were progressing, we have developed a few weapons, including some blazing upwind speed in breezy conditions, which has finally started to put us into the hunt in some races. As a tune up to the event we sailed in the ZHIK Australian Nationals which featured a closed entry to 40 of the best men and women sailors in the world all preparing for the upcoming worlds. It was in this event that we continued to develop our downwind speed, it was great to finally be able to convert solid weather mark rounding’s into good races, and we were really happy with our ability to battle through a fleet, wearing down and chipping away at our competition. We eventually ended with a 12^th place finish in a stacked field, a very respectable result and a good boost heading into the Worlds.

 

The worlds began with light wind and it was a bit of a slow start for us, and the second day was blown off due to extreme thunder storms, however, on the 3^rd day we broke out with a 6^th, 9^th and a 22^nd to move us into the 31^st overall. It was a long hard fought day and we finally saw all our hard work pay off in a big way. The next day our lay day was called off so we could get back on schedule and we went out to race against the top 40 sailors in the world: Gold Fleet. We had one race in big breeze and we came off at the pin end of the start line below the fleet and played the left side of the first beat. We rounded the top mark in 6^th which is where we stayed and fought until the final downwind when a low puff raced on our inside down sending us past 2 boats in front of us, and letting 6 come from behind. In these races inches can make the difference between 5^th and 20^th and we ended up with a solid 10^th place finish, moving us up to 25^th overall.

On the second day of Gold fleet we kept our nose clean as there were several incidents resulting in disqualifications and black flags given out. We sailed a 16, 24 and stayed in 25^th position overall.  Our conservative ‘over the long run’ strategy did not pay off on the last day, however, as we stayed out of traffic on the start line and ended up giving up too much distance away from being too far from the favoured side. We fought to claw back but in this calibre of fleet it was too much to give away and our final finishes were a disappointing 26, 35 dropping us to 29^th Overall in the event.

 

When we arrived to shore on the last day our mood was bittersweet, happy with ourselves by achieving our goal of placing in the top 30, but disappointed knowing that it could have been more if we had sailed to our full ability. Nevertheless with this result we also managed to Qualify for the 2012 Senior National Team, as well as finished 19^th country: giving Canada a berth in the 2012 Olympics… Until a few days later when a Dutch Team was disqualified for a paperwork mistake by not handing in the proper documents with their boat at measurement, allowing a Swiss team to pass us in the standings and knock us out of the final Olympic Qualification spot for this event. While it was a disappointing hit, we are not letting this, which is totally out of our control, affect us. We are very confident that we will qualify comfortably at the next stage of the trials which is the Worlds in Barcelona, May 2012. At this point it is time to move forward and improve our skills which will push us towards our goal of Medaling at the Olympic Games, a goal which is looking closer with each day of hard work.

It has been a few days since the conclusion of sail Melbourne.  We are back in Perth and ready to start training for the next tune up event before the worlds, the Australian Nationals which starts on Sunday.

We showed up to Melbourne about a week early to prepare. We had picked up our brand new Mackay and expected to be sailing by later that afternoon. As we discovered it would be more than a few hours to get the boat together,  yet another learning experience from the 470 that Mike and I are about to learn. 3 days and about 10 pounds of apples, carrots and celery later Mike and I named our boat “57 Hours”, for the number of man hours of boat work it took until our first sail. We bought a mini bottle of Champagne and christened the boat before launching! Having a new boat over here in time for our worlds, and using it to try to qualify for the Olympic Games would not have been possible were it not for Rainer Muller at Pacific Arbour who has been the most incredible and supporting sponsor we could have imagined.

Our first few days of training went well as the new boat worked and felt great. We are happy with our ability to start using our eyes to tune the rig, instead of solely relying on the tuning guide, another indicator that we are starting to get the hang of this boat.
The event started off with light winds, and we were happy with our speed and decision making around the course. In the first race we sailed smart and consistent, rounding in 5^th. After making some smart moves on the first downwind we put ourselves into a solid position for the next beat and finished the race in 3^rd . The second race we won the pin, and once again sailed a smart race, utilizing our new found light wind speed around the race course and finished in 5^th. This solid first day set us up in 4^th overall.

The second day started off slow, with a 12^th in the first race but in the second race we took a more aggressive strategy at the start and won the committee boat; we picked the right side of the course of the first beat and rounded the top mark with a sizeable lead! After that is was very light and unstable breeze which saw us and the World Champions engaging in a battle on the last downwind. It ended with one stuffed gybe and a lesson, putting us into 3^rd at the finish. These are exactly the types of lessons that will make us stronger for the upcoming worlds.

The third day brought big breeze! In both races we started in lighter wind but the breeze built and the majority of the fleet was in the wrong mast settings at the start. This is some of our favourite conditions as we like the challenge of adapting to what we are given. In the first race of the day we started with a bad first beat but fought our way back to a 4^th. In the second race the wind built to over 30 knots and we were in third, until they abandoned the race at the bottom mark due to too much wind.

The next day of racing saw 3 races in very tricky conditions which saw the wind range from about 5-15 knots and big waves. It was a very frustrating day for us which started off well with a 2^nd place but eventually ended up with a 12, 12 and saw us drop to 7^th overall in the regatta.

With a frustrating day behind us we were very excited about making our first medal race! We went into the race in 7^th with a chance of catching 5^th, and a reasonable gap behind us. The was one of the most frustrating of the regatta as we were very fast, however ran into 2 bottom mark situations which cost us big time. One ended in a protest which the jury failed to see and as a result made the wrong call and gave us a red flag which forced us to do penalty spins on the last beat! It was very frustrating to be stuck in that scenario however at the end of the day it was another good lesson learned and we finished the event in 7^th overall. By far our best event in the 470 so far and we are excited to take this momentum into our next tune up event: The Australian Nationals, starting on Sunday of this week. Next after that is the big event, our worlds!